My Adventures in HubPages - The Second Month

This is an update to my previous hub My Adventures in HubPages - The First 30 Days. I've continued to learn a lot here, and I've spent most of the previous month tweaking my published hubs and improving their keyword targeting and Search Engine Optimization.

I've written and published just 7 more hubs and unpublished a few that just weren't doing well. My Author Score continues to go strong - 93 as of this writing - and all but a few of my hubs have HubScores over 70, with most over 75. The AdSense earnings are chugging along, and once again I've earned more money over at RedGage than here on HubPages, and for a lot less work!

I'm not giving up on HubPages, though - I see it as a stronger long-term earner than RedGage...

So far, after 2 months, here are my stats:

• Author Score: 93 (the past few weeks it's ranged from 89 to 93)
• Average HubScore: 75
  
• Total Page Views: 4300+
• Followers: 71
• AdSense Earnings: over $13
• RedGage Earnings: over $37.00
• Amazon Affiliate Earnings: 57 clicks, but no sales yet

Page views have nearly tripled in the past month, as have AdSense earnings and Amazon clicks. Unfortunately, I still haven't actually made any sales from Amazon. The real winner for the month was RedGage, where I got a $25 bonus in the Daily Contest for sending another hubber over there who signed up using my referral ID.

One of the things that inspired me to revisit this topic was a hub written by sunforged about his experiences publishing 100 hubs. One of his key points was that we should look at our statistics in terms of percentages rather than just the raw numbers.

So now, instead of lamenting that I've only made $13 in AdSense earnings, I look at it as a 400% increase! The same goes for most of my other stats - views are up by more than 280%, number of followers is up over 150% and Amazon clicks have risen more than 500%. Now those are statistics I can feel proud of, especially since I've only added 7 more hubs!

As during my first month on HubPages, most of my traffic comes in from search pages, with Google leading the pack by 10 to 1 over second-place Yahoo. Again I find myself amazed at the weird search engine phrases that eventually lead people to my content. here a few of my favorite examples from the last month:

• bottom mount vs top mount fridges
• build your own mining equipment
• can i give my cat turmeric
• giveaway unwanted clothes in delhi
• glasses that see through clothes
• reupholster a stool with springs

I have nothing on HubPages that even remotely addresses any of these queries, and yet still they find me - just goes to show that you never know what you're going to get on the Internets...

My hub on Choosing the Best Non-Stick Cookware was apparently featured on slickdeals.net - I received several hundred visits to that hub in one day! You can see the spike in visitors in the image below.

My hub on Endangered Species also received a mysterious jump in hits from the Philippines one week, and I never managed to figure out why...

I also implemented a new backlinking strategy. It's one that I had previously dismissed, but which has shown a little bit of promise so I'll share it here. I had read quite a few articles that suggested leaving comments with links to my hubs on forums and comment sections of other peoples' web sites. This always struck me as a little bit spammy - I know I don't like it when people leave links to their un-related web sites in my hub comments, so the idea of doing that just didn't sit right with me. But then I realized that this might be a missed opportunity, so I gave it a (non-spammy) shot!

I try to use relevant images on all of my hubs, and most of the images I use that aren't my own original work come from Flickr. I only use images that are licensed for commercial use under Creative Commons, and I noticed that there is a comment section on each user's Flickr page. I started leaving comments with links back to my hubs, letting each photographer know that I had used his image. This generated a little bit of traffic. Like most comment forums, the links inserted are "noFollow", but traffic is traffic!

One of my favorite web sites is IMDB.com, and one of my favorite elements of their site is the list of links at the bottom of the homepage that lead to funny or interesting pages from all over the Internet. These links are often suggested by users, so I figured I'd recommend my own hub! I had written a hub about the most controversial films of the last ten years, so I added a link to that hub in the IMDB suggestion forum and got a trickle of traffic from them. And if the hub had actually been chosen by the editors to be featured, I could have gotten a massive bump in traffic from that one site. So, in the future I'll be looking more closely at the web sites I enjoy visiting, and if I can post a relevant link there I will not hesitate!

Before I joined HubPages, I had signed up for Google AdSense and Analytics for another (failed) web venture. Since I already had the accounts, I was able to use those services right away, which I thought was great. I have a gmail account that I used for my Analytics, but when it comes to AdSense, Google does not allow you use to use a gmail account to access it. The email address I had used to sign up for AdSense several years ago was a free one that I no longer use - in fact it had expired, and I had to sign up for the same name all over again in order to receive activation data from Google. Lucky for me it was still available!

All of that was a major drag, but I finally got it working. After a month of gathering Google website Analytics statistics, I read an article online about linking my AdSense and Analytics accounts so that I could view AdSense earnings from within the Analytics interface. This sounded much easier than using the URL channels I had been working with on AdSense!

I followed the directions to link the accounts, but could not get it to work. Perplexed, I let it go for a few weeks before digging a little deeper. Just last week I finally found the problem - turns out that the AdSense account has to be tied to the Primary Analytics Profile. When I started on HubPages, I created a new Profile for tracking stats from HubPages. That means that all those stats were reported to a profile that wouldn't work with AdSense and HubPages! I had to reconfigure Analytics and start all over with gathering statistics from HubPages - not a tragedy, but certainly not the ideal situation!

So that's it for this month - if things improve enough to warrant it, I'll try and create hubs to track my progress over the coming months.

Happy Hubbing!