Web Career Girl

So today I started looking at HubPages, Squidoo and Infobarrel as a way of both earning a passive income, and helping to support and link back to my niche blogs. Although I found it a little overwhelming reading about so much, I think that efforts in those areas could definitely pay off.

Hubpages: Amy at the Niche Blogger recently posted about starting a challenge to make 100 Hubs at Hubpages in 30 days. I’ve seen a lot of people embark on this challenge, with mixed results – mainly because a lot of people didn’t complete it.

Hubs are simply mini sites written for Hubpages, and can include Adsense ads, and affiliate programs like eBay (which I unfortunately cannot get approved for) and Amazon. Similar to the Squidoo ‘lens’.

Where people were successful it’s clear to see that Hubpages can be a very viable way of making a passive income online. And the great news is that the website seems to have great authority in Google, meaning your articles will get indexed quickly. You can also use this to your advantage for building backlinks to your site, so long as you’re careful to write within their quality guidelenes.

Infobarrel: From what I read about this one, it isn’t as established yet as Hubpages, but in a way I think that could be a good thing. I signed up and it looks pretty easy to navigate, and I think I would use it both as a way of backing up the hubs I build as well as sending links to my niche blogs.

Squidoo: This is the only one of the three that I’ve used already, but not with great results. I think where Google used to love Squidoo, they now aren’t looked upon so favourably. For some reason I also think that Hubpages looks like a much simpler and cleaner option – so I would probably focus my efforts at Hubpages mainly. The good thing about Squidoo, though, is that you can include affiliate links. But they’re trying to please Google by getting more strict on a lot of popular IM niches at the moment.

My Plans: I signed up for all three sites, but unfortunately am not going to get started yet. Why? Google Adsense is being a pain and comes up with an error each time I try to link my Hubpages account to Google Adsense. Until it can be linked, I’ll concentrate on my other work.

However, I thought it was a good idea to introduce them here. Mainly to make sure that I actually do use them in the future! When I do, I’ll likely also go for a ‘100 hub’ challenge, as I think submitting large numbers is the best shot at getting a passive income in time. Until then, I’ll do some keyword research in preparation.

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