How to Gain Traffic to Your Hubs

Hubpages really is an excellent publishing platform, particularly for those who have never done any kind of online publishing before. Writers are paid via Google Adsense, Amazon Associates and Ebay Affiliates as well as Kontera Text Links for 60% of the ad impressions. Members are easily able to track their earnings, see the number of impressions they have received, and to plan their future hubbing accordingly.

New members are often frustrated, however, when traffic and income doesn't come as quickly as they would like.

The truth of the matter is that gaining traffic and income on any site takes time and effort. Hubpages isn't an instant solution, and it isn't an easy solution. My opinion is that Hubpages should be used as a supplemental income rather than in a financial crisis. Some people make significant income on this site, but most of them have their own blogs and also work on Squidoo and are experienced in keyword research.

New hubbers often appear to believe that traffic and Adsense income come quickly. This isn't a trap that Hubpages has set, and you are able to watch your ad impressions in all your affiliate programs. Hubpages isn't "ripping you off" or "taking your money." In the past six weeks that I have been at Hubpages I have seen people come and go -- just since my arrival. I have seen new members become frustrated when they don't gain traffic immediately or begin to see an income more often than every few days.

In the first few weeks, or even months, it can be frustrating trying to increase the traffic to your hubpages. Your income is dependent on your traffic and your traffic is dependent on dedication and a lot of hard work.

You will always get out of Hubpages what you put into it and nothing more, but patience is absolutely key!

When you are writing for Hubpages, there are three different types of traffic that you are looking to obtain. Understanding these different types of traffic will help you to get more people heading to view your hub, and a full understanding of gaining traffic will ultimately help you to develop an income through the affiliate programs allowed at Hubpages.

• Early on, you will get mostly Hubpages traffic that is coming from other members of the site viewing your profile and therefore your hubs.
• As time goes on, you will begin to see traffic from search engines coming to your hub.
• If you are willing to put in some time and work, you will see that people have been sharing your hub with their friends. Most hubbers do viral marketing to obtain this kind of traffic.
  

When I say Hubpages traffic I mean traffic from within Hubpages. Usually this is other hubbers, but sometimes a visitor will either check the main page and see your hub and surf in, or will follow an internal link (a link from another page on Hubpages). This is the easiest kind of traffic to obtain, but still does require some work to be done on your part.

So how do you get attention for your hubs? Look at the following suggestions, but please read below the bullet points, too!

• Get involved in the forums. Whether you are still waiting to publish your first hub of have published 1000 hubs, getting involved in the forum can be helpful to you and gives you the opportunity to talk to other hubbers about how you can improve. In particular, posting in the Extreme Hub Makeover forum will help you to get an opinion on your hubs and how you can improve them.
• Answer some requests. Usually the requester at least views your hub. If it's good, they are very likely to become a fan. Like traffic and income, fans seem to "snowball."
• Comment on other hubs. This is very, very important and the best way to get traffic to your profile (and therefore to your hubs) from within Hubpages. People like to know that you've visited them and what you thought of their hub. Very often they will return the favor by visiting you.
• Write a controversial hub or two. This is almost guaranteed to get some traffic coming your way. I have one hub that reached over 4000 visits from within Hubpages within my first six weeks publishing here! Why Sex is Important to Men
• Keep your hub scores high. Right now my average hub score is 75, though I have one unpublished hub that is only 59. The higher the hub score, the more likely it is to be displayed on the Hubpages main page, which visitors may view and follow through to your article. Hubpages members are virtually guaranteed to check these hubs!
• Keep your hubber score high. If you are doing all of the above, and publishing with some degree of regularity, you shouldn't find this difficult at all. I hit 100 for the first time after four weeks at Hubpages.
• Create internal links to your own hubs. I have used relevant linking in this particular hub, but in some of my other hubs (see the one linked above), you will notice that I have a list of links to other hubs of mine that are related. This doubled my traffic when I started doing it.
• Cultivate your hubs.
• Write high-quality content... Every single time!
  

The most important thing is to make yourself part of the community and to follow basic Hubpages Netiquette. This includes not becoming someone's fan and sending them fan mail in the hopes that they will fan you back! I almost always deny fan mail asking me to "check out my hubs!" and I only become a fan of people who's hubs I really, really like. I don't have the time to read sixty or seventy hubs a day, and I do read the hubs written by the people I am a fan of!

If you want to make money on Hubpages, search engine traffic is what you want most! Visitors who have come in on a search engine are looking for information that is targeted specifically to their needs and are far more likely to surf back out on an ad than someone who has come from Hubpages (who is likely to go back out on Hubpages. Getting search engine traffic takes a bit more work than getting Hubpages traffic, but it is worth the effort if you are willing to move forward and get noticed by Google (and other search engines).

• Keep your work absolutely original. Don't copy and paste anything if you can help it. Don't post the same article on Hubpages, Squidoo and on your blog. Search engines like original content.
• You have capsules for a reason: use them! Each time you use a new capsule and you give it a specific title, the title is a header. The search engines use your headers quite heavily in determining what your page is about.
• Give your images captions and your videos titles. The image captions are used not only as an "alt" for your images, but they are also viewed by search engines and allow your hub to appear in image searches as well.
• Keep your hub more than 300 words. I always shoot for 1500 words or more but this can be a lot to read for some people. 500-1000 words is fine and long enough to be picked up by search engines.
• Do some keyword research. Using the Google Adwords tool, check to see whether or not your keywords have heavy competition or are frequently searched terms.
• Use your tags wisely. It is better to have a few very relevant tags than a ton of barely-revelavant tags!
• Build your backlinks. This is very important and will be covered in the next section of this article.

Even if you don't know anything about keywords and search engines, your pages will get indexed. Those who have a better background in SEO (search engine optimization) and keyword research are more likely to rank high in the SERPs (search engine results pages) than those who are brand-new to internet publishing, but if you are patient, your hubs will climb over time!

When individual visitors decide to share your page with others, they have several options: The first and simplest is to e-mail your link to friends and/or family. This gets you a visit or two but isn't helpful in an ongoing way. Another way that visitors can share your page is by submitting it to social bookmarking sites (Digg or Stumbleupon for example) or social networking sites (Myspace or Facebook, for example). These links direct visitors to the social bookmarking and networking sites to your page, and most are dofollow (which means they will help you in your SERP rankings). These are helpful, but not the end of the story.

How can you build backlinks? Try some of the following:

• If you have a blog, post a link to your hub profile in your blog. You may also want to link to individual hubs that you have written. My advice here is to keep it relevant. I wouldn't, for example, post a link to one of my reptile hubs on my marriage blog. It just doesn't make sense and visitors to my marriage blog probably aren't interested in reptiles.
• Visit other blogs and read them. While there is plenty of advice all over the Internet about how you should comment on blogs, the main thing is first and foremost to read the blog entries before you post your comment. You should always leave a link to a relevant hub and please do so in the appropriate field rather than at the end of your comment!
• Browse Yahoo! Answers for questions related to your topic. Answer the question in text, and when asked to leave a relevant link, leave the link to your hub. Other people will also do this for you. I receive visits from Yahoo! Answers without answering questions myself!
• Write high quality hubs. Are you seeing a pattern here? If you write high-quality hubs you increase the chances that visitors will link to you from their own sites and pages. Whether these links are dofollow or not they are beneficial to you as often surfing visitors will click ads!
  

It's time. Some of us are lucky when we get here: we either know more than others about search engine optimization or we're simply better writers than others and therefore convince readers to stay on our pages longer (and therefore make them more likely to click ads). Some have a talent for controversy or simply write hubs that people want to read. I seem to fit into those categories. Or I'm lucky (or blessed).

Regardless of how "well" I might be doing right now, I know that six months down the road I'll be doing even better, and three months after that, better still. I will continue to write about what interests me (while finding the best possible keywords at the same time!) and I predict that I will do fairly well here at Hubpages.

I know that I need to give it time. I'm not going to make my first payout in a month. In fact, I suspect it will be July (four months at Hubpages) before I get my first payout. I assume that it will be August or September before I reach 10000 page views, though today was a good day for red triangles (increasing traffic)!

Yes, you can make money with Hubpages. You can get massive traffic as some have done here. If you are willing to work (perhaps even to the point of making Hubpages a full-time job!), you can do very well here, as many have done.

Good luck to you!