Making Money on Hubpages, My Story: The First £10 AdSense Revenue

£10 isn't much, but everything starts out small. I hope what I've learned along the way can help new Hubbers avoid the mistakes I made!

To those aspiring to make money on Hubpages, it IS possible! There are many stories on here of regular people making a sizeable (say, $1000/month) contribution to their income. These pages also contain plethoras of very useful information.

So far I have made my money from AdSense alone, and am yet to make a sale through the Amazon affiliate program. I have been focusing on making hubs which generate a lot of traffic, with very low conversion rate, opposed to lower traffic and higher conversion rate. Why? For starters, the hubs I've made have been in my opinion much more useful than a sales oriented Hub would be.

Going from getting 0 - 5p each day with my first few hubs, I am approaching 50p per day consistently with my new series of Hubs. On a good day, that's a 10 fold increase. My goal is ambitious, but I'm certain I will get there, and determination is your best friend: £10 / day. "Fire and forget income."

Some tips for those starting out. I know I'm no expert by any means, but hopefully I can help new hubbers avoid the pitfalls I had!

1. Don't be lazy. The number one reason I only had a handful of hubs in my first 3 months here was laziness! Throw away the "I'll do it tomorrow" attitude: Treat it like a job, give it an hour each day. Whether that hour is spent thinking of ideas, drafting, and producing a couple of hubs, or if you get nothing out it, just give that hour each day, or even 30mins, perhaps only 15mins, you'll eventually get in the mindset for hub success.
2. Reviews are bad... usually. You can spend a long time writing a review for a very popular product and have your hub receive next to no views. Why? What you're doing is simply adding to an already saturated area. Unless you promote your hub extremely well through other mediums you will seldom get views. It is very hard to reach Google page one for, say, a game review. I found this out the hard way, my Unbiased Dragon Age Origins Review only receives, if I'm lucky, two views per day! If you're going to review a product, have it be one where the competition is not so fierce. Nichewatch and the Google AdWords Tool can help you determine if something is worth reviewing.
3. Short, concise hubs = Good hubs. I was getting lowly traffic to my hubs, and was losing hope. One hub turned this around. My Dragon Age Origins Gift Guide hub initially was another disappointment, however after some promotion it reached Google page one and the hits came flooding in. Since then I've released three more game guides, focusing on a small aspect of each game, and all have been somewhat successful. My Mass Effect 2 Planets with Anomalies Guide has even surpassed my Dragon Age Origins guide, but hasn't yet peaked as high as the former.
4. If you're stuck for ideas, Branch off! I wrote Dragon Age Origins Cutscene Gift Guide after the success of my first gift guide. It receives around 10% of the views. Not much, but still out performing all other hubs I had written before.
5. As you've seen me mention above, promotion is key. The best hub is nothing if no one is reading it! Post your hubs to Digg.com and Shetoldme.com, perhaps even your Facebook or Twitter if you've friends you'd know would appreciate it! If you frequent a forum relevant to the subject, post it there too. But the key is: Don't spam. Posting your hub to every conceivable place may get you some views, but you'll also likely be cautioned or banned from otherwise useful places.
6. Keep going! It may be daunting at first, and if you're not seeing any results from it like I was, you might be tempted to give up. Don't! One Chinese proverb which keeps me going, is that success is most likely just as you are reaching the point of giving up. Once you've started seeing results, don't get complacent: Chase the money and keep producing useful hubs to grow your income. Be aware that some hubs will dwindle as the subjects become less popular, so you'll need new ones to replace those. You want to be increasing your views, not just keeping them stable. If you can't think of a new hub idea, try thinking of new ways to promote your current hubs. Add new keywords, optimize the language used, post them to your friends: Word of mouth is powerful, so if you've got a good hub, it'll spread this way too!

Making money on Hubpages with AdSense is not impossible. It requires focus and a will to get the results you want. It requires a lot of work, but once you start seeing what you want from it, things get easier and the money keeps coming without you having to do much. I hope this Hub has helped inspire, and give tips on what works and what doesn't. If you've gotten something to work that I've had zero luck with: Power to you! Feel free to leave comments and help me along my journey as well, or just to share some of your experiences. Anything is much appreciated. Next stop: £100.