Well hello there Hubbers and welcome back to another exciting edition of the Payout Chronicles, where I interview a Hubber who has recently passed a major milestone in their Hubbing — getting their first $100 payout from Google. It’s always interesting hearing each of the Hubbers that I interview talk about the methods, techniques and tips that they have to share regarding their success (or not) with writing on HubPages. I’m a big believer in the ability to learn best practices from one another and I think that hearing it straight from the Hubber who has reached his first payout can be super helpful.
So, with all of that being said, I’d like to introduce the Hubber that I’ll beinterviewing about his first payout today, the one and only Bard of Ely.
Hup: So Bard, I happened to see your Forum post that said you found $113 in your AdSense account after checking it a few days ago. Can you tell me briefly how it ended up in there?
Bard: Well, I don’t know exactly how it all got there because I don’t spend a lot of time checking stats and visiting my Google Adsense account because it has been quite depressing until recently. I am very pleased to see that the total has now gone up to just over $125. I think it’s mainly got there because I have been patiently waiting having seen it advised over and over again in the forum threads that patience is one of the keys to success here.
As a writer and musician because it is so damned hard to get published and released by a ‘proper’ publisher or label it has taught me over the many years to be patient and just keep at it.
Hup: Well, I guess that’s it’s true then, eh? You really can make money from HubPages! I thought that that it was all just a figment of my imagination or something.
Bard: I first came to HubPages having found the site whilst searching for ways to make money online. That was my original reason for being on the site but it soon became somewhere I wanted to spend a lot of my time not just because of the possible money. I made a lot of new friends there and I also concluded that it would make a great showcase for my writing.
Hup: You’ve been an amazing member of the HubPages community for over a year now and in those 12 months you’ve published over 150 Hubs, which is quite a feat in itself. What has kept you sticking around for all of this time and what does being a Hubber mean to you?
Bard: I have already discussed patience, and whilst I admit I have been patiently waiting to see if I ever did make anything here, there are so many more reasons why I have been such a regular Hubber. I appreciate the great community spirit and the quality of a lot of the hubs, which are a great resource for info as well as enjoyment. I only wish I had more time to spend reading more of them! As I’ve already said I have made a lot of friends on HubPages and another thing I like to do is watch how well my friends do on here. In particular I am very glad to see how successful CJ Stone and Misty Horizon have been.
Being a Hubber means to me being ready to answer questions and give advice in the forums, being willing to spend time researching and creating your own hubs and also being willing to experiment and learn as you go along, and which I am still doing of course.
Hup: After publishing Hubs and hanging around the place for over a year, you must have some pretty solid advice for all of the Hubbers out there when it comes to what works and what doesn’t when publishing on HubPages. What fantastic nuggets of knowledge do you feel could be the most helpful?
Bard: I think it’s important to get good titles, to include videos and photos and plenty of links. I tried the news capsules but they didn’t really work for me and so far I haven’t had much luck with Amazon and eBay but I like to add items on them to help illustrate the hub and show what is available. It seems pretty obvious that writing about popular stuff like sex works well, but at the same time I have had very good ratings and traffic for some of my articles about nature and foraging as well as my conspiracy hubs on the Illuminati and David Icke’s theories etc. I don’t claim to know why some of the nature hubs prove very popular and others don’t though. For example, my hub on Antlions and other insects has been one of my very successful hubs but why I wonder?
My advice would be not to give up and not to worry about the money side of it but look on HubPages as a place to display your writing skills and to talk about all sorts of subjects and to meet people too.
Hup: The fact that you have the word ‘bard’ in your name is pretty sweet, can you give me a brief explanation of what it means?
Bard: It came about when in 1997 I had a regular column in Big Issue Cymru magazine for homeless people. I was writing mostly general interest stories but I was already known to the publication as a singer and songwriter from the South Wales music scene. Because of that they dubbed me Bard of Ely. Ely is a vast council housing estate, said to be the biggest in Europe, and I thought it was funny being a bard from such a place. A bard to my understanding is a person who is a singer, a musician, poet and storyteller and I am all of those and I really did come from Ely having lived there for 25 years, so it was an accurate description. I am also a Bard of the Free Gorsedd of Bards of Caer Abiri (Avebury) and Principal Bard of the Travelling Court of Camelot (musical wing of the Loyal Arthurian Warband druid order).
Although we’re not even close to being a news site (nor do we really want to be) I’ve noticed an influx of Hubs that are all written on one extremely popular topic right now — the Swine Flu. In fact, there’s one Hubber in particular, Hal Licino, who has actually written 26 Hubs on that very topic…seriously.
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