My HubPages Journey - Month two

I have officially been on HubPages for 4 weeks and 1 day. In this four weeks I have learned a LOT. I learned what SEO means (and that I'm not going to bother with it because it makes the Google gods Angry). I also learned HOW to write at HubPags and How to Make Money doing it

The grand sum that I have earned so far... $3.19. But my earnings are growing with my page views. I have ALMOST gotten a 1000 page views (as of this very moment, I am at 939) and I have exceeded 100 page views in a single day. I have 2 HubPages accolades (level 1 commenter and 10 published hubs) and 8 followers.

I have 30 hubs in HubPages but only have 20 published (the rest are still being tinkered with). My hubs have 23 comments. My individual HubScore is 87 and each of my hubs has a different score. The highest rated Hub is at an 86, and my lowest score for a Hub (this one because it's unpublished) is a 52.

I think that about sums it up for the first month. Whew! It sounds like a lot, but it all happened gradually and easily. I find that I really enjoy HubPages. It's easy to use, navigate, etc and I don't feel the rules are overbearing. I look forward to writing much, much more for HubPages, and I will continue to share what I've learned.

By tomorrow I should have reached 1000 page views! I'm excited about this. I have several hubs generating a very good amount of traffic, and several generating very little traffic. I'm hoping that as I build up more in each niche that I get more traffic on some of those little travelled hubs. I have a vision, but I have a lot of time and work to do before my vision can be carried out. I will be an absolute star hubber by the time I am done, hitch your wagon to my star now and watch me soar... follow me!

Google - I've been reading a lot about Google and their Pandas and Penguins and Spiders (oh my!) and I have a fear of what they can do to me. My research on the Google gods and what makes them angry led me to believe they want to damage webmasters who use SEOs (why? I dunno, what web content do they WANT on their front page?). And people who over-optimize wind up in some sort of Sandbox which equals Google Hell. So I have decided that it's best not to optimize, I will simply write what I write and hope It's slightly better than the other rubbish in my niche.

I did one google search for my article using a related (but not exact) search term and found myself heading up the second page. Good enough for me! I noticed that the majority of my traffic seems to come from Google, Yahoo and Bing (combined) and then HubPages and Pinterest. I'm quite happy with where I am one month into the game. I hope my happiness continues.

So that's where I am the first day of my 5th week here at HubPages. I will continue to update here, at least weekly, during month two. Follow along and see how well I do financially, and generally here at hub pages, if you like!

• Earn $.25 (Achieved 8/10/2012)
• Earn $.25 three days in a row (Achieved 8/19/2012)
• Have 1000 views (Achieved 8/25/2012)
• Earn $.50 three days in a row (Achieved 9/25/12)
• Have 2000 views (9/7/12)
• Earn $.75 three days in a row (Achieved 9/26/12)
• Earn $1.00 three days in a row
• Have 5000 views.

On 8/25/2012 I achieved 1000 views! Less than 1 month in! I'm pleased with the results I am getting. Today I have 1253, so I am well on my way to my next goal of 2000 views! I am averaging 75-100 views a day. Can't help but be excited about it all. I will update in a couple days for my weekly update, so I don't want to give up too much info right now.

I didn't get my usual weekly update done yesterday, but I'll get it in today!

On my 5th week at HubPages I did pretty well! I made $2.62, which IS slightly better than last week, but not the kind of jump that I've had in previous weeks. Although I haven't been writing as much, so that's to be expected. I have 24 hubs now, I have a hubber score of 89! Of my published hubs (still have a ton unpublished) my highest scored hub is a 87 and lowest (a poem) a 64. I've now had 1464 page views. I am really moving right along!

Here's my big news though.... I was nominated for a HubNugget!!!

Isn't that amazing!! It's for my hub on 5 Annoying Facebook friends, and although it's not my best writing, I did really enjoy writing it and I'm amazed and honored that it was nominated to be a HubNugget! I wish I had the time to really take advantage of all the traffic that I will be getting from this nomination, but I don't. A super busy day today! In fact, my husband is annoyed I'm taking the time to update this hub. But some things are simply important! And this is just one of those things!

I don't check my amazon account often (why would I, I hadn't made any money with it yet) but I went to check it last night and found that THREE sales were made in my affiliate account. So awesome! None of them were yet shipped, so I didn't know exactly how much I was going to earn from these sales.

I checked my account today, and two of the three purchased items were shipped resulting in a commission for me of $1.76! Sweeeeet! Next thing you know, I'll start earning on AdSense, then there will be no stopping me!

My hub that was nominated to be a HubNugget WON! I got 28% of the vote, second place was 25%. I am absolutely thrilled!! I have a little HubNugget sticker on my profile now and my Hub will be featured in HubPages weekly newsletter that goes out to tens of thousands of hubbers. I read that this can really help with getting traffic and followers and that would be awesome!

Another Amazon sale was made and with three sales I have made more money with Amazon than with HP Ad Program, so amazingly, money earned has doubled over the weekend. lol Can't wait to fill in those numbers in my chart. Just keep that in mind, dear readers, it's from ALL sources, not just the HP AdProgram, although until this last weekend, that's where the majority of it came from

My readership went WAY down though from Thursday -Tuesday. I think at one point my views was at like 36 for the day, a number I haven't seen since first starting out. Today is a more acceptable 79 views. Then again, one of my hubs has had 36 views on it's own. That one is listed on page 1 of google doing a search using a likely search term (which does not match my title, but does match a subtitle) and is #8 on listed on page 1, and from a search perspective it's one of the most visually appealing titles on google page one.

Anyway, so I have one hub that's taking off like crazy, evidently saving me from the dismal numbers I deserve.

Regardless, I won a HubNugget and nothing is going to get me down tonight! I'm still going to tell you to follow me, because I think I'll be very successful here on HubPages someday. You can say you were there from the beginning and impress your friends and neighbors. ;)

So this las week was a big one for me! I was nominated and then won a HubNugget Award, I had my first amazon sale, I'm now a few cents a day with adsense. It's been quite the week!

The amazon earnings are actually up over $6.00 now. I had three items ship and three more items pending shipment (so more amazon earnings coming!) This is so awesome!

My actual Hub Pages earning program earnings was down this week. A lot of that is that over the holiday weekend I had a marked drop in traffic. So it as really like four days with very low traffic. Yesterday was a traffic record breaking day for me. I had 175 views. That's the best I've managed so far! A TON of that was from being featured on the HubPages newsletter though. I imagine that will drop off in a day.

Anyway, things are going awesome! I should hit 2000 views today! HubPages has far exceeded my expectations!

Well, I did hit 2000 views on 9/7/12 just like I said I would. I actually have 2313 views as of this very moment. Hoping to hit 5000 by October 15. My goal to get 50 cents three days in a row before September 24 is going to prove difficult. MY viewers are going up,but my CPM seems to be going down, so I'm not getting anywhere. I had one day over 60 cents, but most days are stil hovering around that quarter a day. To be fair though, I haven't published much since September 1st, only three hubs.

I did get another Hub Accolade though. I got he Engaging Hubs Accolade! So that's pretty awesome! 6 weeks here and 5 accolades! I'm feeling pretty good about myself!

I don't know how I'm doing in the grand scheme of things. Perhaps other new hubbers blow away my progress, but I feel like progress is being made still, and I am getting lots of encouragement by HubPages and other Hubbers and I can see myself sticking with this long-term!

So after 7 weeks I made my first payout! I made it on Amazon which has a minimum payout of $10.00. From reading everything that I have it seems this is pretty rare for someone only 7 weeks into things. So I guess I should be feeling pretty good. I am struggling with HubPages AdProgram though. My numbers don't make sense. How can I have a cpm one day of $7.51 and the next have it be $1.10, so one day's earnings is $.89 and the next is $.07? I don't understand if I have the same hubs with similar traffic why does this happen?

I'm almost at the two month mark and I'm still going. I'm not putting as many hubs out there, I just don't have the time to write, but I'm going to keep at it, and hope for the best as I go forward.

I know my tone is down from my last update, and I should be more excited, I'm making some money, things are going better for me than your average new hubber, and I've gotten two accolades, but I just am frustrated. I feel like I take two steps forward and one step back. I almost hit 200 views yesterday and today I'm only at 50 views. I'm sure I'll be my usual upbeat self tomorrow. See ya next week!

Because my traffic has been so crazy, I decided to use title tuner to try and generate some more traffic. A couple of small tweaks. My traffic has been so all over the place. My amazon hubs have been my largest source of income, but they only generate 1-10 views a day. I can't help but think that if I can get more people to look at those hubs, they will be an even better money maker for me. I'll let you know if using title tuner has helped my income and traffic.

I've wrapped up Month Two. I haven't had another Amazon sale in quite a while so earnings were way down for week 8. My traffic has been doing pretty good. I'm consistently getting about 150 views a day, mostly google, mostly for one Hub, 50 inspirational volleyball quotes. That one hub gets about 100 views a day all by itself.

I should really be writing more hubs, I have a lot of ideas, I just don't seem to get anywhere on them. Maybe I'll get some more done this week. I'm going to be honest though, I've been more successful on hub pages than I've ever been on any of the many blogs I've started writing or any other online website. I think there really is the ability to make pretty good money online through hubpages with time, work and a little luck if you have the right niche. If I could get three or four more 100 views a day hubs I could probably start making payment every month on hubpages. Unfortunately, my volleyball quotes hub is the only one that's page one right now. But I'm working on it. Perhaps I'll come up with another winner soon!

I'm kind of in that Neverland between the end of week 8 and the beginning of month three by the date on the calendar, so I'm sticking with month two.

Amazingly, what I want to report is that I had 200 views today. And although I didn't make my goal of getting 50 cents a day for three days in a row by Sept 24th (today) with these kinds of numbers I will meet that goal soon!

I have been tinkering witth some keywords and some title changes, don't know if that's what caused the sudden spike in traffic or not, but I'm enjoying it either way!