Lessons Learned My First Year with HubPages

I recently passed the one year mark writing here on HubPages. During that year I’ve certainly learned a lot and realized that I have a lot more yet to learn. Though it has been a year, I still consider myself a HubPages rookie. It has been a fun year, frustrating and confusing at times, but fun.

In this first year I have made a lot of mistakes and learned a lot of valuable lessons. Maybe, if you can learn from my mistakes without having to make them yourself, you will shorten your learning curve and reach a higher level of success more quickly than I.

So here are the key mistakes and lessons I learned in my first year on HubPages. Believe me, there were many more mistakes and lessons learned than just these but these, I feel, are the most important. Please feel free to comment or criticize as you see fit. I am by no means a HubPages guru and I am willing to learn from anyone.

Write, Write, Write

Like many hubbers, I started writing hubs with a flourish. I actually started by participating in the 30 Day Challenge, attempting to write 30 hubs in 30 days. While I did not accomplish that goal (I believe I wrote only 21) it was a good start and helped me learn the basics of HubPages fairly quickly. After that initial flourish, I wrote new hubs sporadically and infrequently.

But once I ran out of my first bunch of topics I was faced with writer’s block. I had real trouble coming up with new ideas for hubs. As a result I wrote only 2 or 3 hubs in the next month. It seemed I would “get in the mood”, crank out a handful of hubs and then go idle again. Indeed, at one point I went for almost 4 months without any new hubs. That was nearly 1/3 of my first year on HubPages!

This was a huge mistake! How much you write is directly related to how successful you will be on HubPages. While it may seem obvious it was not something that really hit home with me until well into that first year. Writing consistently and writing often is the key to building your hub library.

Likewise, building a substantial library of hubs is a key to generating a lot of traffic. Don’t expect to draw a ton of traffic with only a handful of hubs. While this is certainly possible if your hubs are extraordinary, it is not the experience of most hubbers. If one of your goals is to make money with your hubs, then having a large number of hubs becomes even more important. The primary way to make money through HubPages is with Adsense revenue and Amazon purchases. The more monetized hubs you have, the more likely someone is to click through an Adsense ad or to purchase an item on Amazon. It really is common sense. Yet many people, including me, expect to make good money with only a handful of hubs.

Be Patient, It Takes Time

Also like many new hubbers, I expected that once I published my hub readers would flock in droves to read it. Well, that didn’t happen. In fact, a trickle of readers might have been an overstatement. Of course, I had no clue what to do about it back then.

Then it dawned on me that a hub is simply a web page with its own unique URL just like any other web page. Until the major search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing had indexed my hub, the only traffic my hubs would get would be primarily from within HubPages. It could take several weeks for the search engines to index a new webpage. Until then, it won’t show up in search engine results. Fortunately, the major search engines are fairly smart and have learned to re-index sites more frequently that have highly dynamic content like HubPages.

Nevertheless, you still need to be patient. Once your hub has been indexed you will start to receive search engine traffic. Eventually, search engine traffic will be where you get most of your hub traffic. Currently, I am receiving over 80% of my traffic from search engines with the rest coming from HubPages or others site that I have established backlinks to my hubs. But even that is not enough to get lots of traffic.

Do Keyword Research

In order for your hubs to rank highly in search engine query results you need to target the top keywords for your topic. You need to know what words and phrases people will be using in search engines to try to find your hub. If your hub doesn’t include those keywords, then searchers won’t be able to find your hub.

This means that you need to do some keyword research before you write your hub. Once you have determined which keywords are best, you need to include them liberally in your hub text and in the tags associated with your hub.

Using appropriate keywords was something I failed to do on my first 15 or 20 hubs. I simply wrote them and published them. To no one’s surprise but my own they didn’t get much traffic. Then I wrote a review of the Nike Hyperize basketball shoe my son’s both wear. Since I was writing a review, I used the phrase “Nike Hyperize Review” and several variations in the hub text and as tags to the hub. Very quickly, that hub become my most viewed and to this day is my best performing hub.

Now, it helped that the Nike Hyperize shoe was a hot topic at the time the hub was written but the hub performed well because that was one of the best keyword phrases for people looking for information on that shoe. Though this hub was written over a year ago, it still shows up on the first page of Google search results for the keyword phrase “Nike Hyperize review”.

You can write the best hub possible on your topic but if you aren’t using the keywords and phrases that people are using when searching for that topic, they won’t find your hub. Take the time to do keyword research before writing your hub.

Promote Your Hubs

Even after I waited for the major search engines to index my hubs and optimized my hubs with appropriate keywords I still wasn’t getting the kind of traffic to my hubs I desired. Sure my hubs would show up on Google but way down on page 10 or worse. No one but me would page through that many search result s to find my hub.

Most people will only page through 2 or 3 pages of search results looking for what they want before they give up. You want your hub to appear within those first few pages, ideally on the first page. Building backlinks is the way to get your hub to rank higher and be seen by search engine users.

You need to proactively publicize your hubs on web sites and blogs outside of HubPages as much as possible. If you can get a link to your hub on a number of different web sites, you can achieve higher search engine rankings much more quickly. These are called backlinks and the more of them you have the higher your search engine ranking will be and the more traffic your hub will get.

My hubs didn't rank highly on search engines because I failed to promote them. Once I learned this lesson, I began to create accounts on social bookmarking and publishing sites like StumbleUpon, Digg, Xomba, SheToldMe and others. There I was able to bookmark my hubs creating “dofollow” backlinks to my hubs. I also tweeted to my followers on Twitter whenever I published a new hub. I maintain a Facebook page under my HubPages user name and create a status entry announcement whenever I publish a new hub. Doing this creates valuable backlinks to my hubs increasing my search engine rankings and results in more traffic to my hubs.

Creating backlinks to your hubs is work. It can be a lot of work at times. If you make it a part of publishing each hub, you can make it much a much easier task to stay on top of and reap the benefits of higher search engine rankings.

Write Quality, Original Content

If you really want people to read your hubs, you need to write quality, original content. As they say elsewhere on the internet, “Content is King”. That couldn’t be any truer than on HubPages. If you create quality content people will want to read it. Quality hubs are one of the best ways to get people to come back to your hubs again and again. If you create poor content, full of misspellings, bad grammar and misinformation, people will avoid your hubs like the plague. This was one of the few mistakes I managed to avoid from the start.

If you are writing on the same topics as other hubbers, you will be in direct competition for traffic. This is unavoidable to a certain extent, of course. At last check there were about 181,000 hubbers and that number is quickly rising. Finding a topic that hasn’t been addressed at all can be quite difficult. If you want to write on a topic that has been covered a lot, try to find a new angle or unique perspective on the topic. If you can provide something different than all the other hubs your hub can still stand out and generate traffic.

Write About What You Know

Like most new writers, my first instinct was to write about things that I know well. This is an excellent idea for beginning HubPages authors. Most everyone is an expert is something whether they know it or not. Each of us has accumulated a vast amount of knowledge during our lives. We have knowledge of various topics as a result of our work experience, education, hobbies, travels, sports, etc. Think back over your life and you will find a number of topics that you are qualified to write on.

Even if you aren’t an expert on a particular topic, you can still write a hub about it. You simply need to know how to properly research and write about a topic. You can find several articles that discuss just this topic alone here on HubPages and elsewhere on the web.

When you run out of topics to write on, look about the HubPages community. See what others are writing about. I’ve found that reading other hubs often gives me great ideas for my own hubs. Of course, I’m not talking about copying their ideas here. Remember the lesson earlier in this hub, create quality, original content!

Get Involved With the HubPages Community

This is where I really missed the boat and my biggest regret of my first year on HubPages. Other than writing hubs, I literally did nothing else on HubPages for the first nine months. Big, big mistake! About that time I was really not very happy with how much traffic I was getting to my hubs and very disappointed with my earnings from my hubs. I had written maybe 40 hubs, had less than 40 followers, maybe 10,000 hub views and hadn’t earned enough revenue from those hubs to reach the payout levels. I was quite underwhelmed and considered giving up on HubPages.

Instead, I decided to read what other hubbers had done to get things going for themselves. Without fail, they are suggested getting more involved in the HubPages community by participating in the forums, reading and commenting on others hubs and by asking and answering questions. So, that is what I did.

Around the end of May, I began to visit various HubPages forums and participated in some of them. I started to read other people’s hubs and to comment when appropriate. I also began to click on the ‘Answers’ link and respond to questions posted by other hubbers. Just prior to this, HubPages had come out with their HubKarma rating. Since its inception, mine had languished around 20. Once I started participating in the forums, commenting on hubs and answering questions my HubKarma rating began to skyrocket. With a couple of months it had risen to a very respectable value in the 90s.

I also began to notice a steady increase in the number of my followers. It seems that people really do check out the profiles of people that leave comments on their hubs or that answer their questions. If they like what they see, they will follow you. There is usually a resulting increase in traffic to your hubs as a result. I noticed an almost 40% increase in hub traffic within a short time. Things were looking up!

Learning From My Mistakes

Since I learned these key lessons and began to implement them I have seen dramatic things happen. It took about 9 months to reach my first 10,000 hub views. I will reach my second 10,000 views in less than 3 months. My traffic continues to increase almost daily.

Since getting a better understanding of keyword research and promoting my hubs, I have managed to land several of my hubs on page 1 of Google search results for my keywords. This is a big improvement for me though I must admit I still have a lot to learn in this area.

In my first 9 months I had garnered less than 40 followers. I still have a long way to go in this area but in the last 3 months this number has more than doubled to 102. That number is nothing compared to many hubbers but is a significant jump for me and results in more traffic to my hubs, no doubt.

My Adsense and Amazon revenue have also increased markedly. In my first 9 months I my Adsense and Amazon earnings were dismal trickling in 5 or 10 cents at a time with days and weeks passing with no earnings. In the last 3 months, both have increased with Adsense revenue being earned daily and finally making some significant Amazon earnings. This month with be the first month where I will earn enough in one month to receive both an Adsense and an Amazon payout.

While my HubPages author score was never really bad, it was always in the low 90s fluctuating between 89 and 94. Since getting more involved in the HubPages community it went up noticeably, fluctuating between 96 and 99. Finally, this month, I got over the hump and got the coveted 100 author score! I know it won’t stay there for long but now I know what it will take to get it back! Now I am looking forward to making even greater strides in my second year on HubPages!

In Conclusion

In the past year I have learned many valuable lessons about success on HubPages. Your definition of success may not be the same as mine as the reasons for joining HubPages vary with each hubber. However you measure success, I've learned you likely won’t get it without working hard at it. Why should HubPages be different that any other part of life?

This is the greatest lesson I’ve learn in the past year. I joined HubPages as a forum for my writing, to improve my writing skills and, if possible, to make a little money on the side. If I had continued on HubPages as I had during my first 9 months, I would have been a miserable failure and likely would have given up. Fortunately, some other hubbers convinced me that success here on HubPages is like success anywhere. It won’t come without educating yourself and consistent, hard work. If you are willing to do those things, you too can find success here on HubPages.