Wow. My goal to make 500 lenses by the end of the year may be hijacked by the fact that I can write 2 good hubs in a day. HP’s interface is smoother, faster, and less buggy.
Of course, it’s much more limited, lacking many of Squidoo’s features, and I chafe at not being able to link to anything else I’ve written, educational or otherwise, without fear of being put on probation as a spammer is vexing. (Yes, me. A spammer. Snort.) I also hate not being able to put a small image credit on my photos due the ‘watermark’ issue. And without Amazon affiliates (not in my state), earning avenues are limited to advertising.
But gosh, it’s so nice to start getting money as soon as one has published, instead of watching all the blessings, likes, comments and feedback during the first few weeks of a lens’ existence wear off by the time it’s eligible for tier payouts.
For what it is worth, you can count a hubpage as a page made toward your goal, they just won’t be all on the same platform.
I find making Squidoo lenses a lot faster these days because I make sure I only use a small range of modules. However, because of the way the modules load on Squidoo I find the edit interface on Wizzley much, much faster.
The Amazon Affiliate issues do not apply in the UK, for which I am very thankful, so the choices I make as to where to publish a page are not affected by that. However on Wizzley you do not have the freedom to use your own affiliate account for Amazon – well they have to get the money to provide the platform and until they start getting the amount of traffic that Squidoo does, I can see why they have done this.
I do worry about what is happening on Hubpages, because a close friend is reporting that having been very successful on there, her traffic is way down and she is VERY worried about the way Hubpages is tackling this – she is currently of the view that the owners are making it worse. As a result she is moving some of her content.
So currently I am making Squidoo and Wizzley my priorities for making pages but constantly watching.
However, what all this tells us is that as long as we are so dependent on platforms we do not own for the larger part of our online income, then we are always vulnerable to changes the platform owners make.
Have you considered Wizzley? It’s really even easier than HP AND the restrictions are far looser! Google loves Wizzley. My hubs don’t do nearly as well as my wizzes. I would like to move my hubs over, but people much wiser than I keep saying to leave them. So I refrain.
Squidoo has its own flavor, and it takes me a LONG time to make a lens. I can make a wizz in just a couple of hours.
I’ve considered. Wizzley turned me off initially because of too many WIzzley members dropping their referral affiliate codes in SquidU and even more on this blog in an effort to convince me it was a good place. I totally understand — I am an affiliate here and there — but it was getting a little tiresome. It started feeling like “open season on Greekgeek– let’s see who can score 10% of her page impressions!”
The other problem with Wizzley is that I’m in California. No Amazon Associates commissions. I’ve never had any luck with AllPosters. Zazzle? Well, maybe, but is it worth it?
Hubpages is the same problem: the only money I stand to earn from those sites is Adsense, and understandably, each site takes a cut of Asense revenue. At that point, I almost might as well write on my own blogs and websites. Squidoo’s Amazon modules give me one key benefit which has made me put up, grudgingly, with a lot of the recent changes: Affiliate commissions (even split 50-50) for Amazon, which seems to be the program for which my writing is especially suited to sell things.
I’ll check out Wizzley sooner or later; I just kinda got off on the wrong foot with it.