My First Year at Hubpages: What I've Learned

There are tons of people who are online claiming to earn $27,448.21 each month just by their online activities. Some of these people have an account at a revenue sharing site like HubPages or Squidoo and claim to make a couple thousand of dollars on a monthly basis. I am much more likely to believe those who are claiming $2,000 per month than those who claim to make $27,448.21 per month, although I know that there have to be a few people making that much with their online activity.

When I was getting ready to start grad school full-time, I began looking for ways to make money online. I came across an article on Darren Rowse's Problogger site that claimed he was a six-figure blogger and earned over $100,000 in a 12-month period. I don't know if this was in US dollars or Aussie dollars, but it still seemed like a pretty good deal.

I promptly signed up for a blogger account and started to blog about my random musings on just about any random thoughts that I happened to have. Just about a week into my new blog, which is no longer live, I got an ad click and found that I now had $0.59 in my AdSense account. I thought, hey, this online earning thing isn't so hard after all.

Over the first few months, a few friends would look up the blog when I posted a link on Facebook, but traffic was about 2 visitors per day, and, according to Google Analytics, 1.5 of those were from me. I got a little more wise and my second blog was on more of a limited niche subject. I now get about 10-15 visitors a day from Google on that one. I've also joined the ranks of the two-figure bloggers. That was in May. Now, I'm safely in the ranks of the three-figure bloggers. It's taken about 2.5 years to get there, but the earnings growth to this point has been exponential.

I began my journey much like most other people. I was looking for online earning options. I like to write, and I have quite a reviews and essays from my academic work. When I googled "make money online" I came upon HubPages. I must confess that at first I was a bit skeptical, so the next google search was for "HubPages scam." The pages I looked at did not seem terribly relevant, so I took the plunge.

I signed up for HubPages on December 6, 2011. My first Hub was titled "Perry Miller's View of Puritans in the Errand into the Wilderness". To date, this first hub has a total of 280 page views. That's less than one view per day. It would take over two months and 10 more hubs to publish one that exceeded this first hub in terms of page views. Nearly four months into my journey, I published what has been to this point my most viewed hub, "Who Was the Worst President in American History". This hub is approaching the modest number of 3,000 page views in just over eight months.

In the year that I've been on HubPages, I've found that most of the people on here are pretty nice folk. In my early days, I surfed around various discussions and occasionally posted. I don't do that much anymore, but I do still read a few that interest me.

I've also learned that it takes time to build up an audience. I don't have 5,322 followers, but I am up to nearly 100. I've published a total of 81 active hubs in a year, and am just approaching 18,000 views. This is nowhere near the number of many of the most successful hubbers, but it is a number that is growing over time.

Another thing that I've learned on HubPages is that making money takes time. I did not sign up for the ad program at first and tried to rely on AdSense earnings. To date, my hubs have earned just over $4. Yup, $4 with no zeros to the left of the decimal. I stumbled upon the idea of the HubPages ad program sometime around February (don't ask how I missed it), and signed up.

My first day on the HubPages ad program (February 28) earned a whopping $0.01. That's a whopping one cent. My first month, I earned about $0.05 per day on the program. I'm now regularly a two-figure earner on a monthly basis and have earned enough for an actual payout. I know for sure from experience that this is a paying gig now. While this is not a huge sum, it is largely a residual income that I can earn without much additional work. Of course, the 100 or so page views I get on a daily basis could drop precipitously, but theoretically, these views could still be showing up in 10 years if the topic is sufficiently evergreen.

Even though I've seen many people on here set high goals, I'm probably not going to get into big goals. I would like to see my online earnings grow on a month-by-month and year-by-year basis. In my first year of online work, I earned a total of just under $2. My second year saw this income nearly quadruple to just under $8. I won't divulge my current income, but it is safely in the three figure category.

I would like to see my HubPages income at least double over the course of the next year. This is possible as some of my more popular hubs age and start to get more traffic. Regularly publishing a few new hubs is also beneficial, because these will start to age and gain traffic. I am also looking to expand my online earning opportunities. It would be pretty cool to reach the levels of Darren Rowse and others who can support themselves without leaving home.