Update: Adsense payout

::switches on light and blows cobwebs out of the way::

Should have known better than to start an "anything goes" blog - I might have known I'd end up as an absentee landlord... When writing, I find it much better to stick to specific niche subjects. So if you fancy reading another blog of mine that gets weekly or twice-weekly updates, then visit my gardening blog Beans in a Barrel, which is about growing vegetables in pots and containers.

Anyway, now the plug for Beans in a Barrel is out of the way, you might be interested to know that back in July, I finally made the Adsense payout threshold. So last week my bank account was credited with the princely sum of £64.00. This is with a total of about eighty hubs on Hub Pages. Without going into specifics ('cos it's against Adsense TOS), I'm doing OK - my eCPM is OK, it's just that I need to get more page views if I'm to start seeing monthly payouts and increased earnings. The ways to achieve this are (a) to write more hubs and/or (b) to promote them via backlinking.

Since I find backlinking to be about as interesting as watching paint dry, I will be mainly concentrating on strategy (a). So at the time of writing, my hub count is now 106: 86 hubs in my main Empress Felicity account, and 20 in another account. The second account is devoted entirely to "salesy" hubs aimed at Amazon.com shoppers. (But there will be some Adsense ads in there as well, to "catch" non-US readers.) With the page views and earnings I've got, I reckon I will make payout again in October. (Or November if I'm being pessimistic.)

I didn't expect this, but I actually find I enjoy writing sales hubs - the big hurdle for me is finding stuff to write about that I feel happy about promoting, and which hasn't already been done to death by Hub Pages' big players like Nelle Hoxie, Ryan Kett and Lake Erie Artists. For example, I bought a salad spinner a couple of months back and was inspired to write a hub about it. Imagine my consternation when, after publishing it, I realised that about half a dozen people on HP had got there before me! These days I search HP before writing a hub, to find out how many (if any) people have written on that particular subject already. It's not just about avoiding accusations of plagiarism, it's also that if you end up as item no. 6 on page 1 of Google and 5 other hubs are above yours, people ain't gonna read your hub.