As with most general article marketing strategies, it is the aggregate value of a number of articles that make a big impact on traffic to your website. Hubpages is not different. Similar to creating a Squidoo lens, creating a “Hub” is a way to aggregate your content in a way that others can easily find it.  But to see a significant amount of benefit from using Hubpages.com , you’re going to have to invest some time. Extra perk? Hubpages allows you to build Google ads right into your article for shared revenue.

Hubpages claims to be the leading online publishing ecosystem, and I think that says a lot.  As of today, there are 558,738 published hubs from 108,481 publishers on Hubpages.   A “Hub” is an aggregate of information by the same publisher. A top Hub is likely to have multiple articles, some video, a few images, and lots of great links.  For example, this hub: hubpages.com/hub/Pumpkin-Carving was ranked number one yesterday (trick or treat, anyone?) and it is a robust mini-blog about pumpkin carving.

Creating a Hub is super-easy. That’s one thing I love about Hubpages. There are even images to help you choose your Hub’s layout. Like other article marketing websites, your Hub will be reviewed for authenticity, and approved. They also rate Hubs by how complete and how helpful they are. Higher rated Hubs are more likely to be found, of course.

The other unique thing about Hubpages that other article marketing sites don’t offer is a way for authors to make a little money through Google Ads. If you choose to show Google Ads within your Hub, then the revenue is shared between you and HubPages.

This is the detail about Hubpages that you need to really make sure you understand, though.  Effective use of Hubpages means that not only do you need to create quality Hubs that are useful to people, but that you need to create a large quantity of Hubs. Like all other article marketing efforts, Hubpages needs to be part of your weekly routine, if its going to be part of your social media marketing strategy.  Consider the short and long term effects of using Hubpages: Many decent hubs get only 20 to 30 views in a month, which could results in perhaps 1 or 2 clicks to your website. Therefore, if you were to create a Hubpages strategy that included posting 3 Hubs per week for 3 months, the result could be nearly 40 Hubs, maybe 800 views, and perhaps 80 to over 100 clicks to your site.

That might sound like peanuts, but consider the bigger picture… search engine rank. Inbound linking is one of the areas that small businesses struggle with the most. Directory submissions and reciprocal linking programs only get you so far.  Linking to your own website through a series of Hubs is a fantastic way to increase the inbound links to your site (from relevant content, on a highly ranked website).  Unlike some article marketing websites, Hubpages allows search engines to follow all outbound links. So consider the scenario above… 40 Hubs (with three articles a piece) could result in 120 relevant links to your own website.

In all, do I like Hubpages? Sure I do. Do I think it’s worth your time? Absolutely I do.  If you have the content or have the ability to write or aggregate content which you have rights to, then Hubpages might be a great addition to your article marketing campaign.

If you’d like to read more tips about using social media marketing to increase inbound links to your website, then read  How to increase quality inbound links to your website.

This entry was posted Sunday, November 1st, 2009 at 9:48 pm and is filed under Article Marketing, Social Bookmarking Sites. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.