My Adventures in HubPages - The First 30 Days!

For my 31st hub here on HubPages, I thought I would take a look back at the journey so far. As of this writing, I've been publishing on Hubpages for a little over a month. In that time I've completed the "30 Hubs in 30 Days" Challenge, been nominated for two HubNuggets and had a great time learning about Internet publishing. In an effort to indulge myself and hopefully share some of what I've learned, I present My Adventures in HubPages!

My Results So Far

Since joining HubPages, I've published 30 hubs on a variety of subjects. Most of my hubs are cooking related - they say, "Write what you know," and I know cooking! During the "30 in 30" Challenge, whenever I found myself stumped about what to write, I'd pull out my recipe collection and create a recipe hub. I also took advantage of the Ideabank here on HP, as well as one HubMob topic my first week on the site.

As of this writing, here are my stats:

• Author Score: 92 (the past two weeks it's ranged from 88 to 92)
• Average HubScore: 73
• Total Page Views: 1500+
• Followers: 40
• AdSense Earnings: about $5.50
• RedGage Earnings: $4.30
• Amazon Affiliate Earnings: 11 clicks, but no sales yet

One of my favorite distractions is digging around in my Google Analytics page. From the start, most of my visitors have found me through search engines, which is an unending source of surprise to me. I would have expected my visits to mostly be internal ones from other hubbers, but that hasn't been the case at all!

I credit that with a combination of HubPages' credibility with Google and the invaluable backlinking and Google Search Engine Optimization tips I've gotten from reading other writers here on HubPages.

I've had visitors from every continent except Antarctica, and some of the search phrases that bring visitors to my pages are sometimes pretty bizarre! Here are some of the weirder ones:

• "herbal shampoo for dandruff relief"
• "it is best to hire a lawyer to handle this for you as lawyers have more experience and knowledge about the legal process of settlements"
• "gary larson far side cartoons"
• "beautiful arab girls"
• "cute indian college girl"
• "i hate potheads"
• "idiot! how to decorate cake in chocolate fondant."

I don't have any hubs that come close to any of these topics, but they've all generated visits to my hubs!

One of the things that shocked me right away was how quickly some of my hubs would appear on the first page of a Google search, even without any backlink work on my part. One of the first hubs I wrote was about Temple Grandin, who was recently featured in a critically acclaimed HBO movie starring Claire Danes. Within a day of publishing it, Google Analytics showed visitors finding it with pretty specific longtail search phrases.

These longtails have been my best source of traffic, due to a combination of hub content, keyword density and tagging. For the Temple Grandin hub, here are some of the search phrases that result in first page Google results:

• "cattle chute inventor autistic"
• "autism and farm machinery"
• "autism and fear temple grandin"
• "autism dr. ddesigns farm equipment"
• "design for humain treatment of cattle autisim" - this one appears on the first page with "humane" spelled correctly, too!
• "equipment a inventer used"
• "what is the name of a autistic inventor and college graduate?" - my hub is currently #1 for this phrase

Another of my hubs that gets decent longtail traffic is the one about the Zombie Apocalypse. This was a hub that I wrote for fun when I was out of ideas. I figured I could write something funny that also naturally lent itself to highlighting some of the odder things for sale at Amazon.com, but didn't expect much in the way of traffic. Though it hasn't sold anything at Amazon yet (I guess there aren't a lot of folks looking to buy an $800 crossbow or a $2500 pair of night-vision binoculars), it's been a surprise performer for search phrases like these:

• "best equipment for a zombie apocalypse" - first page on Google
• "essential zombie gear" - #2 result
• "gps apocalypse" - #4 result
• "list of items you'd need to survive zombies?" - First result following Amazon shopping results

The "gps apocalypse" result is especially interesting, and leads me to my next point...

During my first month on HubPages, I probably spent more time reading about Internet marketing and promotion than I did writing. There are endless hubs on the topic of Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and I read a lot of them and learned so much that I couldn't fit into this hub!

I originally wrote a section on Search Engine Optimization for this hub, and it ended up being longer than the whole rest of the hub, so I've decided to give it a hub of it's own! You can find a link to that hub on the right...

Much of my first weeks here on HubPages was spent lurking through the forums. Whenever I found myself with a question about some feature of the site, I would search the forums, and I think I found a great answer every time! The community here is unbelievably friendly and helpful for the most part, and I think this is the first site where I actually posted to an online forum, even though I've been using the Internet since before it had pictures!

A great resource in the forums is the Extreme Hub Makeover forum. It's a place to seek out help for those hubs that just don't seem to be working.

Early in my first month I wrote my first Amazon-affiliate-focused hub about Non-stick Cookware. I liked the way the hub turned out, and I looked forward to lots of visits, even though this topic is very competitive online.

During those first weeks, all of my hubs were getting roughly the same amount of traffic, and they all had HubScores in the 70s within the first few days after publication. But this one was my least visited hub, and it had a score in the low 60s even after a week.

I turned to the forum for help, and that hub is now my fourth most visited, and the score tends to stay in the 70s. At the suggestion of the hubbers on the forum, I did some layout, keyword and tag modifications, and now I get Google traffic from some longtail search phrases:

• "best non stick coating that doesn't come off" - 1st page
• "best non teflon cooking" - top of 2nd page
• "calphalon perflurooctanoic acid" - #1
• "danger of consuming teflon from flaking pans" - #1

This is a something that's a little beyond your control, but it can give a great boost to your traffic. I was lucky enough to be nominated for two HubNuggets in my first month on HubPages. The first nomination was for a hub that I liked but didn't feel was really one of my best, and it didn't fare too well in the voting. But the second nomination was for a hub about Travel Tips that I felt was one of my best, and the result of the nomination and the high number of votes I received gave me a big bump in traffic. I came in fourth place out of ten, and that meant that my hub was featured in the weekly HubPages newsletter, which is distributed to something like 50,000 hubbers.

It took me three weeks to reach 1,000 page views, but in the week after that HubNugget nomination, my visits increased more than 50% to over 1,500 views. My Author Score and my number of followers also increased, so now every time I publish a hub a bunch more people are notified, which has the potential of increasing my traffic even more!

For me, the toughest things about writing for HubPages are devoting as much time as I would like and figuring out what to write about. It's easy to "write what I know," but now that I've had a taste of the potential of HubPages to make money, I feel compelled to write hubs that will bring in some income. That means finding subjects that are likely to draw search engine traffic, which means keyword research - something I do not enjoy doing!

I've made a few stabs at writing hubs that are dedicated strictly to bringing in Amazon affiliate money. This is a pretty specific skill that I don't seem to possess, though! I consider myself a writer more than a marketer, and I find it tough to write about a subject that I don't feel compelled by.

Another favorite hubber of mine is Mark Knowles, who started out writing about what he knows and turned his HubPages experience into a real money maker! He is also a wealth of knowledge about the ins and outs of HubPages, and a good deal of what I've learned here came from his hubs about HubPages and SEO.

So hopefully you've learned a thing or two in this hub, and if you've been asking yourself if it's a worthwhile use of your time, I hope you agree that is it certainly is!

I don't think there's any way I could have matched the results I've gotten here if I had tried starting my own website (which is what I was researching when I came across HubPages a month ago).

The combination of the authority given to HubPages by Google and the terrific infrastructure of the site is far beyond anything I could have done on my own, and I plan on spending a lot more time researching and writing more hubs...