My Experiments with HubPages

Experimentation: A test under controlled conditions that is made to demonstrate a known truth, examine the validity of a hypothesis, or determine the efficacy of something previously untried.

I have been a part of HubPages for 2 months now (as of 26 May 2009) and it has been one hell of an experience. It is a shame I cannot recollect how I found HubPages, but I am happy none the less. I haven't made a dime out of HubPages yet, so if you think this is another one of those "How-To-Become-A-Millionaire-Though-HubPages", please browse to something else from the nicely aggregated group of articles on the right bar. These are little things that I am trying to find out how I can become more successful Hubber and if my decision to write in HubPages is justified (Why not choose the other writing platforms out there???). For some it might be a waste-of-time reasearch, but gives me a lot of insight into so many things.

If you are pissed off and thinking what a waste of time it is, (may be it is, since you might know all this already) and saying get to the point. Here it is, I am a very ANALYTICAL person - I love to look at statistics and ponder on them for ever. In this article I point out some of the most interesting things I noticed here at the HubPages. Read on to know more.Here is what I did,

Objective: To prove it is better to publish stuff in HubPages rather than your own blog, if you are a newbie and do not have a proven track record as a smash-hit blogger or are the official writer on Britney Spears official website.

What did I do: Several hubbers have spoken about writting on topics that are red-hot right now that generate huge traffic volumes in Google. Like for example the American Idol winner (this was 2 days after the 2009 finale) or Farrah Fawcett (who had her video journal about cancer suffering published last week).

Tip: If you are asking how to find these topics, try Google Insights. If you select United States from the drop down and say last 7 days in another drop down, but leave the search field empty and hit Enter. The search results give you a list of all red-hot keywords searched on Google in the last 7 days.

Beware: These are topics that have a huge search volume for a short duration of time only(a week, few days, or couple of weeks)

I published the article on a hot topic, on my web-site. The topic was on Olivia Wilde, Remy Hadley - the chick from House TV Series (called 13 by House). She was a hot topic in Google since she was #1 on Maxim Hot 100 for 2009 a couple of weeks ago.
Here are the results,

The images above from Google Analytics show I had an awesome 2 hits. One was when I viewed the page from my office and another was when I went home and showed it to my wife. Google did not even find it (May be it listed it as the 3,700,000 out of 3,720,000 pages listed).I can guarantee you if I had uploaded it to HubPages I would have gotten more hits and may be Google would have listed it some where higher on the ranking list. That is primarily because my website has a page rank of 0 and HubPages has a page rank of 6.

Conclusion: Ladies and Gentlemen, we have a winner by KO - HUBPAGES

There are a few cribing about HubPages eating away 40% of your AdSense revenue. For newbies, it is a far less price to pay for the amount of exposure (traffic) you get. HubPages is (one of) Google's secret mistress and is indexed quiet frequently. Some of them in the forums claim their hubs/forum threads were indexed by Google in as less as 45 minutes! Try doing that with your blog/website.

Objective: To prove content is king, and good content always brings in good traffic.

What did I do: I took the advice of Maddie Ruud's and selected a topic on the 3 questions she asked me to answer before choosing a topic,

1. Is it interesting to me?
2. Is it interesting to people who don't know me?

3. Will it continue to be interesting for a long time to come?

and wrote about Gestational Diabetes and Indian diet. My wife had Gestational Diabetes and she struggled a lot being a vegetarian. We had hands on experience of how we delt with this problem. A little research on Google convinced me to write an article. I added a lot of informational text, images and videos from youtube as Mark Knowles had suggested. I did a little bit of promotion on forums and sites like Digg.

On the other hand I wrote some Hubs that were done not with a lot of research, little bit of text and a lot of images I took.

The results are here to see,

Conclusion: Content is King, be it HubPages or anywhere on the internet.

Experiment 3

Objective: To prove HubPages is one of the best, if not the best writing platforms.

What did I do: I researched several aspects, like traffic, features, community and financial benefits after I came to HubPages. I saw several other web sites like Triod, Helium, and those Ezine-thingy. Here are the results of my research,

TRAFFIC - From Alexa.com I found out HubPages is just behind EzineArticles in traffic and it is growing steadily against other writing platforms. Also see the traffic ranks of HubPages in India, US, Bangladesh, Europe, ... seems people are growing fond of HubPages in these regions. A 100% traffic spike in a year is impressive for any website and this might just be the beginning of the surge of popularity for HubPages.

FEATURES - This is some thing where HubPages beats Mr.Eziney in round one. The feature set here is amazing and how easy it is to use them is even more amazing. Another annoying thing is Eziney's Team take 7 days to approve an article, and every time you make a change (even correct a typo), you have to resubmit it and they will take another 7 days to re-approve it. I still use Mr.Eziney to drive traffic to my Hubs (Ya I am a hypocrite).

COMMUNITY - I cannot tell this enough, the community is amazing. Senior Hubbies are eager to help (so much I am starting to think they are having a evil plan to destroy earth) and give you invaluable advice that you can use else where on your own blog or website (if you still have plans to have one).

Another writing platform is Squidoo. It is also matches HubPages in features and even has a page rank (7) more than HubPages and Mr.Eziney. But there is some thing about it off late that has a lot of Squidoo users leaving or the interest for new users waning (See data above). The monthly change in April 09 alone is more than 20%, while our HubPages has been gaining 1.26 % monthly and an awesome 139% last year.

FINANCIAL BENEFIT - You might be writing just out of a "passion-for-writing" (I am Laughing-Out-Loud) but hey as you write more you might earn some money (for the mere materialistic mortals).

Conclusion: HubPages have relatively lesser traffic considering Mr.Ezine, but you have a motivation to write more since there is a financial benefit in HubPages.

Summary

If you are new to writing on the Internet and are hoping you would make some money (as a side income) from it, HubPages is a great way to start. The community will help you out launch your writing career/hobby which ever way you see it.

If you haven't joined yet, what are you waiting for? Sign up its free!

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