My Adventures In HubPages - Month 3

In honor of my 50th published hub, I've decided to give an update to the progress I've made so far here on HubPages. Lucky number 50 just happens to coincide with my 3rd month anniversary, and the amount of knowledge I've picked up in that short amount of time continues to surprise me!

Just as in Month Two, I spent more time learning and optimizing my existing hubs for targeted keywords and Search Engine Optimization. Since my last update, I've published 13 new hubs (counting this one) with several more in various stages of readiness. I finally made some Amazon.com sales and continue to make money online through Google AdSense and the revenue sharing sites, RedGage.com and SheToldMe.com.

I've been tracking my HubPages statistics, and here's how I've done this month!

• Author Score: 93 (the past few weeks it's ranged from 90 to 94)
• Average HubScore: 74
  
• Total Page Views: 8000+
• Followers: 114
• AdSense Earnings: over $30
• RedGage Earnings: over $42
• Amazon Affiliate Earnings: 118 clicks, 3 sales, $1.50+

• My Author Score and Average HubScore have remained steady.
• My Page Views nearly doubled
• My number of Followers increased by 160%
• My AdSense more than doubled
• My RedGage earnings increased 20%
• I finally made some Amazon sales

All of this pretty much trended the way I had expected it to, except for the huge increase in followers. That's in large part due to my recent entry into a new unofficial Hub Challenge that I'm taking part in - more about that later!

The Amazon sales were exciting, but one of them led to a bit of confusion. My first sale was for a book that was on a topic that is not in the least related to any of my hub content, so someone must have clicked one of my Amazon capsules and went over to the site and decided to by a book they stumbled across while my Amazon cookie was still active. Fair enough.

But my second sale was a different story! I knew that I had read something over at Amazon about Kindle sales earning 10% commission, and one of my sales was for an e-book. A little investigation revealed the sad truth - that 10% commission is for sales of Kindle devices, not Kindle content! E-books actually earn 0% commissions, so don't look for me to be listing them on my hubs anymore!

My third sale was the biggest, and the only one related to one of my hubs. Someone bought a frying pan, and I have to presume that was due to a visit to my hub about How To Choose The Right Non-Stick Cookware.

I haven't been as active over at RedGage as I had been in the past - not a lot of new content uploaded, so my increase in earnings was predictably low.

One thing I hadn't mentioned before was the amount of income I get from SheToldMe - I post backlinks to that site each time I publish a hub, and so far I've made about a few dimes in AdSense earnings from that site, as well as a few cents from Chitika, another ad revenue channel that SheToldMe allows users to implement.

During my third month on HubPages, my traffic continues to come overwhelmingly from search engines, especially Google. Here are some specifics from Google Analytics:

• Google: 68%
• Yahoo: 3%
• HubPages: 11%
  
• Bing and Other Searches, Plus Referring Sites: 8%

This is very encouraging, since Google and other search engine visits traditionally lead to more motivated visitors, which usually translates into more sales and advertising revenue!

Once again I see lots of strange keyword phrases in Google Analytics that are driving traffic to my hubs from Google and Yahoo. Some are weird choices of keywords that actually fit my content, while some are totally unrelated! Here are some the odder ones:

• zombie equipment (it's pretty surprising how many people search for this!)
• controversial incest movies
• magic jack philippines
• best flaming lips album
• autistic move cattle sciencetist (that's quite a unique spelling of "scientist"!)
• brownie receipt (another misspelling)
• can i use maple bacon in clam chowder (oddly enough, my clam chowder recipe actually addresses that question!)
• funeral potatoes (don't even want to know what those are)
• gruesome sexual disturbing asian movie ever poster ( ?!?!? )
• high heels for men
• unimpressed turtle (my new favorite!)
• alligator joke hit me so hard on the head (that actual joke is on my jokes hub)

I only listed two of the bizarre (and often creepy) search phrases that end up on my list of controversial movies - there are some pretty disturbed folks out there! Or am I disturbed for writing a hub that draws them in?

A few weeks ago, hubber "sunforged" initiated a new twist on the "30 Hubs In 30 Days" Challenge. This unofficial challenge is "30 Hubs in 60 Days", and it builds upon the original 30-in-30 Challenge, but with a focus on hub promotion in the second 30 days . He gathered about two dozen fellow hubbers (myself included) and we are in the process of completing part one of the challenge as of this writing. I'm very eager to see what sorts of promotional ideas he has in store for us!

I've also begun implementing two new approaches when I create my hubs. In addition to all the things I covered in my SEO Tips Hub, I've also started writing multiple related hubs on a specific topic and then linking them all together internally.

The most complete example of this is my Thanksgiving Dinner Menu Hub. Over the course of about two weeks, I wrote individual hubs about each element of a complete Thanksgiving Dinner Menu - the Turkey, Garlic Mashed Potatoes, Stuffing and Giblet Gravy - each with loads of info and videos that relate to the recipe. Then I created a hub that gave an overview of the whole menu, with links going out to the other related hubs. From that overview hub and the individual recipe hubs, I also linked to some of my other cooking related, but not Thanksgiving-specific, hubs - like the Homemade Vegetable Stock Recipe and some dessert recipes.

All of the Thanksgiving recipes have a similar "look and feel", so they give the impression that they belong together. It's sort of like having a separate unique "brand" within the HubPages model. Now, when Autumn rolls around and people start looking for instruction about preparing Thanksgiving dinner, if they land on any one of these hubs it will lead them to all of the others. Plus, I've created a ton of backlinks to my own content right within HubPages!

The other thing I've begun doing more consistently is using my HubPages Referral Tracker in my links to other hubs. Mark Knowles wrote a very illuminating forum thread about hitting 1,000,000 referral views and I quickly starting using my Tracker more often.

By using your Tracker in the links to hubs by other hubbers, you get a share of the 40% of page impressions that HubPages usually reserves for themselves. So if you refer a visitor to another hubber's hub and that visitor clicks an ad on that hub, you get paid a percentage of that click! Here's the HubPages help page about Traffic Referral Program.

Referral Trackers can be used to recommend new users to HubPages - if someone signs up for the site with your ID, you get a percentage of the HubPages share of AdSense revenue for as long as that person remains a member! You can learn more about the HubPages Affiliate Program here. So far I've had one person sign up with my Tracker a few weeks ago...

So far, month 3 has been the best one so far, and I only expect things to improve from her on out! The coming months will see me producing a lot more hubs, and hopefully creating them in smarter (and more profitable!) ways. I will probably create another hub as a "wrap-up" after I complete the 60 Day Challenge, but after that I probably won't be focused so much on tracking my progress. So look forward to my One Year Anniversary Hub or my 100th Celebration Hub, whichever comes first :D

Happy Hubbing!