1,000 Hub Challenge: Income Report, Traffic and Update – Jan. 2012

So wraps up the first month of my 1,000 Hub Challenge where the goal, as the name suggests, is to write 1,000 articles by the end of 2012. This evens out at roughly 83 articles a month but can be completed at any moment within the time frame.

In this hub, I wanted to share a quick update on how I’m doing as far as the challenge, traffic and income goes for my Hubpages experience thus far.

Overall, I’m completely astonished by the rise in traffic considering that I have many other websites that get a fraction of what I’ve received on Hubpages.

I’ve yet to build backlinks to any of my Hubs but do plan to in the near future as I figure out which are the best performers so I don’t waste my time.

Here’s what the traffic looked like in Jan. 2012 for my Hubs:

The biggest performers were:

• Asus A53s Laptop Review
• The Monster List of Freelance Writing Websites
• How to Refill the HP P1102w Toner
• Top 3 Headphones under $200
• How to Make Money with Swagbucks

Of these, the Asus A53s review is the one I’m looking forward to in terms of earnings because it’s receiving a lot of traffic and I have it monetized for Amazon Associates – wish me luck!

Compared to my other projects – Hubpages is barely bringing in money but it’s definitely starting to show a lot of promise especially since I’m tweaking my focus and getting more content out there on the web; it all adds up over time.

For January, I earned $7.99.

Now, this really isn’t much but it’s the principle that it will rise with each additional piece of effort I put into the 1,000 hub challenge. Some of my hubs are very low performing so the majority of the income comes from just a few. My plan is to look back every few months, see what works, and then continue on the hot topics that are proven to perform well.

As of now, I’ve reached 80/1,000 hubs for this year.

This places me at 3 behind for the month of January but that’s not a real biggie since I have a lot of days off in between my classes and plenty of focus to get the job done. The trick is to not be too overwhelmed so I need to make this a great habit of writing nearly 3 hubs a day.

I’m thinking that every three months, I’ll perform an “audit” where I figure out my best performers and start building backlinks to help raise them in search engines. I say I’m doing this later because I don’t want to waste valuable writing time on hubs that aren’t destined to work out well – ya know?

I’ve also got a few regular pieces that I want to update as the challenge goes through but you’ll see more on that later.

I know this is all just getting started, earnings aren’t all that spectacular but there’s a lot of promise here. In all, the challenge is more about creating a writing routine than earning money – I like that it’s stressful and puts me in a creative process rather than posting something here and a few.

Anyway, if you’d like to show your support than I’d humbly ask for you to join me in the challenge and like my 1,000 Hub Challenge Facebook Page. You can also follow me on Twitter.

If you’re new to Hubpages than this is the perfect place to start since you can see the “behind-the-scenes” look at the writing process – I’ll be updated with tips and tricks throughout this year so stay tuned.

Not on Hubpages yet? Click here to join.