HubPages Traffic Bonus

I have 30 days in which to get as much traffic from as many different sources as I can to qualify for the HubPages "Traffic Bonus".

I'll be outlining here what steps I'm taking to achieve that goal.

The criteria is just 10 visitors from 10 referring sites. Surely it can't be that hard?

Flagship Hubs:

"Earn an additional $10 by getting at least 10 page views from each of 10 non-HubPages sources (as shown in the Flagship Hub’s View Stats) within the first 30 days after publication. Do a little promotion of your Flagship Hub and earn an extra kicker!"

Capstone Hubs:

"Raise your total cash earnings to $40 (an additional $15) by getting at least 10 page views from each of 10 non-HubPages sources (as shown in the Capstone Hub’s View Stats) within the first 30 days after publication of your Capstone Hub."

I'll be outlining my 'promotional plan of attack' for the recently completed Capstone Hub series The Roman Empire.

Maybe you'll get a few ideas from my tips and techniques for getting traffic to any of your hubs, not just Flagship or Capstone hubs.

You need to be aware that the page views must be to the Capstone Hub, not the adjoining series Hubs.

Once you've fulfilled the traffic requirements you'll need to submit the link to your published hub to team@hubpages.com with either Capstone Hubs traffic bonus (for your Capstone) or Ten from Ten for Ten approval (for your Flagship). Upon confirmation your payment will happen at the beginning of the next month after approval.

The $10 and $15 traffic bonuses are applicable ONLY to approved Flagship/Capstone hubs.

This is not a blueprint where you can follow it as a step by step tutorial.

It's an outline that you'll need to customize.

Getting only 10 visitors from just 10 sources in a month doesn't seem all that hard. And it's not, if you've thought it through.

You're not going to get the visitor traffic you need by going in unprepared. If you have a network of existing sites with a good track record and reputation, you'll be ahead of the game. If you don't... then you'll need to make yourself a list.

Spamming won't cut it either. Don't do hit and runs on forums dropping your URL in the hope it'll get you the traffic. You need to be mindful to think long term, not short term. Your username is a brand. And you need to build a reputation of trust.

In addition to submitting links to social bookmarking sites you can also publish more articles, at other sites. Increase your chances, or perhaps even dominate the search engine results pages. And also have a shot at dipping into the fresh pool of members at these other sites.

Bottom line is, you may need to promote the pages you've submitted or published elsewhere again. That sounds like a lot of extra work, and it is. And more work than what's worth the $10 or $15 that HubPages Inc is offering. But it's worth doing as it'll count towards your chances of being indexed and ranked highly at search engines. And earn passive income from your hub.

Yes, it sounds like a lot of hard work. But depending on how you approach writing it may not be as time consuming a you think.

When gathering information and writing content for my 15 serials hubs, and also the Capstone hub I had a LOT material that needed to be cut to end up with articles that were tight, and easy to read.

I don't just highlight the words and hit the delete button when I edit. I cut it, and copy it onto another document. I call this my 'offcuts'.

I'll just toss it into the other text doc. Once I've finished my hub article, and I'm happy with it, I'll then see what I can cook up with the offcuts.

Sometimes there's a lot. Enough to feed a family. Other times it's a little. Perhaps it can be for an entrée.

If it's a lot, I'll publish it at a few sites similar to HubPages. Within the body of the text (if it's allowed) I'll link keywords to corresponding articles that I've published at HubPages.

If it's just a few sentences or paragraphs, I'll use it to submit for an immediate backlink to the article. I'll rejig the content so I've got a good title, and also an original description. Some sites have character limits, some don't. I'm vicious either way with editing the material so it's concise, straight to the point and will grab the attention of my potential link clicker.

Occasionally, in the instance of having enough material to produce another full blown article I may go through the process again of cutting and copying the excess from the offcuts. I call these 'leftovers' I then use the leftovers for the submission to social bookmarking sites as described above.

I'll now go through each site I've used to get this elusive traffic. I'll be using my Roman Empire Capstone Hub as the example in this illustration, of what, how, why and what I did.

As you can imagine with Julius Caesar being such a well known historical figure, if not the best known personality of the Roman era, I knew him since a young age from reading Asterix books, there is a LOT of information about him. So with the information I gleaned from various references, I had enough for about three articles.

The one I published at Knol I titled Julius Caesar: Almost an Emperor.

Knol do allow you to link within the article. And you can "insert a refererence". Looking much like an annotated Wikipedia article. You can delete those annotations within the article (they look like this [1]) and it'll still keep your References at the bottom of the page intact.

I of course used it to list my bibliography, and also three websites. You'll notice that Reference number 8 is the link to my Roman Empire Capstone hub. As well as linking the two last words in the article.

The downside to Google Knol is all links are nofollow. But the upside is that you get 100% ad views for your Publisher ID if you link your Adsense account.

Squidoo was a natural choice for me. I have a few Lensmaster accounts and about 900 articles published there.

I actually published Who Is Julius Caesar (squidoo.com/caesar) before I thought to start a Capstone series on Roman Emperors. When I published my first hub on the subject, and it being Julius Caesar, I then edited my lens to link to my hub under my References module.

When I got stuck into the emperor hubs and I had offcuts flying every where, I put aside material for a lens on the Emperor Trajan (squidoo.com/trajan) and another on Hadrian's Wall.

I kept them on the backburner until after my Capstone hub was approved and then published these lenses. You'll see at the bottom of those articles two big fat arrows pointing at a link to my capstone hub. That's the "My Favorite Link" capsule.

I didn't go back to add that module to the Caesar lens. I like to mix things up a little and not be too predictable.

Lensroll is a Digg like type just for Squidoo Lenses. So this isn't going to directly help your hub, but it does stand a chance for backlinks counting towards Search Engine ranking, click thru traffic and submitted lenses which are voted up onto the frontpage also get tweeted.

I had some leftovers from the offcuts so I used it for Roman Empire: Trajan (one sentence) and The Great Wall of Hadrianus (Hadrian's Wall) (ten paragraphs!).

Just so you know, I co-own Lensroll.com with a guy named Greg.

I had never knew about the site until I went looking for other places to publish articles. ArticlesBase.com is a professionally presented site. They have to approve articles before they're published.

They don't however have any reveneue sharing. But that's okay, I'm after some quality backlinks and a chance to dip into some fresh traffic streams. What it means is I won't publish there often, but when I do it'll still maintain the same sort of quality I strive for when publishing content at HubPages.

When it came to choosing what content to publish at Articles Base I thought that Marcus Junius Brutus was an interesting character who was a friend who turned out to be a foe to Julius Caesar. I was running into a lot of information about him while I was researching the subject of the Rome's imperial era. So I thought it only fitting I write an article about him.

Before I did that though, and because I had no idea how the site worked, I published an article on Calligraphy first to get a feel for it. But that was after I had checked out other articles. You need to do this to see if what you've got is a good fit with what's already there.

I published the Calligraphy article about a week or so before I finished the Capstone Hub so I could test out the site. I then waited until after I published the Capstone hub to publish Et Tu Brutus.

I've long been a fan of Gather. There's a very friendly and vibrant feel to the community there. And they do offer a revenue share type payment system.

Unfortunately being in Australia I can't cash out for gift certificates or paypal payments. But I do have an aunty in the US who gets a regular surprise that can be used at Borders or Home Depot.

Now I had already published a few articles on various Roman's, and linked them to corresponding serial hubs. But I kept aside the Roman Historian Tacitus and The Colosseum for my post Roman Empire launch promotional push.

I've made a few bucks here and there with Associated Content. Nothing notable. But then again I haven't pushed it hard at AC. I do have the feeling that if I did it would prove to be worth it. But then that would take away from my time spent on HubPages. So for now I'm just publishing there occasionally.

I saved Mark Antony: Caesar's Staunchest Ally for the promotional push for the Roman Empire Capstone.

I could have cross linked to the Brutus ArticlesBase article. But I didn't. I kept myself restrained to just one hyperlink.

The most links I've put in an Associated Content article is 3. I wouldn't try for more than that. And they were to other articles with good solid information. I think if a person ever tried to put in an affiliate link it would get cut. Because they too review an article before it is published.

In the spirit of 'biting off more than one can chew' I committed myself to publishing 30 articles about 30 Roman Generals for the month of May. This was less than a week before the announcement for the Hub Challenge. I registered a Blogspot blog at Blogger just for the purpose.

I started with crosslinking articles I had published and then when the Roman Empire Capstone Hub was launched I hyperlinked specific words to that hub. I also threw in a banner ad to promote the hub. You can see it here: Roman General: Gnaeus Domitius Corbulo

I am also linked through to the capstone hub on my Blogger profile. You'll see the link as "My Web Page".

I will continue to run the blog after the initial 30 days and the Hub Challenge with a follow up self inflicted 30 day challenge publishing mini-articles on 30 more less known Roman Emperors.

Bukisa is also a new site for me, and to put the site through its paces I published an article on the position of the Roman Consul.

I had just one webpage that I wanted to link in this test and it was http://bitesized.info/article.php?story=praetor. Due to the ? symbol it cut off the URL (the site is probably set up to disregard ? in a URL because they're a common method of structuring affiliate links. But after checking out other articles around the site I was confident that a normal URL would work.

The two articles I published to support my bid for trafficking visitors to my capstone hub was Octavian: The Boy Who Would Become Emperor and Galen: Ancient Medical Professor.

Bukisa also run a revenue share model on their site.

I've been a member of EzineArticles since late 2007 but it wasn't until 2008 that I published an article. Which was to provide a backlink for my very first Flagship Hub about Anti Virus Programs. EzineArticles review every single submission.

It's been almost a whole year since that article and I was quite surprised when I got an email telling me that I had earned Expert Author status. And not only that, but they deemed my submission worthy enough to appear on their home page and sent out on their EzineArticles RSS Feed. So it really is worth putting in the effort to strive for quality!

In addition to the supporting cast of Brutus and Mark Antony to the Roman Empire melodrama I set my sights on the supporting character of Pompey, the man who clashed with Caesar in being the top dog of Rome at the time, and lost. It was a fantastic time in history... intrigue, violence, backstabbing, personal attacks. It's much like a typical HubPages forum thread.

EzineArticles don't allow links in the article body, but you can add a 300 character "Author SIG - Resource Box" which looks like a continuation of the article.

Aside from Lensroll.com and Squoogle.com which are sites that are open to anyone to submit links, BiteSized.Info is a site made by me, but only for me.

I'm often coming across interesting tit-bits of information that can be made into snippets, clippings or short articles. They may even be offcuts or leftovers of things I've worked on. Or for instance, I'm writing a hub about a Roman Emperor and it refers to the Praetorian Guard... what is the Praetorian Guard? Who are they? Do I add that information into the article and slow down or distract the reader? What if the informed reader already knows? What I started doing was publishing these snippets at BiteSized.Info, because that's what they were, bite sized portions of information. So for those 'not in the know' they can click on the link and bring themselves up to speed.

The rever is also true, I'd put links in the short posts I made at BiteSized.Info back to the larger articles.

While it doesn't fit EXACTLY into the direction of the site (which is fine, I own the site, I make the rules, I can break the rules :D) I published a short piece on the Roman Empire for some click thru traffic.

Perhaps you can build a similar site, or... as a special offer to Capstone/Flagship Hubbers, if you can comply to the rules of the site, I'll consider publishing a short original article that you've written with a backlink to your article on BiteSized.Info. But it's got to be well written! Unique! And no longer than 400 words.

Please discuss it with me first.

CopyTaste is an unusual little site. No revenue share, but then again it has no advertising on the site. CopyTaste doesn't even require a registration to post a page. But I have registered, that way it links back to a profile which has links to my other published snippets. I post an original paragraph and embed a link to the corresponding hub.

Twitter is a very powerful tool once you get past the obligatory posts of what people are having for breakfast or dinner or how bored they are. As well as having a subscriber base of friends, you can also use Hash Tags to make it easier for others with similar interests to find the information.

You're limited to only 140 characters, which means you really need to think hard and creatively to make the most impact with your message.

You can find me on Twitter here.

Facebook can be a lot of fun, if not downright addictive. I have two accounts, one is for family and friends (who I know in real life). I update my Facebook Status Update about once a day. I like to keep it witty. And nobody is ever informed on what I'm having for breakfast or that it's time for me to go to bed. And occasionally I link to an interesting news item, and every now and then I throw in an article I've published. I get click thru's without getting in peoples faces.

I also have a Facebook account for my online pursuits (you're welcome to befriend me). Again I try and avoid getting in peoples faces. I never post links in peoples profile pages. I find doing so as being rude (and very spammish).

The same applies to Myspace, though I haven't been there for quite some time because I think there's far too much spam.

You could post links to your hub within threads, though I would only do so IF I've been an active or longstanding member of the forum. If you do it within hours of joining you'll soon find yourself on the receiving end of a flamewar from loyal members or being smacked by a moderator or being banned by the admin.

I'd only post a link to a hub IF it has information in it that directly pertains to the problem that the Original Poster is having.

Alternatively you can always put a link in your sig. Which will work depending how well you word it and how often you post. Though avoid pointing out your sig when making posts, this is seen a similar light as posting the link directly in the post itself.

I highly recommend Tagfoot.

You can bookmark and share webpages. If you get 'footed' you stand a chance of making it onto the front page. Unless you're a spammer and misusing the site and you can get 'stomped'.

You're limited to just 500 characters. So make them count.

I tagged my Roman Empire hub and shared it with friends. People can also discuss content of the link in the Tagfoot page.

InfoBarrel is a fairly new site which requires a submission process for articles before being approved and published. The site owners have their sights (and site) set on quality.

They've divided their site into 11 categories: Culture, Geography, Health, History, Mathematics, People, Philosophy, Religion, Science, Society and Technology. I guess if you can find a fit in one of those topic areas then you've found yourself a home. At a glance it seems that Business and Travel are absent.

You can sign up to InfoBarrel here.

I fast forwarded to the end of the Roman Empire and its fall from grace by publishing an article dealing with the Fall of The Western Roman Empire at Helium.

I'm not familiar enough with Helium to explain exactly how their revenue sharing program works (the publication of this article was primarily for the purpose of traffic) but I have heard through reliable sources that you can really make money on Helium.

They have a very active rating system. By active I mean that there is some level of expectation that the community get involved and rate articles. Comparing one to another.

They do have a strict set of guidelines, but I applaud them for that. It's quite clear that they're after magazine quality articles, and not blog posts resembling anecdotes or a personal journal.

Submitted articles should be at least 400 words, and preferably under 1500 words.

You can sign up directly at the site, but I give a big thumbs up to people who want to get referred. Referrals to Helium are by email only so I had one of my readers send me a referral to sign up to the site, so if you're thinking of signing up to the site, contact for an emailed Helium referral.

Here's two recent sites I've signed up to: Factoidz and YouSayToo (I've actually been a member there for over two years, it's just now that I've started utilizing it).

These are some of the sites I'm using. As you can see there are more than 10 listed here. It's a game of numbers, and you can't give an iron clad guarantee that you will definitely get click thrus.

Be adventurous, seek out suitable sites for social networking, social bookmarking and article publishing platforms. If you've got a good one, share it in the Comments capsule. But please, no spammy affiliate links or traffic exchange sites.

Best of luck in getting your 10 from 10!

If you have checked out each of the pages I have linked as working examples of my backlink building you may have noticed that many of the links to http://hubpages.com/hub/roman-empire have included an extra word in the URL. These are 'trackers'.

Not all sites accept trackers. In fact some specifically ban the use of it.

You can find out more about how they work and how to set them up in my How HubPages Tracking Works hub.

• How Hubscore Works
• An Introduction To HubPage Referrals
  
• Information About The Flagship Hub Program
• Information About The Capstone Hub Program
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