Referral Trackers & The HubPages Referral Program

Here at HubPages, we’re all about sharing the love, so beyond earnings from your share of ad impressions on your Hubs, we offer the HubPages Referral Program. Through this program, you can refer new writers to HubPages and if they become Hubbers within 30 days, you receive 10% of their Hubs’ lifetime impressions.

The 10% isn’t being taken from the new Hubber, but rather from us, meaning that the Hubber you refer will still get 60% of impressions, but that we will only take 30% and you’ll get the remaining 10%!

In addition to earning rewards by introducing new people to HubPages, you can receive a percentage of the total impressions just by sending visitors to Hubs - no Hubbing necessary. If the Hubber who wrote the Hub was referred to HubPages by someone else, you’ll get 9% of the total impressions. If nobody referred this Hubber, however, you get 12%.

Whatever is left from the splits above goes to HubPages. Note that these splits apply only to Hubs.

So how does HubPages know that you referred new users and visitors? It’s quite simple, really. Referrals are recorded via the use of referral trackers. Referral trackers are just little codes or words which are inserted into URLs for tracking purposes. Every Hubber is given a unique Referral Tracker when he or she makes an account.

To find and use your Referral Tracker:

1. Visit My Account > Earnings > Referral Trackers. You will see your Referral Tracker code in the top left hand corner of the table.
2. Create a referral link by inserting the Referral Tracker in any HubPages URL. After hubpages.com, simply insert a slash, an underscore, and your unique Referral Tracker (leave the rest of the link untouched).

For example, say your default Referral Tracker is 1dukongemb7x8 and you want to give a friend a link to the HubPages signup page (http://hubpages.com/user/new/), then the specially-encoded link you'll want to send is:

http://hubpages.com/_1dukongemb7x8/user/new/

You can also find links with the Referral Tracker already inserted by...

• Clicking the "link to this page" link in the footer of any page on HubPages.
• Clicking on the “share” button at the bottom of any Hub and and selecting the “link to this page” option, then copying the URL from there.

You do not have to use your default Referral Tracker exclusively; HubPages allows you to create your own custom ones as well. You may want to create multiple trackers so that you can monitor and evaluate different types of referrals you make in terms of effectiveness. For example, you may wish to use one tracker for all the links you share with specific groups of friends and family, and another for links shared via your email signatures.

1. Return to the Referral Trackers section of your My Account section, and click the “create a new tracker” button.
2. Type in a 3 to 16 character tracking token (keeping in mind that it can consist of only letters and numbers) and add a description (For example, if this is for links you’ll share on your blog, you might want to describe it as “Blog”).
3. When you are finished entering this information, click “Create New Tracker.”
4. Once the new tracking token has been created, you need only insert it into any HubPages URL you’re sharing to start using it (refer to the instructions above).
5. To track the effectiveness of your link sharing, return to your Referral Trackers page from time to time to monitor the number of traffic views, signups, and traffic to Hubs for which you’re responsible. These numbers will accumulate as people who click on your trackers view the Hubs you’re sharing and/or decide to become Hubbers themselves.

As you can see, the HubPages Referral Program is a great way to share HubPages with others and get something back yourself! As you share links with Referral Trackers, keep in mind that these are designed for bringing people to the site, not redirecting people who are already on the site. For this reason, you cannot share links with trackers in the Forums or in the Answers section of the site, and in the future, we may not honor trackers embedded in Hubs and Profiles either.

Surely you already knew that sharing HubPages with your friends and family would be fun, but now you know it can be lucrative too!