Best Option Between Squidoo Vs Hubpages For Article Marketing

Article marketing can be used for any one of three purposes.

You can use your articles to get traffic by scoring a high rank in search engines. You can use them to get backlinks and also for making direct sales if the directory you're using allows affiliate links.

Squidoo and Hubpages are best for achieving all three of these. They allow affiliate links and they both have great SEO benefits. Their pages rank very highly in the search engines sometimes with really very little effort.

Both sites are so similar to each other and are very popular for article marketing. They've even become each others closest rivals over the years.

So which is the best pick for article marketing?

First let me tell you about each of these web 2.0 sites - maybe you can decide from my experience.

Squidoo

I started using Squidoo in 2007 when they were in their nascent stage. There was a lot of hype about Squidoo's pages performing very well in the search engines. I decided to put it to test and put up some lenses partly because I didn't have my own website at that point in time. The very first lens I put up made me my first article marketing sale. I was very excited and decided to not to stop. The pages were performing very well and I managed to get good traffic.

Eventually, as more and more people began using the website, Squidoo started getting strict on their rules and you could get your lens blocked if you used it for a banned topic. I'm not sure if I remember but I abandoned Squidoo completely over some stuff like that.

Hubpages
I discovered Hubpages in 2007. It was about 5 months after I was using Squidoo. I loved Hubpages for their simple layout and for the fact that they performed just as well as Squidoo and sometimes even outperformed them.

Creating hubs were much more easier as you didn't have to reload the page when you added something. You could put stuff up even faster and they even allowed you to share AdSense earnings.

My content on Hubpages did much better than my content on Squidoo and I used them almost exclusively for affiliate marketing (along with blogger) after leaving Squidoo.

Hubpages vs Squidoo for article marketing?

I'm sure you can guess who's going to win this battle but let me give you a little reasoning to back up my own personal bias.

1. Hubpages lets you share 50% of Adsense earnings, where as Squidoo pays you based on an algorithm the one that I still don't fully understand. Also with Hubpages you can check your earnings through your Adsense account while with Squidoo, you never have an idea how much you have earned until they actually pay you.
2. Hubpages has less leaks than Squidoo. By leaks I mean ways in which a user can leave the page without clicking on one of your links. At least with Hubpages, if your visitors leaves through Adsense you are still earning money anyways.
3. Hubpages are a bit lax about the topics which you can submit content for. They do have their rules but they're not going to hassle you if you make a hub on weight loss, one of the banned topics on Squidoo.
4. Hubs are benefited greatly from Hubpages' internal linking structure which helps in your individual hub's rankings. Tag pages and related hubs provide you with beneficial backlinks. Squidoo's internal linking structure is not that good.
5. The clean 'black and white' layout of Hubpages is easier on the eyes and lets you focus on the content while the colorful layout of Squidoo looks a bit amateur and distracts you.

Squidoo's good points are that they're a PR 8 website which is good if you can get your lens' link on the front page. I would definitely suggest Hubpages over Squidoo if you're doing article marketing.

Both are great sites to use but one should always read the terms before you start.