How to get more money with less views on hubpages

So, last week my innocent self decided to write a hub that I was quite sure would get a lot of views. (I am too scared to even mention what the hub is about - I will elaborate why.) It was quite tongue-in-cheek and funny and was on a topic that attracts a lot of attention on hubpages, and I knew the hub will be extremely successful. And right after I wrote the hub, I started attracting significant traffic. My page was read about 600 times the first day and the number of viewers and unique visitors kept rising for the next few days. The very first day, I was ecstatic. I knew that I would have a nice amount of money from the hubpages ad program waiting for me. When I woke up, I was in for a pretty big shock. My eCPM had been reduced to mere cents, and I earned next to nothing. I was disappointed, but I decided to watch the earnings for a few days, hoping that the earnings will go up. I thought that the low eCPM is just a part of the variety of that I will experience. But I was wrong, the more impressions I got, the lower my eCPM got. I started to change the keywords around - and still, I was severely underpaid. Another thing that I noticed was that I got a significant number of clicks (10 clicks on one day), and that I was not rewarded on google Adsense.

My speculations

So I decided to do some investigating. Surely hubpages could not possibly be penalizing me for attracting more views? I decided to have a look at my google analytics, and then noticed that I was getting most of my traffic from another part of the world. I decided to go to my hub and take a second look at my advertisements, and saw that they were quite regular advertisements meant for a mostly American audience.

So this is my speculation. I believe that if you want to focus on earnings, the hubs should be more or less targeted towards an American audience. Having a global reader-base is fine - as long as most of your viewers are from the United States. The advertisers are mostly American based, and understandably want American ad-clickers and viewers who will actually buy their products. I am assuming that the charge for an impression from a country other than the United States is next to nothing, if not nothing, which is probably why my eCPM got lowered so much. If this was not the case, then I would still have earned more from the other hubs that had a strong American reader base. So yes, your earnings will be affected if you target a hub towards a non-American audience, especially if that hub attracts many views. (For now, my belief is that a hub that does not attract many views does not really cause much harm.) I also believe that the google adsense might consider clicks from certain parts of the world to be "invalid", especially if the advertisements (like most) are targeted towards an American audience.

My plan of action and results

So, in order to test my speculation, I unpublished the hub early in the morning a few days ago. Lo and behold, I had MUCH, much less views, but my eCPM shot up and I earned more than I had been earning with thousands of views.

So the lesson learned is - if you are looking for earnings, write for the Americans.

How can you figure out what hubs you should delete so that you can aim for a better eCPM?

• Go click on the hubpages ad program earnings section and look at all your earnings listed daily.
• Watch out for the dates where your eCPM started to get significantly lowered, and write down those dates.
• Go look at the list of your hubs, and arrange them chronologically according to the date published.
• Find the articles on the dates that caused you to get low earnings, and check to see where most of the traffic comes from.
• Edit the article accordingly - but if it is not attracting a mostly American audience, delete it. It is better to get more money than to have a highly viewed article that will get you nowhere. (This is only if your motive is to earn money through hubpages. If you care more about sharing your passion with other readers, then by all means, please do so.)