There is no Google Author Rank. Or at least, there might not be, or there might be, but like most things related to Google’s search rankings algorithm, there is no official or documented word from Google that there is any impact on search rankings based on Google’s Author Rank.

(Don’t confuse this with HubPages Author Rank, which is completely different, and which might count as prior art, if anyone is interested.)

So, what is there?

There is a patent application in which Google applies for a patent to use something like Author Rank in its search ranking results. However, just because there is a patent, does not necessarily mean that Google is using the features detailed within right now. It may never use those features, or it may use them someday.

What is fanning the flames is a conclusion jump based upon some real, confirmed changes with Google.

Google Author Tag

Google IS using a couple of new markup tags that allow you to tag your various writings and publication around the web as having been written by you. There are some good guides out there on it, but the basic idea is this.

You use a “me” tag to tell Google who, on this website, wrote this particular page.

You use an “author” tag to link the “me” to a specific author on the internet, not just on that one domain. This author tag must point to a Google profile. This is an area of some complaint, because Google is forcing writers into creating Google profile accounts, which then, of course link to Google’s new social networking platform Google+. You can complain, or you can play ball, your choice. There is really no downside to having another way for people to find you, so you may as well set one up if you haven’t already.

Finally, on your Google Profile, you link back to where your content where the author tag is in the “Contributor To” section of your profile.

When all of these steps are setup, all of your content with an author tag or me, author tag chain will show up as yours.

What is making people jump up and down is that after you have done all this, Google MAY insert your profile picture from your Google profile next to your articles in Google search results. This may or may not be a good thing. The jury is still out for me, but more on that later.

However, there is NO EVIDENCE that what position you hold in those search results has anything to do with your profile picture being there, or any sort of author rank pushing those articles around. In fact, if you dig in behind the scenes you will see that the same things that always determine Google’s search rankings determine these rankings:

1. How close the title tag is to an exact match of the query
2. How many links point to the article

If there is any influence by Author Rank, it is very small and virtually undetectable in the search results.

Do a few searches for yourself. You’ll see well respected authors ranked 8th or 9th below articles without any sort of author tag whatsoever. The reason? Check the article title in the search results, it’s probably a closer fit to your search, even if it was written by a brain damaged teenage chimp with no experience.

What Is Google Author Rank? originally published at Freelance Writing Blog of ArcticLlama.com

Sometimes, when I want to try something out, or I am writing on a topic that I’m not sure I will continue to have enough passion to write about, I will start a free blog on WordPress.com to see how it goes. Often, that free blog satisfies my needs when it comes to that topic, and other times, I will end up transferring most of the content to a new WordPress hosted blog.

Self-Hosted WordPress versus WordPress.com

Quick Refresher for those not intimately familiar with WordPress as a blogging platform. There are three ways to have a WordPress blog.

1. Use the WordPress.com website where your blog will be hosted for free by the same folks who run and develop WordPress. Your domain name will be whatever.wordpress.com. There are various rules that come with this setup, including being unable to run most third-party plugins, and not being allow to use advertising like Google AdSense on your blog.
2. Use WordPress.com to host your blog, but pay to upgrade to the Pro version. Then you can use plugins, have advertising, and use your own domain name. For example, just whatever.com.
3. Pay a webhost to host your WordPress blog. This is referred to as a self-hosted blog, and it is supported by WordPress.org, instead of WordPress.com. You can do whatever you want, including modifying the underlying WordPress binaries, if you want to be so bold. This freelance writing blog, for example is a self-hosted blog.

I have a handful of blogs on WordPress.com that fall under #1 above. They are, frankly, neglected and underutilized. They go months without an update and when I do update them, the updates tend to be hasty. For example, I started A Freelancer’s Writing with the intention of linking to all (most) of my published writings with the idea of being able to show friends and family what I do, since freelance writing is apparently a difficult job to comprehend for those who don’t do it.

The remainder of this article speaks only of the blogs I have hosted for free on WordPress.com. Everything else was unaffected.

WordPress Suspended My Account and Suspended My Blog

One of my blogs has a broken links checker. Essentially, it follows the links on my website and detects when those links are broken. For the most part, I use it to make sure that I didn’t accidentally delete something, move something, or just cut and paste the wrong URL. However, earlier this week, I noticed that one of the reported broken links went to afreelancerswriting.wordpress.com. When I tried to login in, I got a message that my account was suspended.

This is where it gets tricky. The WordPress forums’ rules state the you can’t really discuss why or how an account was suspended, so I didn’t really know what to do. Worse, the email address that I used to sign up for my WordPress.com account wasn’t active because I didn’t think I was still using it, so I didn’t move it over when I ditched Dreamhost. After poking around, I found one single page that said I should contact WordPress for help. I filled out the request and said that I didn’t know why or how my account was suspended.

Fortunately, instead of any rigamarole, my account was reactivated. I never got a notice or response, so I’m not sure if my inquiry worked, or if it was something automated. However, when I got into my account, I found out that four or five of my blogs were “archived or suspended for violating our terms of service.”

That puzzled me as well, because none of these blogs really does ANYTHING, let alone doing anything unsavory. In fact, two or three of the blogs are old blogs that I setup back when I was naive enough to believe that there was any strategy to playing the game Mafia Wars. The posts were nothing more than “strategy” tips. They didn’t link anywhere, there weren’t any pictures to violate copyright, and they hadn’t been updated in years.

When your WordPress.com blog gets suspended, it is a little easier to figure out what to do. A message on the dashboard with a link to let them know something is wrong is right on top. Again, I send a quick message saying that while not the world’s best blogs, these blogs weren’t violating any TOS.

It seems that they are coming back online, including A Freelancer’s Writing, one by one, again without any sort of message or explanation. Since these are all neglected little side projects for me, I can file this whole thing under No Harm, No Foul, but I can’t help but wonder if other writers working online got caught up in some sort of algorithmic sweep.

If you lost your WordPress.com blog, do contact them. They may get them re-enabled for you quickly, assuming, of course, that you really weren’t violating any of the rules.

Did you have a WordPress.com blog suspended? Did you get it back? Do you know why?

WordPress.com Blog Suspended originally published at Freelance Writing Blog of ArcticLlama.com

The MyBlogGuest.com website is essentially a forum of guest post writers and publishers. As I’ve noted elsewhere, the balance in this equation is typically tilted far to the side of people wanting to publish guest posts. It is no different here.

My Blog Guest is a free forum to participate in as either a publisher or a writer. There is some back and forth in the forums where both publishers request material and writers offer it. There are also two areas of the community that require paying for a pro membership. One is a Private forum and the other is if you want to post articles as a writer to the article gallery.

The free areas of the forums work like a Craiglist of guest blogging. There is a posts wanted forum and a blogs wanted forum. A post I made in the posts wanted forum garnered two offers, one of which resulted in a pretty solid article. The other never followed through.

I did not make a post in the blog wanted forum yet. I will reserve final judgment until I do and see how that works out.

My Blog Guest Pro

I only used the service as a free member, so I don’t know what is discussed in the private forum. The description says that inside they share some “advanced guest blogging and link building lists and tips that actually work.” I assume that the implication that the tips and lists in the free areas don’t work is unintentional.

Whether there is enough value offered within to justify a paid membership, I cannot say.

The other thing that premium members get is the ability to post article directly into the Article Directory rather than exchange classified ads in the forum. It is the Article Directory that holds the most promise for publishers and writers.

Writers must pay a fee and get a premium account to post their work in the directory. Publishers, however, may use the directory for free. Again, there are far more willing writers than publishers. So, this arrangement maximizes the odds that articles can be published (the hard part) so that writers will continue to pay to get their articles published (the easy part).

My Blog Guest sends emails to users with blogs registered and verified on the system. The emails are not too frequent and often do point out potentially usable articles.

The main issue with the service is the time it takes. First, one must sort through the articles listed in the article directory. There are, as one might expect, plenty of low-quality articles targeting high-cost keywords and phrases. If your blog is just some marketing tool without any branding value, these articles are as good as any other. If, on the other hand, your blog is something that you maintain with a specific focus and quality, it can take some sifting to find good article concepts.

Once you find a title that you like well enough, it gets even trickier. You only get to read the first paragraph or so, which makes it tough to tell if the article is well written, and even more so, if it is well researched and on topic. An article titled Top 5 Widgets might be wonderful, or it might list 5 awful widgets with high-paying affiliate programs. There is no way to tell until you have seen the article.

Which, brings us to the next step. If you decide to take a chance on the article, now you have to indicate your interest and then wait for the author to say yes or no to your offer to publish their guest article. There are apparently, enough low value blogs to go along with the low value articles to motivate some authors to include restrictions in their comments about how they will only say yes to blogs with PageRank that are on-topic.

Once the author says yes, you can then copy and past the article into your blog.

Here are the two articles I ended up publishing:

1. Deducting Business Related Interest
2. Can You Handle Your Own Business

And, that in a nutshell is how it works and why I have used it only in limited fashion. The effort to find, offer, accept and publish an article is at least as much time and effort as it takes for me to write my own blog post, which I can use with my own links. In other words, unless I can find a way to speed up the process, there isn’t going to be much value for me, as a professional writer to use the publisher side of My Blog Guest.

Next up, I’ll see if I can get more value out of writing some guest blog posts and get them published somewhere.

Related articles

• Guest Blogging Strategies – Whiteboard Friday (seomoz.org)
• Guest Blogging Simplified With New Site Launch: Goodbye Google And Guesswork (prweb.com)

My Blog Guest First Impressions originally published at Freelance Writing Blog of ArcticLlama.com

I have no boss who stands near my desk scolding me if I show up a few minutes, or even a lot of minutes, late. There is no office manager, no HR department and the dress code requires nothing more than flannel pants and a sweatshirt. But, that does not mean that I work for myself.

Rather, I work for my clients. Some are more demanding than any corporate boss could be. Others are laid back and easy going, but in the end, I work for them. I write what they want me to write, when they want me to write it, in the way that they want me to write it. That is, above all else, what makes someone a freelance writer.

Make Money Writing Your Own Websites

One of the ways you can make money writing for yourself is by publishing your own websites. Writing what you want when you want about topics you are passionate about is very fulfilling. Whether it’s an opinion piece about current events or an in-depth discussion of an age-old topic, your own online properties always have a place for your well constructed prose. For example, check out my article about is Credit Karma a scam, that I wrote after hearing about and checking out the service.

The drawback to publishing your own websites is that online, there is no such thing as, “If you build it, they will come.” Instead, you have to market your websites, just like you have to market your freelance writing business. While some writers excel at marketing, many of us prefer the cozy confines of our home offices.

When I was a Certified Financial Professional (CFP) building my financial advisory business, I loved researching, staying current, examining investments and giving professional financial advice to my clients. Unfortunately, those things are not the elements of being a successful financial advisor. Instead, the key to building a successful financial planning practice is selling. This may account for why financial planning is such a tricky industry sometimes. It is a rare combination to find someone who is honest, passionate about helping people, AND a good salesman all at the same time. As it turns out only one of those skills is fundamentally required, and it isn’t the first ones.

Likewise, building a successful website is contingent less upon writing high-quality content and presenting it in a pleasing, readable manner than it is upon cultivating a lot of links from other websites.

As it turns out, Google is little more than a glorified link counter coupled with a basic text matching system. If you search for freelance writing samples, for example, Google basically pulls up all the webpages in in index that have those words on them. The ones that have those words in that order are considered the most relevant. The incoming links to each page that has the exact key phrase match are counted, and whoever has the most links wins, and is ranked number on on Google search engine results for the query.

There are, of course, modifiers to the algorithm. Google likes to say that it makes hundreds of tweaks to its algorithm each year, but most of those tweaks do nothing more than discount the most blatantly fraudulent links. So, certain kinds of links might be worth one-tenth of another type of link. However, while those little ranking variables might make a page with 175 links outrank a page with 220 links, a page with 3,000 links will almost always outrank a page with 10 links, no matter how many adjustments are made in the link counter.

The idea is that each link is a vote of confidence. The more votes, the more valuable. However, the days of that being true have long since passed. These days, honest publishers are careful to link specifically to their own stuff as much as possible and avoid linking out too much. Less honest publishers sell outgoing links to the highest bidder or spam the comments and forums sections of websites to create additional links to their own properties.

In other words, links are no longer votes, but carefully cultivated, “Vote for Me!” signs placed at busy intersections.

MyBlogGuest.com Guest Post Service

Getting backlinks is marketing for websites. Enough backlinks gives you enough ranking in Google SERPs to get traffic. Once you have enough backlinks, you can get enough visitors from search engines that enough people can find your content, like it, and build links organically (assuming anyone does that anymore) without having to manually make your own links. But, the Catch-22 is that to get traffic from search engines so readers can find you (and link you), you have to have links to rank high enough, but you can’t get the links until you rank high enough for people to find you, so you have to start out making your own links happen.

To get around this, there are numerous ways to build links “by hand” so to speak.

One of the ways to get links is by writing guest posts on other blogs. The idea is that in exchange for providing free content to another website, you get links from their website back to your site. The catch is that there are far more people who want to get links than are willing to give links. Thus, the process is much like when I was cold-calling financial planning prospects. You contact someone with a blog and ask if you can write a guest post for them. Ask enough website owners and you can get some of them to say yes. It sucks about as much as cold-calling does.

The catch to this process is that the best candidates for a guest post are other successful blogs about the same topic. Since linking is marketing, how often do you think your competition wants to help you market your site over theirs? And, since the most successful blogs are very good at generating plenty of quality content on their own, why would they need your content,even if it is free?

To help facilitate the process of guest posting, Ann Smarty, formerly of Search Engine Roundtable, has created a new online service called My Blog Guest. I just singed up last week and published my first guest post over on my financial advice blog at FinanceGourmet.com. It’s called Are You Capable of Handling Your Own Business. It is certainly not what I would have written, but I suppose that is part of the point. The two links at the bottom of the post are the backlinks the author received in exchange for this content.

What do you think?

I’m experimenting with MyBlogGuest.com and some other ideas for search engine marketing. Let me know what you think, and what services you use, if any, to market your online properties.

I’ll post a review of MyBlogGuest once I get a chance to use it enough to form a solid opinion. Grab the ArcticLlama feed to avoid missing out!

Update: See my first impressions of My Blog Guest here.

Related articles

• How to Guest Post to Promote Your Blog (socialpeel.com)

My Blog Guest Experiment originally published at Freelance Writing Blog of ArcticLlama.com

I set up this blog long ago when I first started out as a full-time freelance writer. As you may know, this blog runs on WordPress, the popular, open-source blogging platform. The design and layout of WordPress blogs is controlled by a “theme”. There are numerous good, free WordPress themes out there. I have spent some time (too much time) looking through lots of different WordPress themes while looking both for my own use, and as a way to find good WordPress themes for writers. The trick to finding a good WordPress theme for your blog is both getting one that looks like you want AND that performs well both for speed and SEO.

Unfortunately, many WordPress themes are automatically disqualified from ever being used on any of my blogs by a very popular, but very dumb, feature WordPress theme designers love. Giant header images, often coupled with some sort of scrolling “top stories” feature waste both bandwidth and precious screen real estate.

Have you ever seen a popular, high-traffic website using a design like this?

Lately, Google has added more reason to not use a big header image layout by saying that it may downrank or otherwise demote websites that have too many ads relative to content above the fold. Depending upon how Google defines “content,” big header image layouts could be a ticket to lower search rankings because a big header image and a single 336 x 300 ad will eat up almost all of the above the fold room on many monitors.

New WordPress Theme for Freelance Writing Blog ArcticLlama

The difficulty in finding a good, fast-loading, SEO optimized WordPress theme for writers that I also like the look and feel of, kept this site with the same look for a while now. However, I was spurred to action when I finally noticed that despite my best efforts last time to find a theme that was good as well as good looking, I ended up with a theme that misused the header tags.

You see, Google overemphasizes header tags to a fault. Second only to counting links and matching the query with your title tag, having the right H1 and H2 tags makes all the difference in where your page ranks in Google’s search engine results pages (SERP). The key is to NOT have your blog title as your H1 tag. Rather, your POST title should have the H1 tag. Otherwise, you are optimizing every single page for your blog title rather than the individual content, and that won’t end well.

Sure enough, my old theme had the Freelance Writing ArcticLlama line as the H1 tag, on both the index page and on all the individual post pages. The post title was relegated to H2 status with subheadings having H3 or lower tags. This is SEO suicide.

The new theme does it right. Each post title owns the sole H1 tag on the page meaning that post can rank wherever it deserves for that topic without being anchored down by an H2 tag. I like the look too. I do wish it had a footer, and I’ll probably hack one into it in the future, but for a redesign on Superbowl Sunday, I think it’s pretty nice.

If you are curious, this is the Trending theme from the Hybrid Theme people. Like all the Hybrid themes, it is free, although you can sign up to get technical support if you so choose.

Let me know if you find any bugs and how you like the new look.

- Brian

New Look at ArcticLlama Freelance Writing Blog originally published at Freelance Writing Blog of ArcticLlama.com

It’s an unfortunate reality that for small business owners, like us, the tax burden can be extraordinary.

Small Business Taxes for Freelance Writers

Both Democrats and Republicans say that they support small business owners. When it comes to sole proprietors, at lest, they are both liars.

As a successful sole proprietor you will pay the highest tax rate of anyone in America unless you are very careful and very organized. No one, Republican or Democrat is talking, even in their pie in the sky campaign promises, of doing anything about that high tax rate for freelancers.

What kills freelancers on taxes is that you not only have to pay ordinary income taxes on all of your income, you also have to pay self-employment tax. The self-employment tax is essentially the result of being both the employee and the employer.

What many Americans fail to realize is that the amount of money that comes out of an employee’s paycheck each pay period for Social Security and Medicare, is only HALF of what actually gets paid in Social Security taxes. The employer also pays both Social Security and Medicare taxes for each employee. When you are a freelance writer, you pay both halves.

The employee typically pays 7.65 percent in Social Social Security and Medicare taxes and the employer pays a matching 7.65 percent. As a single person small business owner, you pay a whopping 15.3 percent. This is referred to as the self-employment tax.

2011 Self-Employment Tax Rate

For 2011, us freelance types catch a small, but helpful break. Just like everyone else in America, we get a temporary 2 percent reduction in the employee share of the Social Security taxes. The employer side, however, gets no such relief. Thus, the 2011 self-employment tax rate is 13.3 percent instead of 15.3 percent.

If you have been following the news, you know that House Republicans decided they were getting too much bad press to oppose a short-term extension in this temporary rate reduction for the first two months of 2012, so that went through. However, as of this writing, there is no tax cut for the whole 2012 tax year passed and signed into law yet, so don’t count those pennies for this year.

Adding to the self-employment tax for 2011 is your regular income taxes. If you made enough money in your freelance writing business to hit the 25 percent tax bracket, for example, you actually will have to pay 25 percent + 13.3 percent, or a soul crushing 38.3 percent for federal income taxes. Of course, you still have to pay state income taxes in many states as well. The Colorado state income tax rate is 4.63 percent, so I’ll be lopping a stunning 42.93 percent off of my earned taxable income for 2011.

The only hope we freelancers have is loading up on small business tax deductions. Fight back by taking the home office deduction, if you qualify. Don’t forget to deduct all of the stuff you bought for your business using the higher 2011 Section 179 deduction amount. You can also deduct things like domain registration fees, business cards, office supplies, and more. This lowers your taxable income, which means that that ridiculously high percentage ends up applying to a smaller number.

Unless you have limited income that won’t really effect your taxes, or you end up taking the standard deduction, it is probably worth the expense to get a tax preparation software like TurboTax Home and Business or TaxCut small business edition to walk you through getting all your deductions.

Most importantly, though, is to be sure to collect and correctly enter all of those 1099-MISC statements you get from clients that report your income. Misreporting your income can really increase your tax audit odds with the IRS and they have computers that match up all reported 1099s with the 1099 income that you report.

Remember, you get to do something that you love, and you get to work for yourself. It can be easy to forget that when you are filling out a check for some-thousand dollars to get even with the IRS. Then, remember to keep every scrap and receipt for every single thing you spend money on to get all your deductions this year, and the next, and the next, and the next…

Freelance Writer Taxes originally published at Freelance Writing Blog of ArcticLlama.com

Anyway, let’s get the new year started off on the right foot with some great resolutions for writers for the new year.

New Year’s Resolutions for Writers

Every writer is different, but there are some things that seem to be true for most writers. I’ve started off this list of writer’s New Year’s resolutions with those that fit into that almost universal category and then moved on to those things that might be more useful for fellow freelance writers.

1. Write - No matter who you are or what you do, writing is the one thing that will always improve your craft. Reading is useful (see #2) but there is no substitute for just writing. The thing that catches many writers is that they force themselves to write certain things in order for it to count as “writing.” For example, a freelance financial writer may only count the things written about finance as writing. In truth, any writing is useful, skill building writing. In fact, writing outside of your comfort zone is a great way to develop better writing skills. Writing for recreation, is a great way to avoid burn out. This blog is a great way to turn procrastination into useful procrastination. Cranking out a blog post may not drop any income on the table (at least not immediately) but it has many uses. In addition to being cathartic, this blog allows my freelance writing business to show up in searches, help me meet and become friends with other writers, and pay it forward by helping others develop their own writing craft or writing business.
2. Read - The other thing that helps all writers is reading. Reading allows you to learn and hear other styles. It allows you to gather new information, obtain a fresh look on old knowledge and it keeps your mind working in complete, grammatically correct ways. The other important benefit of reading is that it allows you to know more. New writers often hear, “write what you know.” That is true, but what blocks too many writers is not realizing that you can always know more. You can “know” about being a prisoner in Alcatraz by having served time there, or you can always learn by reading everything you can get your hands on about the subject.
3. Brag and Boast – Too many writers, especially new ones, are reluctant to put themselves out there as high-quality writers. I’ve seen many a top-notch writer dismiss what they do to others. “I mostly just write little things for some ad agencies,” is hardly the way to make the kind of impression that might lead someone to remember later that you are a professional writer. When you tell people about what you do, toot your own horn a little bit. That way, when the day comes that acquaintance happens to be in a room where someone talks about getting some professional writing help, he’ll think, “Hey! I know a great writer.”
4. Market - Many writers are writers because they like to be in their own heads. They often like to work alone, if not by themselves. For writers like us, marketing can be a major downer. Unfortunately, marketing is the only way to develop and keep a reliable pipeline of freelance writing gigs coming your way. Fortunately, you don’t have to cold call like some telemarketer begging for work. This is the 21st century. There are literally hundreds of ways to market yourself without every picking up a telephone or shaking hands at a Chamber of Commerce mixer. Create a website, start a blog, build up a following on Twitter, print up flyers, take out ads, make sure you have compelling, up to date profiles on Facebook, Google+, and LinkedIn. A little legwork in one or more of these areas can improve your exposure greatly.

Lastly, never forget why became a writer in the first place. If you don’t love it, figure out another way to make a living; there are a lot of jobs out there that are easier and better paying for someone who isn’t a hopeless wordsmith.

Good luck to everyone on their new year and may 2012 be your most successful writing year ever, in whatever way you frame success.

Good Writer Resolutions originally published at Freelance Writing Blog of ArcticLlama.com

Whatever it is, it is annoying.

Tomorrow (or later today if this mental fog clears) I’ll be posting the best writer’s resolutions for the new year. Until then, Ugh!

Writing in Your Head originally published at Freelance Writing Blog of ArcticLlama.com

With article marketing, you publish articles on websites, generally for free and without any editorial approval, and then use those articles to link to your own webpages. The idea is that since Google is basically a glorified link counter, making more links point to your online writing content is a good way to boost how high your rank in search engine results pages, or SERPs.

The “best” place to publish said articles changes from time to time. Sometimes it changes because Google figures out what everyone is doing and they make some tweaks that make publishing on the old place less valuable. Sometimes it changes because the websites themselves figure out what is going on and shut it down. And, sometimes is just changes because people decide to go somewhere else.

The first article marketing website I remember hearing about was EZinearticles. The required an editor to approve your article, although the standard wasn’t exactly high, and they restricted the number and placement of your links to your own content. It was theoretically worth the restrictions because Google thought highly of EzineArcticles.com.

Later, I heard about Squidoo. On Squidoo you build “lenses” which are webpages built with the help of Squidoo.com’s tools. Essentially you type your content into various fields and the site generates and publishes a webpage. Squidoo was the first site I heard of being “taken down” by some sort of Google action. Squidoo remains, but it’s value as a pure article marketing play isn’t as high as it once was.

From there I heard about site after site. Most of the time I took a look, maybe published a freelance writing article or two and then moved on. For example, I have a handful of articles published at EzineArticles. You can find them via my ezinearticles Expert Author page. I also have a couple of lenses published at Squidoo under the name BrianBrightHub, which I’ll be changing if you can change usernames since BrightHub ended it’s revenue sharing program.

Eventually, I heard about HubPages. The strange thing is that I liked it enough to stick around for a while and publish over 100 “hubs,” which are also just webpages created via the HubPages interface. You can find my hubs under Hub Llama.

HubPages Earnings

Like most of the freebie publishing websites, I eventually moved on. It usually just makes more sense to publish your own unpaid content on your own websites. You control all of the rights. You build up the credibility of your websites. You get 100% of any advertising earnings.

I used HubPages largely for things I wanted to write but that I had place to publish them that fit. Every month or two I would end up back there for some reason, often to build a link to an article that had surprisingly, popped up in Google AdSense reports as making some money for me. But, in the end, I mostly dropped out of using HubPages.

However, there were a couple of things I liked about HubPages. First, there was no editorial review, so as soon as you hit publish, your article was live on the web. That doesn’t mean there are no rules however. HubPages nofollows links until you generate a high enough author ranking to get your links followed. That puts a crimp on the one-and-done types. Also, there are automated checks of things like how many links go where and so on. It is all very easy to circumvent, but it blocks the worst abuses.

HubPages has revenue sharing as well. The interesting thing about HubPages revenue share was how it was done. Hubs were published with Google AdSense ads on them. The way the revenue share worked was that HubPages showed Google Ads with your AdSense ID on the ads 40 percent of the time and showed ads with the HubPages company ID the rest of the time. In theory, this gives you a 40 percent share of all ad revenue.

Still, I hadn’t been to HubPages in some time. All of that changed recently when I decided to redirect BrightHub links to other things I have published since the company will no longer be paying any revenue sharing. Since I had some links built from HubPages, I dropped by and found a nice surprise. I’m earning money at HubPages.

Sometime in the last year, HubPages started using its own advertising program. I have no idea how it works or where the ads come from, but I clicked Yes to sign up for it. It turns out that now I’m making money from HubPages.

Don’t get me wrong, I made a little money each month with the Google AdSense program on HubPages, but never anything worth working on. However, with the new HubPages ad program, I’m earning closer to $50 per month, for articles that I haven’t updated, linked, or thought about in over a year. My greatest number of pageviews come from an article about the current Happy Meal toy at McDonalds, although my article about 529 plan contribution limits in 2011 is a close second.

I can’t help but wonder if publishing a little more on HubPages might generate some additional passive income. As it turns out, I have some extra material I can easily publish since some of it was returned to my ownership when BrightHub shut down.

Now, I have to decide how much effort is warranted at this stage.

Do you use HubPages? Are you making lots of money on HubPages?

Making Money with HubPages originally published at Freelance Writing Blog of ArcticLlama.com

Now, as most of my readers know, I’m not a big fan of revenue sharing. The main reason is that there are just too many factors out of my control. No matter how great my freelance writing is, for instance, there will never be any traffic to speak of if the site it is published on doesn’t link to the content, have a good layout that both human readers and search engine spiders like, and so on. In other words, my efforts and work are not reflected in whatever I might earn via revenue sharing. One of the main reasons I became a freelance writer is to have my own hard work pay off for me.

Bright Hub Revenue Sharing

When I first started writing for Bright Hub, they paid $20 per article plus a certain amount of revenue sharing. In my mind, that meant that BrightHub paid me $20 per article. Period.

Over time, however, the amount of content I published at BrightHub began to add up. Additionally, some of my articles began to rank highly for certain search terms. An article I wrote about seaport.exe, for example, pulled in several thousands of page views each month. I started to make noticeable passive income from my BrightHub writings. I even wrote a followup article about how to get rid of Seaport that generated more traffic. Both of these articles were written after I had blogged about it at my business and computers website BestHubris.com.

There is a very big difference between the promise of revenue sharing, someday, somehow, somewhere, and actual income earned from revenue sharing. Once I started earning real money with my revenue sharing, I decided to help the process along. I built links to my content on Bright Hub, starting with those articles that had the highest number of pageviews and moving down the list. This boosted my content and the corresponding income it earned. I even linked to the BrightHub articles from my personal articles about similar topics because they paid per page view instead of per click like the AdSense ads on my own websites.

Even after Panda hit eHow and Bright Hub, I still earned a decent amount of passive income from Bright Hub’s revenue sharing program. It was less than half of what it used to be, but it was still nice income, even if it was no longer impressive. Therefore, I made no effort to take down any links to my published work on Bright Hub.

However, this month, the freelance writers for BrightHub received notice that the company was ending what was apparently an optional program of revenue sharing. Even then, I didn’t really make much effort to unlink my content. After all, there is no reason to kick someone while they are down. But, then I noticed in my Twitter stream that Bright Hub is still publishing new material at a pretty good rate and still making money off of my original content that I wrote for them.

On the one hand, the content was bought and paid for by BrightHub, much in the same way the content I wrote for Demand Studios was bought and paid for. Both companies are welcome to do whatever they wish with the content.

The difference is that I never linked to any of the stuff I published for Demand Studios or eHow. I made a good faith effort to build the traffic and revenue my content generated for Bright Hub based upon their good faith effort to share the rewards with me. The thing about revenue sharing is that it is a percentage and by its very nature adjusts up or down based upon how well the content performs for the owner. When Google’s Panda update caused them to earn less money on my content, I also go paid less. It rubbed me the wrong way for them to take away my cut now, but continue to benefit from it in the same way.

So, long story, short, I’ve been removing the links I made from my sites and other published content and, whenever possible pointing them back to me or my content that does still benefit me.

The point of this post is two-fold. One, it turns out that I build a lot of links when I get motivated to do so. All writers should come up with ways to quickly build links to their own content. Two, it turns out that I am earning money with HubPages (I had some links from there too) and I never even knew it. That is my next post.

Related articles

• Google Search Update or HubPages Improvement ? (besthubris.com)

Taking Down Bright Hub Links originally published at Freelance Writing Blog of ArcticLlama.com