HubPages’ 5 Steps For Getting 39 Million Unique Visitors Per Month
By Anna Johnson on October 26th, 2010How did HubPages go from launching four years ago to averaging 39 million unique visitors per month? Based on a TechCrunch article by CEO Paul Edmondson, HubPages – which lets you create topic-themed webpages and share in ad revenue – followed – and continues to follow – these 5 steps to reach 39 million unique visitors in monthly traffic:
Step 1: Optimize content for the search engines
HubPages helps authors create content for their webpages – i.e. ‘Hubs’ – that will attract search engine traffic. For example, when you create a HubPage, the platform prompts you to add more content, include relevant tags, refine the titles of your articles, and link to specific pages.
Step 2: Identify the key business drivers
HubPages has identified, and bases its marketing around, the key metrics that drive its business. HubPages’ two main drivers are Hub production and revenue per thousand Hub views i.e. revenue per cpm. To this end, the company has developed a model which estimates how much traffic and revenue a new author will generate.
Based on knowing how much revenue each new author is worth, the company uses ‘sophisticated micro-marketing’ including search engine marketing to attract authors. Interestingly, HubPages has also discovered that content created on HubPages tends to peak in traffic nearly three years after it’s created…
Step 3: Establish quality standards
Although HubPages doesn’t – and doesn’t’ want to – review content for quality, it has instituted mechanisms to prevent porn, deter duplication, and increase the quality of content published on its platform. When the company implemented such measures about a year after launch, traffic to the site dropped by 30 percent. Over time, however, both traffic and revenues have grown as high quality authors and advertisers continue working with HubPages.
Step 4: Encourage authors to produce popular content
To encourage authors to create more popular (and higher revenue-earning) content, HubPages runs contests to encourage people to write about evergreen topics and also provides analytics on each page so authors can track their traffic.
Step 5: Be author-centric
According to HubPages’ CEO Paul Edmondson, by letting authors choose what they want to write about and retain ownership of their content, HubPages has built a loyal community of writers. The company has cultivated the goodwill of that community by letting people follow and compliment each other. Edmondson regards the creation of this community as an important factor in the company’s growth.
With 39 million in monthly unique visitors – following an almost 140 percent increase in visitors over the past 12 months – Edmondson believes HubPages’ strategy of community content, revenue sharing and search engine optimization is working.
Source: Paul Edmondson, “How We Got HubPages To Scale,” TechCrunch, October 24, 2010
