Recently, I have posted several "hubs" on HubPages to have some first hand experience with how it's different from eHow and Squidoo. Based on my previous post, I'll compare all three of them in this new post, so you can decide which suits you better.
As I discussed informational content in my previous post regarding producing passive income over the Internet, three of the most popular sites in the on-line publishing market came out: eHow, Squidoo, and HubPages. All three sites provide a free platform that inspires people to write down their insightful knowledge or know-how, and rewards them for doing so. eHow focuses on how-to or do-it-yourself (DIY) types of information, while Squidoo and HubPages are wide open for all kinds of subjects.
You do not have to be a professional writer to start making your share of contribution. All you need is a topic and a passion for sharing with others. Of course, your success in the on-line publishing marketplace depends on quantity, quality, and the value of the information you publish. And, more success usually translates to better rewards. The rewards primarily coming from ads and affiliate programs depend on the site traffic. All these sites have worked with major search engines to make sure their content properly included in the research results, invested in marketing to attract traffic, and formed on-line communities to entice writers. My personal experience shows that eHow appears to have most traffic at the moment.
That said, let's get straight into comparing how they work.
#1 eHow
The difficult part of writing an eHow article is finding out what you want to demonstrate and doing the preparation work for the article. When it comes to what to demonstrate, the good news is that there are virtually unlimited categories you can consider. The bad news is that you should really know your subject. It does not mean that you must be an expert in that area, though. My advice to you is that you should at least try out the instructions you are going to write and make sure they work. Getting your hands dirty actually has several benefits. For one, you know whether the instructions or tools are correct and/or complete. During that exercise, you may find out additional tips to avoid potential failures. Secondly, you can take pictures along the way to illustrate how things are done. Remember - a picture is worth a thousand words. Here is a good example posted by my daughter.
Once you have done the preparation work, it is time to just enter the information on eHow. The tool they provide focuses only on the article itself and is very simple and straightforward. eHow then takes care of the ads and the affiliated content. For most cases, that appears to be good enough. I have seen others customize the page layout to make the article more appealing and effective, though. Even though eHow accepts articles of any subject now, you still author articles using the same editor for composing a 'how-to' article.
#2 Squidoo
As I mentioned before, Squidoo is not focused on how-to or DIY. You can write about anything you want including on-going events, as long as you believe there is value in your article. An article at Squidoo is called a lens, and the author of a lens is called lensmaster. Squidoo has a ranking system, LensRank, that inspires the lensmaster to do better and more for their lenses. Your new lenses at Squidoo are likely to start out as work-in-progress and at a low rank. Squidoo offers some advices in the health report to make your lens more polished. As you revise your lenses with more useful information and improve them with more interesting modules, their ranks improve. At one point, they will become featured lenses that Squidoo starts to promote and include in search results. So, it is important that you keep on working and revising your lenses, even long after you have created them.
A lens consists of a number of modules. There is a wide variety of modules including the most commonly used - introduction, text/write, and comments modules. The text/write module needs improvement, even though it accepts some basic HTML tags, such as for hyperlinks. The most interesting modules, however, are those related to merchants like Amazon, CafePress, and eBay. For example, the Amazon modules allow you to place Amazon products in your lens and bring in income as a result of affiliate sales. You can configure the Amazon modules to either let Amazon recommend the related products to your subject, or you pick the products best suited for your readers. You can also customize the product presentation.
Squidoo splits the profit of a lens evenly with the lensmaster, after excluding the operation costs.
#3 HubPages
HubPages works in a much similar way to Squidoo. An article is called a hub, while HubPages users are called hubbers. HubPages ask each individual author to sign up affiliate programs with their sponsored merchants (e.g. Amazon and eBay). HubPages states that the author gets 60% of the ad revenue from the hubs.
Although with a slightly different look, the HubPage editor works similarly to Squidoo's. Instead of modules, HubPages calls them "content capsules". At the moment, HubPages only has a small number of capsules available. The text capsule is the best among all three, which offers various fonts and formating capabilities. The support of rich text in the text capsule makes authoring much more productive compared to the others. I find the Amazon and eBay capsules a bit hard to use. For one, the search capability seems to be inflexible and very limited. I have had a hard time getting the list of the products I feel comfortable with. Although I am allowed to hand pick my favorite products, the capsules do not provide adequate look-up functionality.
HubPages assigns HubScore (1 - 100) to each hub upon publication based on a verity of factors. Among the three sites, HubPages sets out many rules to ensure high quality of the hubs. Violation of those rules results in either penalty to the HubScore or removal of the hub. Hubs with HubScore lower than 40 would have lower ranking by the search engine and other negative implications. In addition, HubPages also assign a score for every hub author. You should get yourself familiar with those rules collected in this hub, before joining HubPages. Below are perhaps the two most common violations many hubs have been flagged about:
- Overly promotional: A hub is considered overly promotional, when including more than two links in the same domain. Exceptions are made, if those links are not "commercial", such as Wikipedia or news sites of good reputation. The hub is also considered overly promotional and may be subjective to removal, if its content is copied from the other original site (e.g. your blog or web site) and the hub contains links to those sites.
- Duplicated: Copyright violation is definitely prohibited. Even if you have the rights of the content, a hub may still be considered duplicated, if its content is copied from the other original site and found at many other sites.
A few final words: set a realistic expectation
You may have heard people claim that they have made a significant income off these online publishing sites, which may have motivated you to jump right in. I would remind you that there are no quick bucks or short-cuts to success here. Treat it like a career, if you may. Your success requires both quantity and quality in your writing. Make writing a habit and learning a part of your life, if you wish.
Read this post on eHow (part 1, 2, and 3), HubPages, and Squidoo.
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