The Hubpages Experiment – 6 Months On

6 Months Later...

This post is a bit of a break from all the travel stuff and is about my feeble adventures in making money online. 6 Months ago I completed the hubpages challenge, an experiment in making money online where I published writing on the hubpages website, put Google adsense on and links to Amazon products (where I get a tiny percentage (3-5%) of any product sold). As I promised at the end of the experiment I’m now going to analyse whether it worked or not and if it’s worth doing.

The monthly income

To start with I made £6.06 from Google during the 30 day challenge. So this was before I even completed the month of September. Impressive results that made this idea seem like a very good one

October brought me £7.10. This was with all articles finished (I was aiming for 100 but actually got about 80 done, even after that a few got taken down for being too similar to one another. I did no work and still made the money, this was the idea of the experiment – to passively earn income, and it’s working! Even if it’s not going to make me a millionaire in record time.

In November I took on the usual advice of promoting things on the internet by writing more articles elsewhere (specifically ezine articles) and linking back to my hubpages. The idea is this raised the value of the articles in the eyes of the search engine websites (like Google and Bing) therefore those websites were more likely to send me traffic (and therefore click on ads/buy products and earn me commission). However I only brought in £4.59. Note, not all my articles have a link to them, only the top 20 performing ones, the ones that weren’t earning I basically forgot, working my strengths rather than my weaknesses.

December was my highest month during the 6 month period at £12.55 and the only one to crack the £10 barrier. I’m not sure whether this was from the ezine article links or the Christmas rush with people spending more online in general. I suspect the latter though.

January brought in a comfortable £8.66 I noticed at this point although my number of clicks varied, the traffic seemed to be consistent every month (confirmed in February too). Again as per November and December, I did no work, just logged into my adsense account to see what I have earnt.

The final month of February brought in a measly £5.21. February is a slightly shorter month but I don’t think that’s much of an excuse. But still, it is money that is coming in from work I did 6 months previously.

Due to terms and conditions I can’t say the page impressions, click numbers and income together as that is against Googles terms (they don’t want people to calculate who is paying what to advertise with them), but as a slight hint I usually just get into 4 figures a month.

This is my income from Google adsense. I made money from the Amazon links too but haven’t been tracking that consistently. It is roughly half as much as what I’m getting from Google though – still a nice number that is adding too the total.
op of this.

What I should have done differently

I should have promoted more and built more links. Really I barely did any work that should bring in income and I’m surprised I made anything at all to start with, let alone half a year later. I hope to find time to do this at a later date as it might make the income actually look impressive rather than look like an hourly wage that I’m pulling in monthly.

Has it paid off?

Technically no. I put in a lot of hours and as I just mentioned I’m basically getting an hourly salary a month now. Long term this should pay off, but it wasn’t worth doing from a time spent / income received point of view 6 months on. But to emphasise I basically made a product and told no-one about it. No business works like that. I did the 80% of effort to make 20% of the income and I should really do it the other way around now to balance it out. I think if I didn’t have the e-zine articles links I’d have made even less (maybe £2-4 a month). My traffic stats say that e-zine has actually sent some people my way too.

Am I happy I did it? Yes. Would I do it again? Yes. Even though it doesn’t seem worth it at the moment, it is something that needs attention to make it useful. You need to think about it, not just write crap and expect it to make money, and likewise not write something brilliant and tell no-one about it.  The more effort invested the more it pays back. If you have little time and want quick money, this is something I advice you shy away from – go get a job instead.

If however you have plenty of time and don’t mind waiting to get a long term pay off, then hubpages is a very valid thing to invest your time in. I may report again in another 6 months or so but am not promising anything this time :P My next strategy it to promote these ‘hubs’ a bit to get my moneys worth out of them (I’m sure there is a limit but I’m certainly not close to it yet) and will experiment with something else next. I’m certainly happy to fall back on hubpages in the future though.

Saying that I should mention the change in the ‘Google algorithm’ that is stirring people up at the moment. Hubpages has reacted to this and changed the terms and conditions of their site and how you can lay out your hubpage too (can not put adverts at the top of the page, and must have at least 50 words between each advert being the main one). They have also just released their own advertising scheme to go alongside Google Adsense, so it’s another potential source of income.

I hope this has been of use to someone, I enjoy reading about peoples incomes online, it allows us to be mobile and so if anyone has criticism against it being on a blog usually about travel, then I ask you to stretch your travel budget indefinitely and tell us how to do it without the internet.

Tagged as: hubpages, hubpages challenge, make money online