HubPagesBlogging is a great medium if you've got lots to say, but unless you keep it fresh, topic and targetted then your audience soon becomes someone else.

Well, there's some new sites turning up which allow you to post in a much more ad hoc way, but still get exposed to a large potential reader base and you can even turn a (small) profit off it.

HubPages offers a very powerful blogging type tool, but within a much larger community space (which helps drive traffic to your content).

They've developed a pretty smart content editing system (as like a lot of Web 2.0 beta properties it's evolving at a scary pace) which allows you to break your content down into easily digested chucks of text, interspersed with images and relevant Google, Amazon and eBay advertising. The best thing is you can build these pages without needing to know one single bit of HTML or CSS syntax and it's all pretty much live preview. If you can use Word you can use their tools.

So, how do you make money?

When you create (or later update) your account you can include your Amazon, eBay and Google Ad-Sense IDs,then when your content pages are displayed you get a certain number of page impressions for your affiliate credit, a certain percentage for the 'house' and a percentage of other users affiliate ids in order to help give everyone a leg-up. You earn 'credit' for extra percentage displays of your earning referals by driving traffic (to your pages and also other pages that interest you) and new publisher signups... so it's quite easy to win.

HubPages will eventually live or die on the value of its content. Unlike Wikipedia it's much more free-form and opinionated, but as every post can be rated by visitors the good ones will float to the top and the dross will sink into irrelevance. If you disagree with something you see there you can post a rebuttal. If you feel you can add to a topic then create a post and link it to the orginal (and post a referal in inspiring posts comments)