After squidoo announced their content acquisition by hubpages, it's time for quitting the third-party-pacifier and starting to play it right. I completely understand that those web 2.0 sites are the only option for some start ups to make money online. And they made me money, good money, when they worked. But we've all witnessed squidoo's slow death over the past couple of years and their attempts to survive on the expense of our highest performing lenses. A domain name costs $1/month, and hosting costs as low as $1.99/month. That's less than 3 bucks a month or 2 cups of coffee. Of course you're not going to be paying on a monthly basis, but still it can be covered by a couple of clickbank sales, or simply cut down your coffee consumption for a month (doesn't have to be coffee, you got the idea). From experience, when I had my lenses locked on squidoo and moved them to my own websites, it took them longer to rank, but after that they made me more money than they've ever done while just lenses. Besides being able to directly build a list from those pages and the overall value of my sites that increased, in case I think of selling them. My plan, and I am interested in learning about yours, is to move my lenses to my websites while letting the transfer to hubpages take place just to preserve my right to receive my unpaid loyalties from squidoo. Hubpages is going to un-freature them anyway because they either have a clickbank product on them, or are linking to a website of mine that has a clickbank link on it. Yes, hubpages is that much nosy. Any feedback?
Article sites used to be very profitable back in the day. Slap a half way decent article on Associated Content and it was easy to rank well. Panda hit these sites hard though. I'm a big believer in writing for yourself and owning your own content. Articles may still drive some small amount of decent traffic. Use them to drive traffic to your own sites and blogs. Your own domain is a great investment as yahia says.
I used to use hubpages. A lot of my stuff is still there. Hubpages is good for traffic if you do it write. It also gets your name out there. I promote using things like hubpages in addition to having your own domain. I just use Wix and Blogger. Both are free and I do just fine.
I stopped wasting my time there a long time ago. Hubpages, on the other hand sends good traffic to my niche site and I plan to milk them for as long as they allow me.
Adios Squidoo! I made a lot of money there no doubt. It was also the platform that I learned so much about marketing on the internet and I am grateful for that opportunity. It opened a lot of doors for me in it's day. I started moving my stuff off of there soon after Panda and Penguin. I had a lot of pages there in one niche and I too put them on my own site and did very well. This said site I put up for Auction in August and sold it for a pretty penny. I am not bothering with hubpages anymore. One thing I recently realized is if you have your own site, it is like a piece of real-estate on the Web and it has a monetary value. Like a house, keep investing into it and improving it and the value rises.
Yes, hubpages and blogs were a very effective marketing strategy in the day, but like most have learned, what worked yesterday does not mean it will work today, or tomorrow. Google changed that with as they have many sites that use to work effectively at creating traffic. Those days are long gone, not as easy as it once was to drive traffic to our web sites. I spent hours on top of hours keeping my sites on top of organic search results with google changes, not easy, that is for sure. Success to all,
I tried squidoo before for blogging. I don't know how to use it for earning. But when finished college i also stopped using squidoo.
Squidoo, Hubpages, Blogger, Wordpress.com and the like are all the equivalent of digital sharecropping. You sow your seeds on their land and only get a portion of the profits. Get off borrowed land and start your own farm. Affordable on any budget, really.
Wow! I have to say I love the way you phrased this! I also totally agree! Get your own domain and site/blog.
Interesting, This was a great way to explain it, sharecropping, and it says it clearly for anyone to understand. Why build traffic to any domain you do not own and control entirely, crazy. Success to all,
