My First Month at Hubpages

I'm a couple of days short of my first month, but I'll be going away and will not have access to the internet where I'm going so I thought I'd post it early. I'm counting my first month as the first 30 days, since I started with my first hub on June 9th, 2011. In future anniversary hubs I will count June as a full month and use the calendar to mark anniversaries. So a month number two update would come at the end of July.

I read an article once that gave an idea as to how one could earn a bit of extra money:

1. Go to Craigslist for your local area
2. Look in the jobs section
3. Pick one or two categories that match any skill sets, abilities or interests you have
4. Check the listings for any job that you can do that would be part time or on evenings, or weekends

So I looked at the jobs section and found a writing/editing section. I went in there and someone had posted a link to hubpages. I don't know who it is and unknowingly I have likely given them some extra traffic due to the referral program. This reminds me that I should put my own ad in craigslist for 'writers wanted!'.

I have been very fortunate in my first thirty days to be nominated not once, but twice as a hubnugget writer. Amazingly enough, my How to Write a Brick hub won the first one. Peak Oil Further Reading was my second nomination and again, thanks to friends I have online, I was able to win it.

I found that my score rose fairly quickly, I'm curious now to see what it will take to get up higher than the low nineties. I believe that my How I Raise my Hubscore hub is what really got me this high in so short a time.

Within these first thirty days I managed to accumulate some accolades:

• Published 10 hubs
• Answered 50 questions
• Level 5 commenter, leaving insightful and engaging comments
• Popular among readers, as measured by feedback to their hubs.
• Starts great discussions in the comments
• Contributes to the community by helping our new users in the Forums, voting and/or flagging inappropriate content for our moderators.

I had read about a past challenge about writing 30 hubs in 30 days, well, I've done that. As I got closer to the end of the month I was hoping to hit 100 followers, but I didn't quite make it with only 78.

In terms of traffic and revenue, I've had 1265 pageviews, 212 HubAd Impressions, $0.78 of HubAd revenue, 272 Adsense views and 2 clicks giving me $4.09 for a total of $4.87.

I'd say on average I spend between 10 and 25 minutes writing a hub. Then another 10 minutes rereading my hub three times before I publish it. In addition to that I spend between an hour and two hours daily reading all of the hubs from all of the hubbers that I follow. If I have time after that, I then look at the latest hubs, and the latest questions and respond to those. I think this method of casting out a net to build hubber relationships is working out.

My work of copy/editing hubs does add a bit of time to my hub visits, and I don't always do it, but I have received feedback from a few hubbers that they really appreciate it. The one thing I wish more people would do, that I keep doing, is to visit more than one hub of a hubber once you've read one of their hubs. I describe how and why I do this in my Helping Hubbers Earn hub.

Overall I'm pleased with the hubpages experience thus far.