The HubPages experiment continues. Check out some of my best Hubpages Hubs here.
I hate to say it, but I’ve been sucked in by the whole HubPages concept. For those of you who are not familiar with HubPages, it is an article directory that allows anyone to author webpages using a web-based template. It’s closest competitor is Squidoo, although I find Squidoo a chore, and HubPages a little too much fun.
What makes HubPages so addicting for a professional writer is that the interface is remarkably simple to use and the output generated in the form of a published “Hub” or webpage is attractive and compelling. Additionally, I have yet to have the interface crash on me and cause me to lose any work, which means that I feel comfortable typing directly into the web forms instead of being compelled to type into a text editor like Notepad++ or Word and the copy and paste the results. This makes writing Hubs much faster than on less “trustworthy” platforms.
Still, to reach the full potential of HubPages, one needs to generate more traffic on their webpages or Hubs. There are two ways to go about this within the context of the HubPages system.
The first method to attract more Internet traffic to your website hubs is to get a higher HubRank or Author Score on hubpages. This provides two main benefits. One benefit is that once a writer has a HubRanking over 75, their backlinks have the HubPages nofollow tag removed which means that the links from HubPages actually pass their “link juice” on to the site they link to.
The other important benefit is that HubPages displays “other” articles or hubs to its visitors whether they are Hubbers (hub authors) or just regular internet users directed to HubPages via a search engine. Needless to say, appearing more often in these lists of articles increases the odds of people clicking on your links and visiting your own hubs. Ideally, that visit leads them to read more of your stuff, and eventually bookmark, share, or become a fan of your websites.
Today, when I logged on to HubPages I had an author score of 93. Since one component of any HubRank is “random,” according to HubPages documentation, there is no way of knowing how much of that score is “real” versus how much might be a pumped up random number. However, a 93 is pretty good either way.
Unfortunately, there are many Hubbers with scores of 98,99, and yes even the top score of 100.
How To Get HubRank 100
Getting all the way to a HubRank of 100 takes full participation in the HubPages community. Fortunately, that is pretty easy to achieve, even if you only want to “fake it.”
Commenting on other Hubs, making a few posts in the Forums, and publishing a new hub every now and then is sufficient to qualify as “full participation.” The only thing left to do is have enough traffic, fans, or commenters to get the rest of the algorithm up to the top.
Assuming one is writing quality content for publishing hubs, and that one is not interested in pandering to the lowest common denominator by writing dozens of hubs about hot actresses or pretending to be a hot housewife writing about her underwear, then the only two possibilities for driving increased traffic to the webpages for the sake of increasing the author score are a) building more links to hubs, or b) writing more hubs.
Since the point of my experiment with HubPages is to generate links OUT to my stuff, taking the effort to do anything more than the most basic backlinking to Hubs seems counter-intuitive. Therefore, the solution for most writers looking to earn money writing online is to produce more hubs.
Like I said, generating new hubs can be a quick process for an experienced writer. Assuming that a topic is in mind and the author is already a sufficient subject expert to write on the subject, it is entirely possible to write quality Hubs in 20 minutes or less.
In the past I have attempted to writer 30 Hubs in 30 Hours. However, this schedule leaves no room for error. Since I am unwilling to take any precious time off in order to ensure success, I looked for a new idea that would fulfil the objective of publishing a lot of hubs fast but have some more flexibility.
The result?
The Turbo Lightning HubChallenge!
Publishing 100 Hubs in 10 Days. The additional hubs will generate their own traffic and as a bonus compliment the traffic already being driven to my websites via HubPages.
To go all out, I have decided to sell-out this time, as well. I’ll be writing hubs on the most common “high traffic” or “high search volume” topics. After all, it isn’t like I’m building a whole website to compete for a single high CPC keyword with massive competition. If it turns out that the Hub works at drawing traffic, I’ll have an insiders look at what works for that search term.
If not, the hubs will still draw the eyeballs of visitors already floating around the HubPages community who happen to see a Hub about the best new free techniques for whitening teeth, looking younger, losing weight, and getting government grants for plastic surgery for hot housewives. (Oh, yeah. Now THAT is keyword stuffing!)
Will it work?
Find out. Grab the Make Money Writing Online Feed so you don’t miss a thing.
Google has allowed certain third-party advertising networks called, very benevolently, “Google Certified Ad Networks” to the Google AdSense program. The official party line is that these additional online advertising networks will provide publishers with higher income allowing them to earn more passive income online from the content they publish on websites. The skeptical party line is that nobody sells ads better, or in greater volume, than Google AdWords, and that the 3rd party ad networks have to earn their money by taking a cut of revenue as well, therefore, these new ad networks will only drive down the amount of money webmasters can earn with AdSense advertising on websites.
A lot of information floating around the search engine optimization world is either old news. A lot of the so-called accepted wisdom is based on flimsy, or even non-existent, research. And, much of the search ranking conventional wisdom repeated, again, and again, on websites and blogs isn’t actually relevant to the most common scenarios. 
Am I just that jaded, or am I just that observant?