Could HubPages Be Worth $1000 Per Month?

I have recently decided that I want to put more effort into HubPages since I noticed in October that my traffic had started to stabilize and actually begin increasing following the Google Panda update earlier in the year. Now that the site has gone to subdomains and the Ad Program, I think the site holds some promise for me as a potential source of online income.

However, I also want to get the best results for my effort and am having an internal debate as to what might be the best decision given the limited amount of time I will have to write. Working full-time and writing can be incredibly brutal physically and the amount of time involved to build an online revenue stream from nothing can be quite substantial.

One thing that I have noticed is that the CPM for the HubPages Ad Program is about 50% than the CPM for my AdSense account which makes me wonder if it might be wise to try to rapidly build my portfolio of Hubs and focus on traffic here in order to more quickly get to the point of monthly payouts.

I have been wanting to creating more WordPress blogs, but my time is getting close to maxed out between HubPages and two personal finance blogs. I am doing all of the writing for one of them which means writing 3 posts per week, about 50-60% at the other one, plus I want to get to 400 Hubs by the end of the year. That will require a pace of about 16 Hubs per month.

When I add it all up, I am expecting myself to write 7-8 articles per week for the entire year. I don't know if I can handle that pace. But, if I could get some steady and reliable income from HubPages, I could build additional blogs using paid authors and gradually make more and more with AdSense and advertising. The time involved would be minimal as I simply would have to edit the articles as I copy and paste them into the blog.

Ultimately, my goal is to develop an online income that is consistently over $1000 per month so that I can use the extra money to pay off some debt. That amount of income would also help out as I get ever closer to retirement and could be used for other expenses once the debt is paid off. Residual income for work done over several years would be great.

There are already some Hubbers that are earning over $1000 per month simply from HubPages. I think that I could do it as well but will simply strive to get over $100 per month by the end of this year which would pay for the author expenses that I am paying now on the second blog. It wouldn't allow me to start a third blog, but if I add any AdSense income to that, I might be able to do it.

There are some other niches that I would like to enter, but I really don't have the level of interest or time to write consistently on those topics meaning that I would want to hire authors. At an estimated $20 per article to get a decent writer, it would take about $160 per month to pay for 2 posts a week on a blog.

Ultimately, I do think that I could get to $1000 per month simply with HubPages, but I would have to grow my traffic to about 3,000 views per day. I have noticed some good growth lately, but I will likely need almost 1000 Hubs total to get to that level of traffic which might take a few more years of concentrated effort. I suppose I will see what this year brings and what happens over the next month or two.