My Statistics on HubPages - Results of 30 Hubs in 30 Days and 100 Hubs in 30 Days Challenges

Some people have asked me how the HubChallenges, particularly the 100 Hubs in 30 Days, have affected my statistics. They were considering participating in a challenge, and were wondering if they would lose some readers if they wrote new hubs too frequently. They also wanted to know if their efforts would be rewarded by increased revenue.

This hub was written shortly after my second month on HubPages, while I was working on the 100 Hubs in 30 Day Challenge. Below the original hub is an update to show how these hubs did over a longer time span.

30 Hubs in 30 Days Challenge

Being fairly new to HubPages, I am not sure what the normal is, so I will present my information and ask you to tell me if this is what you expected. My traffic and my revenue are pretty similar. As you can tell from the photo below, during the 30 Hubs in 30 Days challenge, my views ranged from 0 and 100 per day. When I took a week off, my views plummeted back to 0. It appeared that my followers were reading the hubs as I wrote them, and the hubs then went dormant.

My Statistics on HubPages Views

As I went into the 100 Hubs in 30 Days Challenge, my views were now on the high end of 100 - 200 range. It has even managed to get into the 200-300 range a few times. I had a hub that was Hub of the Day yesterday that spiked my views, and I hope that with the additional followers, I will maintain my views in the 200-300 range. The Hub of the Day and many of my other hubs are about quilting, which is a pretty specialized niche. There are lots of quilters out there, but I don't think most of them have heard of HubPages. My views fluctuate greatly, going down on the weekends and some other days, and spiking up on other days.

During the 100/30 challenge, I had to write three to four hubs a day. Sometimes I missed the mark, and had to catch up the following day. I personally think that writing this many hubs that fast may be detrimental in getting initial readers. My followers probably do not have time to read more than one of my hubs in a day, if that, so they likely chose which one to read. Some of my hubs did not stay on the homepage under "latest hubs" long enough to get many views. I am hoping that this will be made up over time as they show up under different categories throughout the year.

Most of my readers continue to come from HubPages and the few links I have placed on other sites. I do have some search engine traffic. Until I get more search engines, I think my revenue will continue to be low.

I'm not sure how much I am actually allowed to talk about revenue, so I will keep it vague. In general, I was earning pennies, and later dimes during the first thirty days. Eventually I got to quarters, and now my average over the entire HubPages career is almost 40 cents a day. I didn't start earning any money until October 19 when I finally had all the setup correct. This keeps the really low numbers out of the calculation.

This isn't a lot of money, considering that writing hubs take a lot of time, and 40 cents a day is not very much money for the amount of time I have put into it. However, I have read that I should be thinking about how much each of my hubs make in a year, and right now, I don't think I have a way of telling. I have to wait for my hubs to age and Google to find them worth their while to rank them higher.

Each additional hub is not bringing me a great deal of earnings, but I think that over time, that will change. I haven't had a chance to do a lot of marketing, or researching SEO and keywords and such. Once I do that, I think I will get more of the search engine traffic that I need.

As a basis of comparison, I am noting my current status. My profile shows that this morning, I have 115 hubs written. Only a few more to get to 130 and accomplish 100 Hubs in 30 Days. I don't think the stats will change today, since I think they update once a day and I wanted to make this hub a part of my 100 hubs. My hubber score has been hovering in the mid to high 80s, although I think it got to 90 once. I think this has to do with the fact that I don't post my hubs right away. I have some unpublished hubs and when there are a few of those, they will drive down the average of my hubs score, which I am sure impacts the hubber score.

My accolades show that I have written more than 100 hubs (actual number 114), at least 100 followers (actual number 171), have been read over 1,000 times, have answered at least 100 questions, am a level IV commentator, am popular amongst my readers, start great discussions in the comments, write engaging hubs that visitors read from start to finish, and one of my hubs was Hub of the Day. Yesterday, I had the one about flagging content, but it has disappeared today. I think it will be back today since I hopped some hubs this morning. I need to think of questions to ask to get the Questions accolade.

I have 171 followers, which is really exciting. I received a big surge yesterday with the Hub of the Day.

It takes patience to wait for hubs to properly age and to show their value. It also takes some marketing. After the challenge is over, I will be able to do some marketing, and revise my hubs to make them stronger and easier to find.

While I suppose I could write a few hubs and spend all my time marketing them, I think it is good to have a good number of hubs out there. Now when I go to market them, there will be plenty for me to choose from. This might be more efficient, in an assembly line sort of way. I'm not sure, but we will see how it goes.

As you can see from the updated graph, I wrote many hubs on the last day of the challenge. Traffic initially went down after the Hub of the Day spike, but then it started to increase. It felt like I was finally getting rewarded for all of the articles that I wrote.

Traffic was great in April, and then the Penguin / Panda slap happened, and the traffic nosedived. Even though I wrote fewer hubs after the challenge, the traffic continued to be about 200 visits a day. This is disappointing, since I know many other Hubbers who have more views with fewer hubs. I think that the reason my numbers are lower than others is because I haven't found popular topics that interest me yet.

I am happy to see that even when I am not writing articles, my existing hubs continue to be read.

Quality is more important than quantity.

Many of the hubs I wrote during the last week of the 100/30 hubs were of incredibly low quality. I knew I hadn't spent nearly as much time as I needed to, and although I did go back and edit them, it really wasn't enough to revive them. It is important to keep the quality goals higher on the list instead of rushing to meet the quantity goals. Quality hubs will fare better than a large volume of low quality hubs.

Choose Popular Topics

During the challenges, I basically wrote about whatever I wanted. Even though I did dabble in keyword research and found that quilting and genealogy aren't topics that are highly sought after, I continued to write hubs on those topics. While this is enjoyable, it really isn't a good way to get readership and revenue. If you want those, you have to choose popular topics.

Learn SEO

Many of my hubs didn't do well because I didn't know how to properly optimize my pages for the search engines. Although I did try to use different spellings and different words that people would search, I did not make sure that my ideas about what people did matched up with what they actually did do. I now use the Adwords Keyword tool more often, and it seems to have made a small difference in increasing viewership.

It's an Ever-changing World

Things continue to change. People search for different things as time goes on. Your competitors continue to write articles, some of which may surpass yours. Google changes its algorithm regularly. HubPages continues to change the way the site runs. When you feel like you are finally getting the hang of how to write for online readers, the traffic nosedives. You feel like giving up and suddenly the traffic rises again.

The HubPages Community

The HubPages Community is great in the support, advice and knowledge it provides. Other Hubbers will comment on your hubs, which provides great motivation and encouragement to keep writing. While it is wonderful to get that kind of support, sometimes it can encourage the wrong kind of writing. Other Hubbers may not notice that the title does not have proper keywords, and they may like topics that the search engine traffic does not. Many of my hubs about HubPages did very well here, but they were idled because they did not receive any search engine traffic.

Marketing

It is not enough to simply write articles. To increase viewership, you must market your hubs on other sites such as message boards, Facebook, StumbleUpon, Google + and Pinterest. These sites provide a bump in your traffic while you are waiting for the search engines to find your hubs.

Absolutely. Both of the challenges provided motivation to keep writing articles and kept me focused on my goals. I think they were worth doing. Before I pursued another challenge though, I would make sure I did the following first:

• Learn keyword research and SEO strategies
• Read lots of other hubs and list what I like about them
• Read the HubPages learning center guidelines about finding images and attributing them properly
• Make sure I know my way around all the different capsules
• Do keyword research and choose my hubs more carefully
• Check my schedule and think about the number of quality hubs I can write in that timeframe. A random number like 30 or 100 is too arbitrary. I would choose to take weekends off, and possibly write one hub a day during the business days.

Once I have done all these basic things, only then I can actually start the challenge and write the hubs. I would make sure that I have time to re-read and edit the hubs so that they are high quality hubs before they are published.

The 30 Hubs in 30 Day Challenge was fairly easy for me, and the 100 Hubs in 30 Days was downright grueling. Both of them gave me a chance to build up a substantial portfolio of hubs. I have taken down many of the hubs that I felt were low quality, and am working on fixing the mediocre hubs.

Since September, I have been participating in the Apprentice Program on HubPages, and hope it will teach me even more things about how to write quality hubs, and increase my readership and revenue. I can't participate in these types of challenges during this program, since there is a maximum of 15 hubs I can write a month, but I will likely participate in some kind of challenges when it is over.

In the meantime, I will continue to try writing about different topics and hope I find some that work well for me, and continue to learn as much as I can about online writing.

What is your advice on increasing HubPages traffic and revenue?