My Hub Pages Reflections as I Approach My One-Year Anniversary

By Lisa Kroulik © December 19, 2011

Within the past few days, the “Joined” part on my profile changed to 10 Months Ago, which tells me that I first signed up for Hub Pages prior to February 19 of this year. Although I don’t remember the exact date, I distinctly remember the circumstances that lead me here. I had been employed as a data entry clerk for the past 2.5 years, and while I enjoyed my friends at work, the job was sucking by brain cells dry.

In my early 40s with a long history of job-hopping, my future there didn’t look so bright. I briefly toyed with the idea of returning to college, but I was unwilling to take on the expense when I have a daughter who will be there in less than three years. I was becoming more depressed by the day when I was introduced to Hub Pages through the job board website Monster.com. I was intrigued by the thought of earning “hundreds or thousands of dollars a month” and came here to sign up for an account. I didn’t expect it to change my life.

I was hooked on Hub Pages from the start. After years of stifling my desire to write and taking brain cell killing clerical jobs instead, I finally had an audience and a platform. I wrote a new Hub nearly every day in the beginning, hoping that I would earn enough money to leave data entry behind forever. That did happen in April, but it was not due to Hub Pages.

In the 10 months I have been here, I have published over 70 high quality hubs, if I do say so myself. As of November 30, I had earned $46.06 on the Hub Pages advertising program, $22.60 on Google and $17.39 on Amazon. Of the three, I have only received a payment from Amazon. With an income of $85 for nine months of work, I came to terms with the fact that I wasn’t going to earn even a supplemental income on Hub Pages.

I have written extensively about leaving my job and making significantly more money on article writing websites in previous Hubs I have written. For now, I have decided to focus my online writing career on working for these types of websites. I would like to earn more of my income here, but I don’t have the unpaid time to invest in posting back links on more than a few different sites. While I am disappointed and feel misled by the original Hub Pages ad on Monster.com, there are other reasons that I stick around.

When I first started writing here, I stuck to that old adage of writers to “write what you know.” Having been in a long marriage to an emotionally abusive and personality disordered man, I had a lot to say about different aspects of recovering from this type of emotional trauma. The first Hub I wrote about it, “Stonewalling: How Abusers Express Anger by Saying Nothing at All” (see link below) won a Hub Nugget Award the following month, on my birthday, no less. I still have the email:

Hi nybride710,

Congratulations! With 49 percent of the vote, your Hub was selected by the Hub Pages community as a winner! Excited? We are!

Your profile picture and an excerpt and link to your Hub will be included in today's weekly Hub Pages newsletter that is sent to over 60,000 Hub Pages community members.

Let me be the first to congratulate you and encourage you to continue to write such wonderful Hubs. You're an example for all Hubbers who are getting started and an encouragement to “veterans” as well.

We hope that you continue to enjoy writing at Hub Pages and participating in the community. We certainly enjoy your work.

Congratulations again, and we look forward to seeing you around.

– KoffeeKlatch Gals

Well, that got me thinking that maybe I had something useful to say after all. Many of my earlier Hubs are devoted to some form of emotional abuse or another and I have received very gratifying feedback from people that they have indeed found them helpful. Because one Hub in this series won a Hub Nugget, it has seen over 2,000 hits. That just inspired me to write even more.

I also had the experience of writing one very controversial Hub for which I had some not so pleasant commentary directed at me. If you don’t know which one it is, I’m not going to post it here. I haven’t exactly developed a thick skin yet about my writing and life experiences and had to disable the comments after about three months.

From there, I went on to write a series of Hubs about my experience of leaving my data entry job and forging a new career for myself writing online. Even though I have since surpassed these earnings, a Hub I wrote on June 30 entitled “How I Earned $2,003.68 Writing Online This Month” (link also below) remains my most visited with nearly 3,000 hits. I have also received hundreds of comments and some emails from grateful people for writing these series of articles under the How to Make Money as a Writer category.

I see Hub Pages as a hobby and not something that is ever going to earn me very much money, but I’m okay with that. It gives me the ability to write what I want, not what clients want. Between this site and Flickr, the photo sharing website, I have awakened a creative part of me that I kept silent for far too long. Since I ditched Facebook in September, I have come to appreciate the purposeful connections with fellow writers and photographers that much more.