I can't believe people are still slaving away writing articles on a website like Squidoo or Hubpages. Here is why you shouldn't be and where you should be putting your valuable content instead.
Rubbish Payout
Some people have created hundreds of articles and spent god knows how many hours, yet they only make < $100 a month. A month! If you were to calculate your earnings per hour it would be well, well, below minimum wage. In fact your probably working for a couple of cents per hour. Your time is more valuable then your money. Trust me.
You Can't Sell It
If a website of mine is making much money, I sell it. It gives me cashflow to work on other projects. When you post an article of squdioo – they own your content. The only value it has is the ad revenue. And if that dries up, you've got nothing.
You Have No Control
If the website your posting to (Squidoo, Hubpages etc) suddenly gets the big FU from Google, then basically you're screwed. Furthermore, these websites can ban you at any time.
Cheat Sheet on What You Should Be Doing
- Build your own website.
- Your site probably won't rank within the first few months, and you'll probably want to give up. This is where 99% of people fail.
- Keep adding new content – but it doesn't really matter how often. I have a website which hasn't been updated in 6 months and it still brings in $700+ a month. Every month.
- Use affiliate links. It works and makes more money for less trafficked websites
- Don't worry about backlinks. I posted an article on this site (which has no backlinks) and it made me $80 within an hour. If you know how to write, if you know how to make a headline and if you know which topics to target, then you can do well without backlinks. If you don't know how to do that write 500 posts and you'll soon figure it out.
- Stop working for cents!
I believe that you should only blog on these sites to get some backlinks to your sites. I’ve seen people who were somewhat successful with Hubpages, but getting links is the best deal here.