I’ve been slowly but surely deleting the links to my content ever since Bright Hub shut down for all intents and purposes. Unlike writing for Demand Studios, one of the things that made Bright Hub worth writing for after awhile was the revenue sharing.
Now, as most of my readers know, I’m not a big fan of revenue sharing. The main reason is that there are just too many factors out of my control. No matter how great my freelance writing is, for instance, there will never be any traffic to speak of if the site it is published on doesn’t link to the content, have a good layout that both human readers and search engine spiders like, and so on. In other words, my efforts and work are not reflected in whatever I might earn via revenue sharing. One of the main reasons I became a freelance writer is to have my own hard work pay off for me.
Bright Hub Revenue Sharing
When I first started writing for Bright Hub, they paid $20 per article plus a certain amount of revenue sharing. In my mind, that meant that BrightHub paid me $20 per article. Period.
Over time, however, the amount of content I published at BrightHub began to add up. Additionally, some of my articles began to rank highly for certain search terms. An article I wrote about seaport.exe, for example, pulled in several thousands of page views each month. I started to make noticeable passive income from my BrightHub writings. I even wrote a followup article about how to get rid of Seaport that generated more traffic. Both of these articles were written after I had blogged about it at my business and computers website BestHubris.com.
There is a very big difference between the promise of revenue sharing, someday, somehow, somewhere, and actual income earned from revenue sharing. Once I started earning real money with my revenue sharing, I decided to help the process along. I built links to my content on Bright Hub, starting with those articles that had the highest number of pageviews and moving down the list. This boosted my content and the corresponding income it earned. I even linked to the BrightHub articles from my personal articles about similar topics because they paid per page view instead of per click like the AdSense ads on my own websites.
Even after Panda hit eHow and Bright Hub, I still earned a decent amount of passive income from Bright Hub’s revenue sharing program. It was less than half of what it used to be, but it was still nice income, even if it was no longer impressive. Therefore, I made no effort to take down any links to my published work on Bright Hub.
However, this month, the freelance writers for BrightHub received notice that the company was ending what was apparently an optional program of revenue sharing. Even then, I didn’t really make much effort to unlink my content. After all, there is no reason to kick someone while they are down. But, then I noticed in my Twitter stream that Bright Hub is still publishing new material at a pretty good rate and still making money off of my original content that I wrote for them.
On the one hand, the content was bought and paid for by BrightHub, much in the same way the content I wrote for Demand Studios was bought and paid for. Both companies are welcome to do whatever they wish with the content.
The difference is that I never linked to any of the stuff I published for Demand Studios or eHow. I made a good faith effort to build the traffic and revenue my content generated for Bright Hub based upon their good faith effort to share the rewards with me. The thing about revenue sharing is that it is a percentage and by its very nature adjusts up or down based upon how well the content performs for the owner. When Google’s Panda update caused them to earn less money on my content, I also go paid less. It rubbed me the wrong way for them to take away my cut now, but continue to benefit from it in the same way.
So, long story, short, I’ve been removing the links I made from my sites and other published content and, whenever possible pointing them back to me or my content that does still benefit me.
The point of this post is two-fold. One, it turns out that I build a lot of links when I get motivated to do so. All writers should come up with ways to quickly build links to their own content. Two, it turns out that I am earning money with HubPages (I had some links from there too) and I never even knew it. That is my next post.
Related articles
- Google Search Update or HubPages Improvement ? (besthubris.com)
