Connecting the Dots...(1) Blog to (2)Hubs to (3)Income

Earning any kind of income on the webs is very difficult. I never expected to actually make any money doing what I loved to do after I retired. I am a teacher and it seems I cannot stop doing what I was born to do. That is where my web experience has been a life saver for me. Money really did not matter. Not until I actually made a little. Then I was hooked.

When that dibble began to come in I really did not understand why. In December of 2010 that I began getting some bigger hits on the Adsense account and was asked by two people to post links to their businesses. One I accepted because it was very simple and was not a pyramid scheme. I turned the other down. But I did not see any cause/effect connections at all.  I guess I thought it was just good luck.

I continued to do what I do. I wrote on whims or because something caught my eye or because I had an opinion. But something changed and I could not make the connections. Somehow the dots were not connecting like they had been. A small steady increase in the money being held by various money earning web sites stopped abruptly around the end of March. What had happened? I knew that if I wanted to continue with my writing for a web site called Retire In Style Blog and my Hubs and earn some money doing it, I was going to need to change something. But I could not connect the dots.

Statistics are not that hard to understand. If a high hit count comes with a direct link to an article or idea, then you need to pay attention and build on that.  It only seems logical to me.  When the count on my stats begin falling and all my hits are for things I posted month ago, I need to make a change. That was PART of what was happening to me. But it was more than that. Good posts might go unnoticed and things I thought were mundane would go through the roof. What was going on?

So I looked at adsense keywords before I wrote hoping that adsense would send me advertisements that people would click on. But still no income. I wrote two articles about southern Arizona and both of those went through the roof and I was even contacted by a large resort in a courtesy kind of email. It was all very encouraging until I realized there was little to no income.

Then I began looking at the adsense ads I had placed on my blog quite over a year ago. It seemed that things had changed quite a bit and I thought I needed to update the ad html code so I could take advantage of  more visual type ads. I thought they would draw more attention. Things just kept getting worse and worse. All I could think about was keeping the blog going because it was my own creation.  I needed to feed it continually. It was a hungry beast indeed.

The one piece of statistical information I did not look at was my Hubpages. When I looked at them this morning the light went on. During that period of time I was earning the very most I was writing as faithfully on Hubs as I was on my primary blog. I went through and counted the Hubs this morning and sure enough, the correlation seems to be there.

I had also quit posting things or writing for Redgage. That might be the third leg on the tripod. I know I continued to get followers there and I had also neglected that part of my writing life altogether.

I have always heard that statistics don't lie. So until I can see another reason I am going with the information my Statcounter and Google Analytics is giving me.  

So the conclusion I came to was that Hubpages is a very important part of this whole process. Linking with other people and pointing people to my hubs from my blog and pointing from my blog to my Hubs could be the key. I will continue to take a look at the statistics, post to the social networking sites and link to Stumbledupon. I will always tell people when I vote them up and beam them up to Stumbledupon. I will look at keywords, cps, global hits for words and google analytics. I also use these sources to see what people are looking for where they came from when they come to my blog or Hubs.  In the end it seems that the time it take does pay off.  

I am very interested in personal experiences. The more we share the more we succeed.

I am always a little disappointed when people give information but are not willing to share their websites. One picture is worth 1000 words...at least for me.

My blog: Retire In Style Blog