Amateur who's writing own work for HubPages - should I move to Blogger/Blogspot?

Question

I'm currently writing little things here and there on HubPages. I don't intend to get into blogging "seriously", and even the little articles I write I don't consider amazing. However, I do enjoy writing them, and have many future articles already planned out in my head for whenever I next have time to write again.

FYI, if you want to get a sense of the stuff I write, you can find me on HubPages (for now, at least?) here. I get on average anywhere between 1 to 7 views a day (total, across admittedly only 12 articles), so it's certainly not much. I just thought I'd provide the link in case the type of topics I write about is pertinent to your answer.

My question is whether I should move over to Google's Blogger (a.k.a. Blogspot), or some other similar free service.

What I like about Blogspot is that it's just you on there. It's just your stuff. If people start coming to that site of yours, it's always just for you. As opposed to HubPages, where it looks like they're going to get rid of subdomains fairly soon, essentially grouping together hubs by topic instead of author (though I assume "related" links in each hub will operate essentially the same).

Admittedly, I do also like the prospect of getting 100% of your adsense earnings on Blogspot, as opposed to splitting earnings 60/40 with HubPages.

Now, I understand the downsides are largely related to those very upsides.

On Blogspot, it is just me on there. On HubPages, there are possibly people coming to my articles because of links through other articles also on HubPages. There'll obviously be none of that on Blogspot.

And getting 100% of the earnings doesn't mean much if there's no traffic anymore.

Now, I don't actually mind not getting much money (for example, my goal is for years down the track, after having written up to hundreds of articles, the earnings be enough to simply buy a nice lunch every couple months for me and my wife). But I would like to have some visibility on the web.

On that note, if I move over, what would happen to my articles which consistently get at least a view a day? The articles which manage to get within the first or second page of google searches? I assume the HubPages articles would essentially disappear from the search results. But theoretically, from the new blogspot domain, over time those same articles would get back to where they were?

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Any answers greatly appreciated - both those targeted at me and my amateur circumstances, and more generalised answers.

Answer 1

As you point out, HubPages helps direct traffic your way. I would probably publish both places until I felt comfortable with the income I was receiving from which ever free provider I chose.

Initially I would publish separate articles on both domains (for overall revenue considerations) until traffic was at desirable levels on your custom domain. Then you might choose to move all your HubPages articles to your new domain, since HubPages says you own your content:

6. PROPRIETARY RIGHTS; CONTENT OWNERSHIP

[...] "HubPages does not claim ownership of Your Hub Content or Author Content. Such content will be owned by You or a third party from whom You got permission to post the content."

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I assume the HubPages articles would essentially disappear from the search results. But theoretically, from the new blogspot domain, over time those same articles would get back to where they were?

That depends on a number of factors, some of which might be totally out of your control (as Google makes its own decisions on how it ranks sites).

In short, you may have to build up a large amount of traffic to the new site before that kind of switch occurred. Even so, Google might still choose to rank your older HubPages articles higher based on criteria you have no influence over. If you do some basic SEO, you can mitigate some of that, but personally I knew someone whose articles on another domain were still ranking higher than the one she transfered them to many months after re-publishing on a new domain.

All said, this isn't discouragement -- I personally like publishing on my own domain. But I would say it will likely require some effort to build traffic compared to that of HubPages.

Answer 2

This is something I see a lot for comics series : The author publish a new page on its own blog/website first ; then, a few days later, publish that page on the community website (so on your case HubPages). A link to the blog/website is always visible just under the page on the community website.

This way, followers from the community website can more easily discover the series via links and so, and they can still follow your work on the community website if they prefer it that way. (Maybe the community website offers usefull tools : syndication, collection of favourites...) But the early release to your personal blog/website incite people to switch over. Eventually, if enough of your public switches over, you can stop publish to HubPages.

Now, this may or may not translate well to blog posts, where you don't have the urge to read the next publication, but it's still the less "risky" way to try to use your own blog.