Taking a Vacation and Still Earning Money With HubPages

I just returned from a 28-day cruise to Hawaii and the South Pacific. I have been a member of HubPages for ten months. My schedule had been very stressful before this vacation, so I made a promise to myself that while I was away, I would not go on HubPages at all. I wanted to see how successful I could be at making money while I was on vacation. Of course, if you have ever been on a cruise and bought a time package of minutes to use the internet while on a cruise, you know it costs a lot of money and that was another deciding factor in my staying away from HubPages while I was gone.
I always have enjoyed the idea of earning money through a residual income while sleeping, and now wanted to try it while I was on vacation. I was gone for 31 days...one month. I recorded my statistics before leaving. Now I have returned and was quite excited about checking my statistics. But now that I have seen them, I am disappointed.
On 10/16/2012, I recorded my statistics as:
Hub Pages, 10/16/12 Hub Pages, 11/17/12
Number of Published Hubs: 128 ------ Number of Published Hubs: 128
Past 30 days of Hub Views: 8,514 ------ Past 30 Days of Hub Views: 4,930
Past 7 Days of Hub Views: 1,432 ------ Past 7 Days of Hub Views: 1,079
Number of Followers: 310 ------ Number of Followers: 348
I can't actually write my earning here, due to the HubPages rules, but my earnings for the 30 days I was away ended up only being a little more than one-half of what I had earned during the month I was active on Hubpages.
My traffic dropped a huge amount over the month-long period, in fact, it was less by almost 50%. And I earned almost 50% less as well. I was surprised to see that I still gained 38 followers even though I was away. That was great news.
What this experiment proves to me then is that HubPages is a great way to earn extra money, but needs promotion and activity on the site by the hub authors to have the potential of earning the optimum amount of money available to them. Without my being active on the site, the number of views I received went down significantly.
HubPages needs writers who continue to be active members of this community, as well as promote their work as I usually promote my work on Facebook and Pinterest.
All in all, I am very happy to know that I can make money at HubPages even when I do need a break and go on vacation. There are not many other types of opportunities out there for that. And while I did not venture onto the HubPages website while I was gone, I did bring my computer and wrote hubs to publish when I returned, so although financially my HubPages account took a hit, I will hopefully make up for it by publishing the hubs I wrote on the cruise. Only time will tell, but I must say I have missed the HubPages community. Although the cruise was a once in a lifetime experience, now that I am back, I am happy to be back here with my HubPages friends.
* Since I wrote this hub, I have gone on four more extended cruises, and earned residual money on HubPages because the internet on the ships I went on cost between 65 and 75 cents a minute and takes 5 to 10 minutes just to even get a connection! My husband and I went to the Panama Canal for 15 days, Copenhagen, Denmark for 12 days, and to Northern Europe for 15 days, which included London, Paris, and Amsterdam. I still earned money even though I did not write any new hubs during those cruises due to the expense of accessing the internet while on a cruise ship. On future trips, I do plan to pop onto the HubPages website when I check my email to update a few hubs. I have found that doing that periodically helps improve my earnings, and doesn't take that long to do.
Overall I am happy that HubPages allows us to earn residual income even when we are away from the internet, away on vacation, or sound asleep in our beds!
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© 2012 Karen Hellier