I Got Paid From The HubPages Ad Program!: My Story Plus How To Increase Your Earnings

Yippee! I finally got paid from the HP Ad Program and what a journey it has been to get to this point. In this hub, I will detail my journey to getting paid and how you can increase your earnings too. I am still not an expert (I was only here for 7 months) but I have still gathered enough information to increase the traffic and earnings I get each day. How do I do it? Read on.

First of all, I am sure that you are wondering how much I actually received. According to the HubPages TOS, I cannot say how much I have earned but it was well over the payout threshold of $50.

Bonus: I also received a payment of $16 from the Amazon Affliates Program. I'm thrilled to bits!

• I have written 47 hubs, so far.
• I have been here on HubPages writing for approximately seven months.
• So, I have written about two hubs per week. Each hub has about 800 to 1200 words.
• I have about 127 followers.
• During my first few months, my earnings ranged from pennies to a few dollars. Nonetheless, I kept writing because I knew I would begin to earn a lot more the longer I was here and the more hubs I had.
• I have three Editor's Choice hubs but I opted out because the EC status was causing my traffic to drop on one of my best performing hubs.

So, how did I do it? Well if you want to be paid over $50, you will have to work hard let me tell you. Basically I wrote 2 articles a week (each with an average of 1000 words; most are stellar hubs) and made sure I was ranking for the correct keywords. I have spent at least four hours each week on HubPages whether its writing hubs, adding/editing older hubs, reading and commenting on other hubs or just taking a break in the forums. Ever since I began, I thought it would take me at least a year to get paid and that one year would take forever. I cannot believe that I have spent a full seven months here on HP. The time has flown and the community have been very supportive. Thanks everyone!

Getting paid isn't really rocket science but it takes a lot of work and writing to get to that point. Here is just a four step guide to what you should do, on your pathway to reaching that payout threshold. This will in no way a guarantee to get you lots of traffic but it is a plan that should help you if you are stuck.

1. Write at least two hubs a week. You should start getting search traffic about two weeks after you write your hub. These hubs should be high-quality. The higher quality they are, the higher you will rank in Google.
2. Do keyword research and optimise your hubs in the best way that you can.
3. Share your hubs on social media, Pinterest and other websites. If you have a blog, link to it that way or do some guest blogging.

I will now cover these steps in more detail.

There are countless SEO tools on the web that will help you in all your SEO investigations.

1. If you want to know your PageRank, try this tool.
2. If you want to see if you are going overboard with a certain keyword, you can check your keyword density with this tool and to see what keywords the search engines rank your content on. Your keyword density should go no more than 3 to 4%.
3. For 100 other tools such as if your site had been affected by Google Panda etc, check out Moz's 100 SEO tools list. Most of the tools are free but some aren't.

You don't have to write two hubs, you can write one or three plus. As long as you write great quality hubs, the number doesn't matter. Remember, quality overpowers quantity.

I am not on any social media sites so I get a lot less traffic as a result. I depend on search traffic entirely so I need to have SEO friendly hubs. I don't do much backlinking because I prefer to write a hub in that time. The only SEO I implement in my hubs is keyword research. The best way to do it is through using the Google Adwords Keyword Tool. In short:

• Pick a niche that you know a lot of information about. It could be cooking, health or DIY. Whatever your niche is, type that into the Google Adwords Keyword Tool and you should generate a huge number of subcategories of keywords.
• Pick a keyword that has a fairly good CPC, not a keyword with a CPC of $0.01. Also look for keywords with a lot of traffic. This could be anything from the hundreds to the thousands. If that keyword has less than 10 searches per month and no CPC at all; it is pretty much a useless keyword.
• Once you have some keywords that you might want to write about, type them into Google and search them. If there are a lot of strong websites ranking for that keyword then it will take you a bit longer to rank for them, you may never get to the first page. This is known as high competition and you generally need to avoid this, unless you are great at link-building and you have a high PageRank in your subdomain. The hubpages.com domain has a PageRank of 7 (out of a possible 10) so it will be easier for you to rank with a HP article rather than a post from your new blog or website.
• If you don't know how strong a website is, check its PageRank using this free tool. You simply paste the URL into the box, do the reCaptcha code and you are presented with its PR. For example if there was a website with a PR of 5 or above, it is going to be really hard to rank higher than that website; unless you have an amazingly written hub with a lot of links pointing to it!
• Use the keywords that you think are profitable in the title, summary and first paragraph of your hub but don't overdo it! Overusing keywords can get you in trouble with Google and isn't a quick solution to getting more traffic.

To gain some quick traffic, share your hubs on Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus. Don't spam your followers just a nice useful hub now and again can attract you hundreds if not thousands of views.

Pinterest is another great place to share some of your hubs. If you have a popular fanbase there and you pin some of your hubs to your board, you can generate thousands of views.

Wrylilt, a very successful Hubber here has fantastic success with Pinterest and she has said that at least three ofher hubs go viral on Pinterest each week. I'm no expert on Pinterest so for a great article on crafting Pinterest-freidly hubs and how to attract traffic from there check out this hub.

I would like to say a huge thank you to all the HP community including my followers. Without your support it would not have been possible. It really is a delight and it makes my day when I get a nice comment on one of my hubs or a new follower.

If you have yet to get paid and you are lacking motivation, keep writing!! You will get there eventually. I thought that I should give up a few months ago but today I am super glad that I didn't. It isn't impossible to get paid so keep writing! I hope that this hub has inspired you to keep writing and keep going, you are all doing a fantastic job!

Please let me know on your thoughts, comments and suggestions below; I'd love to hear from you!