Ten Thousand Views! My Experience on HubPages PLUS How To Get Good Traffic To Your Hubs

Wow, what a journey it has been here on HubPages. After three months, I finally reached the ten thousand views mark. As a new hubber three months ago, I had many questions about statistics, earnings and how to get good, passive traffic from Google.

I have written this hub today to give you my experience of writing on HubPages including statistics, earnings and how many hubs I wrote to achieve this mark. I will also be giving some of my tried and tested tips on how to get good, long-term traffic from Google (that actually work).

OK, ten thousand views may not sound much to all of you Hubbers out there who have reached a million views and counting but for me, I am quite happy with the milestone. It has taken a tremendous amount of work and dedication, but is most definitely achievable. Here are some statistics about me:

• I have 88 followers.
• I have reached the 10,000 views milestone, three months after signing up, with 36 hubs.
• My best hub has received 150 views a day.
• I participate regularly in forumns and comment on others hubs regularly. I especially like welcoming new Hubbers into this wonderful community, since other Hubbers have done the same to me. I was so happy when one2getno and Brett.Tesol followed me on my first few days here on HubPages, their following really helped me to start writing on HubPages. As a new Hubber, you'd be surprised at how happy you can get when someone follows you!
• I get from 250 - 400 views a day with 36 hubs. It could be better, but I am constantly writing new hubs to increase my traffic.

Along my journey as a newbie, I have done many mistakes and have learned from them. Although I didn't do all the mistakes mentioned below, I see them occurring all the time. I am not writing this completely out of mind, following the things said below will definitely rank you higher as a Hubber. I have found that doing these things will help you become a better Hubber.

• Don't make massive goals when introducing yourself in forums like; 'I am going to write 5,000 hubs, try to get 100,000,000 views by the end of this year and make thousands of dollars next month!'. OK, it is not impossible but seriously speaking, it will take a lot of hubs to achieve your goals. Goals like these look bad.
• Put a profile picture immediately when joining. The default avatar image looks boring and will not entice new readers. You don't have to put a picture of your face if you don't want to, but something that you like or describes your interests, such as flowers, scenery, animals, everyday objects etc. Anything really, but not the default avatar. I was stupid enough to put my profile picture about a week after I signed up. That definitely didn't entice any new readers.
• As well as the profile picture, write a bio which is designated on your profile page. Having 'no bio' means 'no you' in cyberspace. Hubbers that visit your profile page always want to read something about you be it your hobbies, personal interests, what you work as, etc. This along with your profile image should state something about you, and that means people can relate to you and share common interests with you, meaning more readers, more comments and more traffic.
• Start writing good quality hubs during the first few weeks. Don't sign up and then write a hub a couple of months later. Try make your hubs over 700 words, add a picture or two and a poll. Put your best hubs in the 'In The Spotlight' carousel.
• Don't add short comments like 'Very interesting', 'Cool', 'Nice hub!' or 'great'. Short, boring, grammatically incorrect comments will not do well and you could be viewed as a troll or spammer. You may be trying to add a nice comment but instead add a spark of personal interest, give your thoughts on the hub, say how it helped you and perhaps ask a question. You don't have to do all the things mentioned when commenting but completely avoid short comments.
• After you sign up, don't follow thousands of Hubbers for no reason, that looks really bad. Instead if you want someone to follow you and you are genuinely interested in their hubs and what they write about, comment on their hubs and send detailed fanmail. Don't follow Hubbers for the sake of getting followers, it doesn't really work like that.
• Don't write about how to get lots of traffic from Google to your hubs about two days after you signed up, no one is going to take you seriously. It will take you at least six weeks until you get good organic search traffic flowing, so theoretically it isn't possible for you to start getting search traffic two hours after you signed up.

About three months ago, I joined HubPages with many doubts. I doubted whether it was actually possible to get good traffic and good earnings. There were and still are many articles all over the internet saying that HubPages is a scam and is a waste of time. Is that true?

NO! No way, in fact it is quite the opposite. You can actually get good and high traffic here on HubPages, as well as earnings if you are willing to put in the effort. Perhaps you won't get rich quick, but you will still make a good $50 with a lot of hard work.

I published my first few hubs and was startled to see that I was getting comments! That is another great thing about HubPages, the writing community here are so welcoming and thoughtful, and I would like to thank them for that.

I was a little irritated when I joined because I wanted to find out more about what kind of statistics to expect here on HP. Were they good or bad? Money worthy? Unfortunately, there isn't that much information written by Hubbers, you will get some but not much. Also, on Google there are so many articles saying that you are wasting your time on HP, views and earnings are dismal yada yada. Don't believe all that rubbish, here are my statistics. You can judge for yourself, bearing in mind that I spent at least an hour a day writing and improving hubs, commenting etc.

As you can see on the graph above, my daily visitors were very small. I was barely getting a few visitors a day. There was a huge drop and then it picked up to fifty visitors a day. Then I began to write a lot more hubs, incorporate a little SEO using the Google Adwords Tool and improved my other hubs.

Writing more hubs is a slow process. I strive to make high-quality stellar hubs, as they will earn the most traffic in the long term. During the month of June, I tried publishing a hub every day or every two days. Traffic had begun to increase at a steady rate and now with 36+ hubs, I am getting a steady 200+ views a day. I am sure that will rise very much so in the future as I continue to write more hubs.

The secret to accumulating hundreds of views is to keep writing hubs no matter what and fully optimising them through keyword research. I'm not just saying that, the top Hubbers that get ten thousand views a day, have at least 500 to 600 hubs. Within saying that, some Hubbers with only 80 to 120 hubs could get the same.

Don't overly spam the web with your links though, Google will recognise this and you can get Panda'd (Google Panda in a nutshell: Your search views will get a massive drop, as Google Panda aims to weed out spam and unworthy articles. Don't post links all day, you will be sorry.)

The majority of my traffic is organic search traffic as you can see in the picture below. This form of traffic is one of the best, because your viewers are looking for a 'solution' to their problems or an 'answer' to their questions. They love long articles with plenty of polls, videos and pictures and so does Google. Writing stellar hubs will help you rank higher in Google Search results, as HubPages has said in the past.

I don't use social media or social bookmarking sites to promote my hubs, I feel that whilst you may get a short burst of traffic, it never lasts and then you are back down to normal traffic stats once more. Some Hubbers find it effective, others don't and I feel that I am one of those.

Sometimes when people like one of my hubs, they share it on Facebook and Twitter and then my hub gets a huge boost in traffic. That happened once or twice to me and it definitely helped my traffic. I have heard of Pinterest as a great traffic booster and I will begin to use it to drive traffic in a few weeks time.

However, the BEST way to get a constant stream of traffic is to get the first few spots in the Google search results or even to get on the first page. Only that alone will get you passive traffic. It took me a few weeks before I got a little search traffic, but then after a few weeks, my hubs began to rise in the Google search results page and now I get a constant stream of traffic! Want to see how?

This link will bring you to the Google Adwords Keyword Tool, which will help you decide on keywords and more!

So what's the secret behind my success? As I mentioned above, it's the search traffic that I get daily. Here is a comprehensive guide on how to select a good niche to write about and how to use the Google Keyword Tool to select highly-profitable keywords.

• What are you good at? What are your hobbies or interests? You may be interested in bird watching, or analytical chemistry or Mexican cooking recipes. Whatever you know a great deal about, select it. Here are some ideas; gardening, cooking, sewing, knitting, embroidery, geography, nature, saving money, home design, science, student tips, writing, travelling, SEO, health, employment etc.
• Next, narrow down your topic. So for example if you chose health, narrow it down to something more specific like; health benefits of certain foods, exercise, major illnesses, foot health, keeping a healthy heart, home remedies for minor ailments.
• For example, I am going to choose 'how to keep a healthy heart'. Open up the Google Keyword Tool using the link on the right.
• Type in your phrase into the 'word or phrase' box. So, I type in 'how to keep a healthy heart'.
• Tick the 'Exact' checkbox on the left and untick 'Broad'.
• On the right, click on the columns button and select 'Competition', 'Global Monthly Searches' and 'Average CPC'.
• Then, put in that captcha code. Sign in if you don't want to type it in.

To fully optimise your hub, always be as specific as possible! For example, the hub titled 'Cafés in New York' is very broad, try making it more specific such as 'French Quarter Cafés in New York'.

• Then, take a look at the kind of results that appear. Choose phrases that get at least a thousand views and up. Right click on the phrase that you like and select google search. This will show you the kind of websites that rank for those keywords. If competition is very high, then you shouldn't really go for that phrase.
• For example, under my list of results I saw the term 'coronary heart disease'. It was getting 20,200 searches every month and had a CPC of €1.45. I then searched that phrase into the search box and generated a whole list of words I could use.

Well, what about my earnings? I am slowly but steadily getting closer to payout, I should reach the payout threshold of $50 dollars in two to three months time. Seems like a long way away, but two to three months can fly if you are continually write hubs!

I was accepted for AdSense with 18 good-quality hubs, about one month after I signed up. Getting accepted for AdSense is easy enough once you have about 15 high-quality hubs. Other hubbers were accepted with 6 hubs, others took 30 hubs, it really depends.

I will definitely be keeping you posted with how I am getting on, when I will get paid and so forth.

I would like to say thank you to all the dedicated writers and staff here on HubPages. They have given me so much support and encouragement from day one. I would like to say thanks to all those that commented on my hubs, who followed me and left fanmail, to those that replied to my questions and forum discussions.

The HubPages community has given me so much inspiration, happiness and a love for writing. I have learned so much from writing, to creating great hubs, to earning by writing online to SEO to keyword research, many skills which would not have been possible for me to master was it not for HubPages.

What does the future hold for me after achieving this milestone?

Well, you can be guaranteed that I will keep writing hubs, commenting on others' hubs, following other Hubbers and participating actively in the forums. You haven't seen the end of me yet! The HubPages journey is a long one, but slowly, with perseverance and a lot of dedication, anyone can become successful here on HubPages.

I would like to have at least 100 hubs by the end of the year, I already have almost 40 under my belt. I would also like to reach a payout in two months time. I'm almost there. I'll have a hub on that too, in the future when I do get paid.

Thanks for reading and please leave any comments, suggestions or random thoughts you may have below. I would love to answer!