The Marketers Edge

How another web 2.0 website is making a show in the search engine game

Here we go again!

I received a flood of emails in the last few days touting this new traffic generating source. Curious as any other marketer looking for new avenues to generate traffic I am off on another adventure.

This new wonder is hubpages.com and it is a community of content producers that shares traffic and revenue through a quality index that promotes the best content.

This is another Web 2.0 site that freely hosts a community of content producers
much like Squiddo . And just like squiddo it shares revenues with the content creators. The idea is not new and it is appealing to the writers that are judged by the community for the quality of the content they generate.

The website is organized in tag based hubs that indexes the content by a “hub score” that is earned by the author of the content based on how the community judges the quality of
the content.

The content producer is encouraged to monetize his “content” with Adsense ads, advertisements from Amazon or eBay if you are an affiliate. They also provide lead generation tools that you can incorporate in your web pages. They also have a HubPages Royalty Program.

A warning here: if you do not want to share the revenue from your Google Adsense you should not choose to monetize your content that way, because HubPages wants 40% of that revenue.

The interesting thing is that the search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN are starting to rank some hubpages for very competitive search terms.

Knowing that the search engines are taking into consideration the traffic that is generated by the hub and that they are allowing all links in your content to external websites (your websites) as back links . It makes great sense to capitalize on the traffic that you don’t have to generate to benefit from search engine placement for articles that you write in your hubpages. Instantly your blog has a PR6 rating.

Creating Your First HubPage

The creation of your new account and the posting into your hubpage seems simple enough. They provide many “non-techie tools” that allow the inclusion of photos, audio and video from sources like YouTube, Google Video and others.

Membership of HubPages is constantly growing as people are discovering the community through word of mouth and search engine results.

Using HubPages.com to Improve SEO

Take a look at HubPages, if you have a blog, hubpages are very be similar.
You can lurk and see what the community is writing about and see if there is a place
there for your specialty. I found several internet marketers there and they have been
welcomed by the community.

Since this is another social networking site I can only recommend it with caution. I have
my reservations about this site just as I do about MySpace and Squiddo. The object is to create content of value for the community and grow your internet business at the same time. Many people become involved with the community and neglect their businesses.

You make the call.