Four Years at HubPages : The Journey : Overview

When the big number 4 jumped out from my profile page at HubPages this evening (January 15, 2012), I got all excited.

Okay, not really. It's not like I didn't know that my first-ever Hub was published on January 31, 2008, or that three of my top five Hubs in terms of total view counts were written in the first thirty days of my tenure at the finest all-around site for writers on the entire Internet. So yes, excited would be a bit of an exaggeration.

But there were definitely some thoughts that came along with the discovery... including the realization that to survey one's own Hubs chronologically is--for me, anyway--to tour a personal diary, a compendium of goals, dreams, accomplishments, an autobiography if you will. I've never before recorded so much that pertained and/or grew out of my daily experiences and insights into the world around us.

Value: Priceless.

Today, I'm about as established at HubPages as a writer can get unless you're a member of the staff or your name is Patty Inglish (voted Top All-Around Hubber for 2011 and deserving every bit of the award). My HubScore hits 100 with some frequency, there are 1,088 Hubs out there with my name on them, serious numbers of readers consider my input on everything from job hunting to leopard geckos to home building to writing prison pen pals to politics to--you name it.

It doesn't get any better than this. Heck, I'm even earning a few hundred bucks a month to do what I love doing.

Un. Be. Lieveable.

But...how did I get here? No, really; I'm not kidding around. When my wife and I first arrived to homestead our Arizona acreage near the Mexican border in April of 2009, the picture was much different. At that point, I had maybe seventy-something Hubs online and had earned just one Google AdSense check (which had turned up as a huge surprise the previous autumn). Communication with the Team was nonexistent, as was my social interaction on the site.

I decided to just "eyeball" that journey. It won't be easy to pick out just a few highlights from enough material to challenge the Tax Code, but we're going to try.

1. June, 2009. Pam and I are in deep financial ca-ca. No one will hire me in Cochise County, Arizona--mostly because I refuse to work after dark. Leaving my disabled redhead alone in a camp trailer near the border after dark is not an option.

I decide to bag the job hunting...and begin writing at HubPages more or less full time. Approximate earnings for that summer: Enough for half a tank of gas per month.

2. Somewhere around that time: A Metis medicine man named Red Elk leaves a comment on my Survival Cabin Hub. That page had already locked itself into high position on Google's first page of results, but the vew count wasn't really spectacular.

However that works, Red Elk's contact changed all of that. Prior to his first post, the Hub had received fewer than two dozen comments. Red Elk and I became instant friends, discussing low-priced housing possibilities and survival techniques on the Hub and in via private emails, which we do to this day. Some friends of his joined in.

Those relatively few comments became, as of today, 675. Before Red Elk, this Hub had been my #2 Hit...but now it moved into the #1 spot and took off like a rocket. This week, it became my first-ever Hub to top 100,000 views, sitting at 101,848 at this moment. Even the basic Hub itself has more than tripled in worthy content, featuring a number of Red Elk's experimental mini-domes for "small living", most of them constructed to a state of liveability for $300 or less.

I learned many things from my association with Red Elk. I learned that on the Internet, content--and lots of it--really does count. I learned that after basic Hub content, Comments are King. And I learned that readers really care if you really care.

3. How to Build a Home Single Handed. In August of 2010, just when we could see no way to survive the month financially, a miracle happened. I'd inherited some mineral rights in North Dakota from my father. They'd been in the family "since forever", seemingly worthless yet always retained and passed on to the next generation.

Thanks to U.S. development of shale oil technology, they were suddenly worth something. I'd drawn the long straw.

Lease signing bonus money took the pressure off for a while. It might even let me build us a real house...if I was creative, stingy, and did every lick of the work myself.

Labor costs: Zero.

Enter the hybrid earthbag-walled home we dubbed the Border Fort...and a seemingly endless stream of How To pages detailing the process. Without trying, I became a bit of an "unconventional building guru".

4. Sarah Palin. I've been a rabid, right wing nut, rabble rousing, conservative super-supporter of Sarah's from the morning I walked in the door of our home in Colorado after a night shift of water hauling in the gas driliing boom. The first words out of my wife's mouth were,

"John McCain just announced his pick for Vice President, the Governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin."

"Brilliant!" I exclaimed, and I meant it. Still do to this day.

The turning point Hub-wise: November 17, 2010, the day I picked up a copy of the Governor's newly released book, Going Rogue. For the first time, I had in my hands some real information on Mrs. Palin rather than the smack-attack put out by the liberal media and other members of the Obamanation. Nothing between its covers surprised me in the least; I understand how the lady thinks.

But the book did launch me on my political writing career at HP. It started with a book review of Going Rogue, a simple hope that the Hub might help sell another copy or two...and swiftly morphed into an unstoppable juggernaut of a monster: More than 200 pro-Sarah Palin pages. Pieces on local politics written to assist our local Tea Party folks, of which I'd become an active member. Endless work to document the ABO (Abuses By Obama). Support of conservative candidates in various elections around the state and across the country.

By early 2011, my HubScore was usually somewhere in the 92-96 range. Income had struggled upward to a munificient average large enough to pay for our Internet access, which made my redhead very happy indeed--because it was no longer costing me to spend "all that time" on the computer.

Three very big events took place in the first half of the year, one of them awesome and two of them ugly.

5. The Safeway Shooting. January 8, 2011. Six people are dead and nineteen injured at a Safeway parking lot in Tucson, Arizona. Among the injured, U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords takes a 9mm bullet through the head...and survives, though that was in question at first.

There are many heroes and one deranged loser of a villain: Jared Loughner, who had a bone to pick (as he saw it) with Gabby. The left wing immediately mass-assaults conservative talk shows and blogs as the "cause" of Loughner's insanity. Sarah Palin and I both take down pages (hers on Facebook, mine on HP) that had "targeted" Ms. Giffords (a Democrat) in the 2010 elections, not from fear of the numerous death threats but in respect for the Congresswoman and the other victims.

In the 24 hours that my Hub remains visible on the stats page after deletion, the Google cached version is hit by more than 6,600 views...but I'm a nobody, merely visible on Google and basically unknown. I can't imagine the tsunami of hate that hit Sarah's Facebook page.

6. In March of 2011, HubPages invites me to join the new HubPages Ad Program. I leap at the opportunity, understanding instantly why this is for HubPages ownership and writing membership the best thing since sliced bread. Google AdSense income plummets to around $25 per month...but HP money makes up the difference. Overall, even starting out, I'm a few bucks ahead each month, and I'm deeply optimistic about the long haul.

7. May 5, 2011: Former Marine Jose Guerena, a two-tour veteran of the war in Iraq, is gunned down in his own Tucson home by a S.W.A.T. team there to serve a search warrant. There is nothing right or good about this shooting. I write a Hub compiling available information from various online sources...and the results are high-impact to say the least.

People are not happy about what appears to have been a state-sanctioned murder of an innocent civilian, murder especially because after pumping the homeowner full of lead, the police refused the mortally wounded man any medical attention for more than an hour after he was downed.

Of course, he had by that time bled out and gone to hang out with the angels.

Iraq Veteran Gunned Down In His Own Home: Coverup? That's the title. The Hub received more than 4,000 views in one day at one point. The current tally is 19,009, with new views being added on pretty much a daily basis. There are 535 comments to date.

This one transcends political affiliations, putting an ace reporter for the Huffington Post and Yours Truly on the same side of the scale.

There is more--much more--but the reader is bored already. Bad writing, Ghost. Maybe need a ghost writer.

So: Quicker wrapup:

Along the way, the sneaky and highly effective combination of Hubbers Will Starr, Wayne Brown, and Old Poolman conspired to make a western writer out of me, and Tam the Tall Tale Teller came to entertain us one and all. In September of 2011, view count and income both shot upward, so that where I once struggled to get 200 views per day, 2,000 is now more the norm.

Dollar-wise, that nominal HP income expanded to roughly a quarter of our monthly nut. Once, even, my (always ephemeral) HubScore of 100 turned up in the #1 spot in all of HubPages. And, just in the past few months, my Bakken (North Dakota) job hunting Hub became through the grace of its readers a massive self-help community for those seeking work in the oil boom.

Thus it would seem my course is set. As much by accident as anything else, I began at HP (like everyone else) with nothing, discovering over time that when you care about what you write, readers respond.

At this rate, four more years of Hub production at one per day will undoubtedly produce yet more unforeseen turning points, but it's clear they'll be points worth encountering.

Unlike four more years for the spendthrift President Obama, the worst one term President in the history of the nation. Four more years with the Spender in Chief occupying the Oval Office...that, the country cannot afford.

Remember in November!