Writing Online – HubPages and Other Places - My Second Year
I started my writing online journey two years ago. It was a much bigger learning experience than I had anticipated. It took a year before I started making much money. This time last year I finally thought I knew what I was doing and so wrote this hub - 200 Articles and 1 Year of Learning How to Write Online
And then Panda hit
I’m sure you all know about Panda, so I won’t explain here, but the trickle of money I had started to earn just about stopped. “Never mind,” I thought, “I’ll concentrate on earning money from Amazon.” I wrote a few product-based hubs and learned how to advertise Amazon products elsewhere and finally thought I was earning something...
Google Method for Writing Articles on HubPages
Will you be writing on HubPages this time next year?
And then I lost my Amazon Associates account
Through no fault of my own and purely for the reason that I live in California, my Amazon Associates account was canceled at the end of June 2011. It was a huge blow, I lost 75% of my monthly earnings, but it made me rethink the direction I was going with my online writing.
I signed up with Shareasale and Linkshare and started advertising those products instead.
I did get the Amazon Associates account back in October, a week after I had changed all my links to somewhere else.
The decision I made was to write a Kindle book.
I was very happy writing articles and didn’t think I had the skill to write a whole book. But Kindle books are shorter. I decided to write a book just to see if I could. I wasn’t aiming to make money, but just to learn from the experience. I planned on 10 chapters of 500 words each and put them together to make what eventually became a 6,000 word Kindle book, Homeschooling Boys – Gaining Maximum Success from Minimum Cooperation
Meanwhile I had become BellaOnline’s Living Simply Editor. I had written a lot of articles about getting rid of clutter both there and as TinasTreasures on HubPages. I gathered these together into my second book, Living Simply – Improve Your Life with Less Clutter, a little longer at 21,000 words, and published that on Kindle. A few months later I used CreateSpace to get a paperback version of the book. All of this I would not have done if my Google Adsense and Amazon Associates money had not been reduced so drastically.
It’s really healthy to diversify and so I set up a website with Weebly to sell Wire Free Bras. In addition, I started writing with other revenue sharing sites and started a number of blogs. Hopefully if I lose one income stream in the future, it won’t take such a large percentage of my earnings.
So, what does the future hold? I’m currently planning another two Kindle books and if I have a spare month I plan on learning how to design a WordPress site. If not to earn money with it, at least so I can’t say that learning WordPress has defeated me. I’m also planning on increasing what I make with Amazon Associates, and I’m blogging about that here.
I still can’t say that I am earning enough to live on, but I hope by this time next year I will be able to. The learning curve of the past two years has been huge and the more I learn, the more I realize how much more I need to learn. Two years ago I thought earning money online was easy, but it’s not. It’s a lot of learning new systems, skills and trends and a huge amount of sitting in front of the computer with not a lot of it profitable.
But my motto is that “Life is a Learning Experience” and the last two years have been exactly that. For my first year I wrote almost exclusively on HubPages. In my second year I learned to diversify and not to get down when things change that I have no control over. Many times I felt like quitting, but I believed it was possible to earn a living from earning online, and I still do. And I predict I will still be doing it this time next year.
My other hubs...
- How to Advertise Amazon Products on Yahoo Groups and Facebook
- Writing Product Reviews on HubPages using Amazon Associates
This hub show in words and with a video how to write product reviews on HubPages using Amazon Assocates - The Google Method for Writing Articles on HubPages