Hubpages is More than a Way to Make Money Online

When I joined Hubpages a little bit less than three weeks ago, I did so because the site claimed that it could make me money. I don’t even remember how I discovered Hubpages that first time that I took a visit. I somehow stumbled on the site after having done a search in Google. I knew two things: I was a writer and I thought about writing all the time, and I needed to figure out how to make an income at home.

I’m the type of woman who is often looking for a quick fix. I live in a world that tells us that we can and should get instant gratification and that we are entitled to everything our heart desires. My heart desired more money, and working on my own websites was proving to be quite slow. I have launched into everything I could think of: I’m knitting and crocheting like a mad woman, creating items to sell. I am saving money to get the materials I need to begin creating custom teddy bears to sell online and at flea markets. Doing this is complicated and somewhat unpleasant. Although knitting, crocheting and sewing are hobbies of mine, I cannot possibly produce enough on my own by hand.

Writing, I must say, is significantly more natural to me. I think about it constantly: what am I going to write next? Will it be fiction, non-fiction, poetry, prose?

Strangely, as much as I think about writing, I don’t like the actual process of doing it. I’ve always complained about this. I feel as though God gave me talents and that writing just wasn’t one of them. But as you might already know, if you’re a writer, you can’t help but write.

I’ve never had much confidence in my writing. Nobody could convince me. My father used to praise me up one side and down the other for my poetry, which I felt was mediocre at best. He also told me what a great basketball player I was. I couldn’t shoot hoops to save my life. I think you probably get the idea: I couldn’t trust him to be honest with me.

Even getting a poem published when I was fifteen years old wasn’t enough. And we’re not talking poetry.com, either. I am speaking of a legitimate children’s literary magazine. I even got paid for the piece. Even so, it wasn’t enough to win awards and have poetry published. I was a writer, sure. I still felt that my talent was for the theatre and for the theatre alone.

I wrote, because that’s what writers do. I participated in forums, and I owned a poetry forum for a little while until I could no longer afford to keep it up (I had no ads and therefore no revenue). I blogged, because writers blog. I find that blogging is an easy way for a writer to find an audience. It’s an easy platform to use in order to publish writing, regardless of quality. I knew that nobody particularly cared whether my writing was good or bad, and they could read it or dismiss it as they pleased.

I did reasonably well. I got comments on my Sims 2 stories (since my computer can no longer handle the game, I am not playing at the moment, but you are always welcome to visit the writer’s guild). Even my Mommy blog got comments for a while. And don’t get me started on alternative lifestyles. I was constantly having to approve comments on that blog!

I switched projects a lot, trying to find my niche. I tend to like a niche. I don’t want to bounce around because I don’t feel that it is favorable for gaining traffic. I couldn’t figure out where I best fit. The comments meant something to me personally, but as a writer I didn’t trust them to measure my worth. I felt as though people were in my domain. What were they going to say? “You’re a terrible writer who should get off the damned internet?” I don’t think so.

In my most recent past, I’ve been receiving incredible feedback on my writings. I have been writing about marriage for quite some time, considering that I have done a lengthy study on the subject. For a while, e-mails and instant messages came pouring in, telling me how helpful my articles were and how articulate I was. I figured that these supportive people were friends who wanted me to feel good about myself. I felt that the traffic coming in to my site was due to good optimization rather than due to the high-quality content on the site.

In fact, I felt so terrible about the whole thing and considered the articles to be so sub-standard that I removed them! I took the entire website in question down from the internet and am only now considering reconstructing it!

When I found Hubpages, I began to reconsider what I had been told about my ability to write. I thought: here is a site that does everything for you. The site is branded, and much of the work is already done. I am free to simply write and worry about little else. While I still retain the option to research keywords and do my own marketing of my articles, I didn’t have to. I could allow Hubpages to do some of the work, and I could hope to see some reward. I knew that it would take patience, just as everything does. But I also knew that I finally had some hope. Hope, for me, came one hub at a time.

I didn’t look at Hubpages as a community: I saw an opportunity instead. I am a lover of all forums and I love people. I like to interact, preferably in appropriate ways, with other people on the internet. I love culture and want to learn as much about the culture of others as I can. I involve myself actively in too many communities and often find myself having to take a step back. It is rare that I find a place where I stay for more than three weeks. I am very sensitive to the “feel” of a place.

At first I didn’t want to get involved in the community. I didn’t need one more thing on my plate. I just wanted to write, read my own comments, and keep to myself. I didn’t know, in the beginning, that hub score related to how much I participated in the community. Even if I had, I don’t know that I would have cared.

Then I started to get fans. Badcompany99 and BristolBoy were my first two, followed closely by k@ri and wandererh. I got my first comments, and my first fan mail. These weren’t people who knew me: I was new to this community after all! These were people who happened upon something that I had written and took the time to tell me that they enjoyed it. They served to gain very little by encouraging me. But these four formed the initial stepping stone that helped me to begin bridging the gap of Hubpages. It was because of these four that I took another step, and then another, and finally branched out and joined the community.

It was at this point that I ventured out into the community. That was probably about a week and a half ago, and already in this time I have noticed that I am different. I don’t know that the community is different because of me, but I hope that it is. I hope that by joining the community I have touched a life or two, that I have reached out to someone in need or maybe changed a heart.

For those of you who have sent encouraging comments, fan mail or e-mail, I want you to know that you have changed my life. I thank God for every blessing He has bestowed upon me. I know now that He chose to give me not only a talent for the theatre and for acting, but He gave me a talent for words.

Hubpages has changed the way that I see myself. It isn’t about the money any more: It’s about sharing with others something that I was given. There are so many talented people here, so many precious people that I could spend my entire day reading and neglect my own writing, house and family. You are all so wonderful. I could write a book about my experiences here just in the first two weeks. I can only imagine what it will be two years from now!

Thank you all!