The learning hubber: week 1

Ok I’ve been hubbing for one week now and the hubby-moon is by no means over. Just thought I’d take a moment to thank some of the people who’ve helped me so far with their fantastic articles. When you join the world of hubbing and blogging there is a pretty steep learning curve (which I am currently hacking my way up with ice-picks and ropes of the written word. It seems to me the key things to get your head around in this game are:

1)     What to write about

2)     How to get traffic

I guess it all depends on what you’re doing here. If you’ve stumbled upon the world of blogging for something to do, or feel that you’ve got information to impart to an online audience then great. You may also be trying to make money which is also fine. In my case I admit it’s a bit of both. Up until now my writing career has consisted of fictional stories and books which have given me hours of fun and more knock-backs than a blind boxer. I have a day job but would love to write for a living so I bit the bullet and decided to write some non-fiction. I hated the idea to begin with but soon realised that it’s just as much fun because when you’re blogging you can use your own opinion, your own take on things, your own humour and talk about things that interest you. On sites like Hubpages your work will likely be viewed by others and may give you valuable feedback. You can make friends, follow other people and share knowledge. At the same time your writing skills will improve, especially if you keep hubbing every day, and you make even make some money. It’s pretty rewarding for a writer who, otherwise, was looking at ways to paper his house with rejection letters (boo hoo .. violins).

Traffic

Call me naive but the whole idea of generating traffic from writing is totally new to me. My brother always used to say “start a blog” but having looked at them I had no idea how this could lead to traffic? Why would anyone read what I’ve written? They don’t even know who I am. Surely they’re more interested in writing their own stuff and waiting eagerly for feedback. Eventually the penny dropped through my inch-thick Neanderthal cranium and I realised that this is exactly why it works.  If everyone wants feedback, and they know that the way to get it is to give it … then they will. Because sites like this are well designed and give you the options to search by topic etc. you soon find yourself contributing and answering questions, simply because it’s cathartic. If I see a question like do-you-spend-more-time-on-reading-the-hubs--or-writing-your-own-hubs--or-doing-both-equally (by lex123)  I’ll be all over it, because this is exactly what I’m going through at the moment. Of course I want to talk about that stuff, and I want to see what others have said too. This is just one example but, believe me, you soon find yourself imparting your wisdom to people all over the place and learning loads from all the other hubbers. There are such a diverse group of individuals contributing to this site that you’ll definitely meet like-minded people. So the way to generate traffic is to create it for others. But this is just the tip of the iceberg. Once you’ve done that you can start using Hubpages URL Trackers to create links between sites. This has the added bonus of giving you a percentage of their traffic too. This is where I must thank Alison_Graham for this fantastic article on url  tracking. There are other articles on this but hers seemed to make the idea click in my head finally. Here it is Url-tracking. The other person I have to thank for my progress with traffic so far, and this guy has a fantastic take on blogging, is howtoguru. I thoroughly recommend his one-month challenge How-I-made-1-000-with-13-hubs-in-a-month. It’s full of really useful tips about generating traffic to your hubs and other blogging tools like social bookmarking which is still new to me and I’m slowly getting to grips with it.

Anyway, this hub is like a diary entry at the end of week one. I’ve learned a heck of a lot from this site and am really enjoying writing every day. But the best part about is the other hubbers because whatever you need to know … they’ll have written about it and are usually happy to answer your questions. Good luck if you’re just starting out.