In the last couple of weeks I have seen a very welcome rise in my HubPages earning, also in google impressions and even clicks. Overall however the picture is still pretty grim. I am not talking about any actual money one could take to a supermarket and buy food with, but I can afford a Costa cappuccino once a week.
I did make $1 in a day, but that was using the wonderful reddit tool, which although it works very efficiently is short lived, with a half life of 24 hours. Even without reddit I am however getting about 100 visitors a day to my HubPages site, which I would consider miraculous a couple of months ago, but it has demonstrated to me quite how impossible the challenge of making a living online is. So far this month I’ve made $5, and about £1 in adsense, and yes it is weird being paid in two different currencies.
Hubpages is a revenue sharing article parking site. Hubbers (people who use HubPages) can write articles, called Hubs, about any topic (almost) they want to, the site makes it very easy to add pictures, movies and other modules to the site, and adds advertisements. It used to depend on Adsense, and it still uses it, but they have also set up their own program with other advertisers, which pays by impressions rather than clicks, and has a pretty good rate. HubPages gets 40% of the impressions, so you need 1600 views to get 1000 impressions. Other than the HP ad program and Adsense you can also make money by using the Amazon or Ebay modules. If you enjoy writing and would like to try them out it is very easy to sign up on their site (my affiliate link).
All this theory is great but what about the money you can actually make in real life? The RPM (rate per millie) of the HubPages ad program varies from page to page but it is in the range of 4-6 dollars per 1000 views. The ad program pays by impression rather than by click. I am starting to recognise that this is actually a very good RPM, of course I only get 60% of the impressions. If I make 5$ per 1600 views, I will have to attract 16,000 visitors to my site per day to make 50 dollars, which is about a third of what I really want to make (I actually got paid a little less than $150 a day in my proper job, but I was unhappy with how little I was being paid). I think the challenge is obvious.
It is quite clear to me that I can increase my earnings from HubPages. At the moment I have 33 hubs, that is nothing, proper hubbers have hundreds, there are even some people with a thousand hubs. Also I suspect my hubs will attract more search traffic as my domain ages, I develop some links, and have more content. I can already see a definite increase in my Google Webmaster Tools impressions and clicks, the most impressions I’ve had in a day is 3500, which resulted in 60 clicks. As I understand it impressions are when my site actually appears on a page viewed by somebody who used Google to search for, so if my site appears on page 20 of the search results it is unlikely to get many impressions. Clicks are when my URL gets clicked on and the searcher shows up on my hub.
Traffic to my HubPages according to Google analytics, blue line is impressions, while red line is clicks
Quite a few of my hubs are on the second page of Google SERPs, if only I could get them to leap over a few other sites so they were on the first page I’m sure the number of views would increase. So I can definitely considerably improve my HubPages performance. The question is whether I can improve it by 300x. Given infinite time, anything is possible, the challenge is to make this happen before the redundancy money runs out. That might be difficult, it does take some time to write hubs, and I’m not sure if I can keep thinking of topics.
I did read something quite optimistic in one of the blogs that aims to teach you how to make money online
most people overestimate how much can be achieved in a month, but underestimate how much can be achieved in a year.
It is of course possible that this is all complete bullshit designed to get people to pay up for the expensive coaching programs, but I must have hope!