Hubpages 12 months on and my first 50 bucks - tips for boosting revenues

So....one year has gone by and it's time to look back. I'm very excited to share my experience, as I know that folks are eager to hear testimonials when they first set out. At first I was unsure about whether I would ever make any money at all, things seem to be taking off now. Since I now know some promotional methods I feel less pressured to produce quantity. Now I can truly write what I feel inspired to write knowing that those who are interested will read it.

The graph above shows my year from last August, 2011, to August of this year, 2012. The blue bars represent the number of hubs written in each month and the red line is the number of dollars made each month.

Well, initially I was very enthusiastic and wrote quite a number of hubs in the first two months. In August and September of 2011 I wrote 37 hubs !! This number is 80 per cent of the total number of hubs I've written!! However, my initial revenue was very small, because very few people were viewing them. There was a small peak in Sept when an early hub on dog photography made hub of the day, but that only resulted in $1.50 for the whole of that month...

From October 2011 to March 2012, after the honeymoon period was over, I didn't write any hubs at all. My revenues reflected that initially although they did start to creep up in January.

A leap in revenue seems to coincide with four hubs that I wrote in April and continues to rise with a couple of hubs that I wrote in May. However, as I'll explain below, this was not actually due to an increase in the quality of my hubs.

The biggest increases in revenue were in July and August, totals of $9.65 and $14.48 respectively. Again I did not write especially popular hubs. Today, Sept 7 2012, I reached $50.05 in total (data not shown).

In January of this year I was laid off from my day-job and decided to play around a little (don't worry I didn't expected to replace my pay-cheque using Hubpages!).

As you can see my earnings started to slowly rise.

So what caused this? Well, as I already had a lot of material posted I started to promote it. Now this is not spamming people! I just put it out there in case it was information other people were interested in.

First I started with my facebook wall and posted some relevant articles on there. They started to generate a little bit of interest.

Then I shared some pages on Stumbleupon.

And finally, as Pintrest started to take-off, I used some of my best photographs (which I take myself) to promote hubs on there. If folks find the info interesting then they'll post the links to their own boards and so the sharing goes on. This can result in exponential interest in the pages, which will increase your revenue.

More recently I've shared some of the pages that are relevant to my own business via twitter and my company facebook page, with references in my newsletter. This serves to provide useful info for people that is related to my services. It also saves me writing time by using the material that has already been written and formatted (great for the summer months!).

I've also joined some facebook pages where hints and tips are shared and put my links on there, where they are best appreciated. The great advantage of this is that you get to read all the other interesting posts from people with tips to share.

The most popular hub by far is about getting rid of pantry moths! It was written in September 2011.

Not a very exciting hub you might think, but when you're overrun with these things it can be really helpful. Maybe it just goes to show what a problem this is for everyone. The hub doesn't even have an exciting cover picture just a rather blurred picture of a moth that I took from a distance on one of our kitchen doors.

Just to give you an indication of how popular this is, these are the current stats:

Overall views: 2930 (almost one third of the total no. of views for my hubs)

Last 30 days: 1301

Last 7 days: 361

Today: 44

So, this just proves that if you have an issue that you've needed to solve that was really driving you crazy, it will probably make a popular hub regardless of how pretty it is!!

With the new formatting tools recipes are fun to write and to share.

I've written a couple in the past few weeks and had a great time taking pics and trying to make the instructions easy to follow. These are especially great for sharing on pintrest.

Apart from the possibility of making a few cents on these it's also useful to bookmark these for yourself for future reference - like a digital recipe book :-)

Some hubs are of seasonal interest so you can recycle them at the appropriate time of year.

I have one to do with Easter and one for Cherry blossoms that fit this criteria. They have peaks in interest at certain times and you can re-share them on facebook or twitter in case someone missed out the last time.

Apart from time of year there is also the time of day to be considered when you tweet or post on your wall. Folks are inundated with information these days so try and catch them at a time when they're sitting down to relax and read emails and your link may pop up just at the right moment :-)

The hubs I like to write most are the special interest ones. The research is fun for me and I like to put them together in a sensible way. However, these ones don't tend to get as many hits...

Still, I think many of you would agree that we do this more for love than for money :-D

My special interests are mental health and wellness.

I hope you've enjoyed reading my experiences.

If you're new to Hubpages I hope this inspires you to write, and if you're an established Hubber I hope you'll share some more tips in the comments section to boost us all along !

"Happy Hubbing" and I'll check in again same time next year :-)