HubPages Community Dos and Don'ts

HubPages is a wonderful online community for people who like to share ideas. It offers a ready made online writing group where you can meet, get advice, and discuss topics with others who like sharing and expressing their ideas as much as you do. As added icing to the cake, you may also make money for your crazy thoughts through a variety of advertising and product placement options.

HubPages is well-liked by many search engines. Publishing on HubPages gives you the added advantage of getting your content quickly crawled and indexed by Google and Yahoo.

Perhaps the strongest attraction of HubPages, is its vibrant and helpful community. There are many here who take active roles, in helping others who have questions, or concerns. There are always new and interesting discussions going on in the Forums and the HubPages team is always concocting new ways to make life more interesting for everyone.

We should not, however, take this wonderful HubPages community for granted.

All of us can do our part to help make HubPages fun, engaging, and successful.

1. Share your knowledge and ideas for the betterment of the HubPages community.

Be free with your knowledge, and answer questions where you can. I have found that you gain more by helping, than you do by trying to protect your valuable ideas from others. By freely putting your ideas out there, you get everyone excited, and chiming in on how it can be improved.

You also get a lot of good karma points and respect as the go-to person for certain questions and community issues. By offering useful information, you will quickly gain a following of fans who will consistently read, link-to, and comment on your hubs.

An example hubber who has been very successful at this is darkside. He has some great hubs on how to use HubPages tools to effectively build a visually appealing, well laid-out hub. He also pushes the envelop of these tools. For example, he has a very novel hub on how to do html-bookmarking (i.e. link to a particular capsule within a hub) with existing tools.

2. Answer questions and express yourself in a thoughtful and positive way.

There are many ways to communicate an idea. You may choose to use positive, negative, or neutral language.

Which you choose, will depend in large part on, the idea being communicated, your audience, and your goal. The most common goal is to convince others of your point of view. If that is your intent, the best way to achieve this is through the use of positive or neutral language.

People rarely, if ever, respond to negative language, scolding, or insults. When faced with negative language, the response is either to fight back, or to shutdown and stop listening.

When I first joined HubPages, I had a lot of newbie questions. Many people helped me out with my Forum posts, but one hubber really struck me as being especially attentive to the language that she used.

Here is an example where Marisa responded in a nice way, even to my accusatory statement. She identified with me by saying that she also struggled in the beginning, then she suggested a very good alternative to the mentoring idea that I was advocating. Marisa's mentoring lite idea was later implemented by the HubPages administration. Now that is some high-quality positive impact!

Positive language also makes the Forum a friendly place to go to, and encourages people to participate and ask more questions.

If you take the time to phrase your replies in a positive way, more people will listen to you. Think of it as web marketing yourself. If you alienate people with insults, sarcasm, and negative talk, you will lose the goodwill of the HubPages community and it will be more difficult for you to get comments and help when you need it.

3. Seek out new members, offer support and a helping hand.

It can be difficult to start out in the HubPages community, and it can be especially discouraging when your new hubs pull in very few visitors per day.

One very positive thing that you can do is to spend some time browsing other members' hubs, especially those by new hubbers. Be truthful, and give suggestions on how you think their hubs can be improved.

Getting visitors, and comments can be very encouraging when one is starting out.

I still remember that my first comment was from Rochelle Frank and my first fan was desert blondie. I appreciate all comments and all fans, but the first ones are always extra special. Jim10 is also quite awesome because he always takes the time to leave me some cool comments.

Take a small break from hubbing, and give someone new some encouragement, and a helping hand, Good karma always has a way of coming back to you.

1. Don't use sarcasm.

Sadly, sarcasm is a common way of communication, especially in online communities including the HubPages community. Sarcasm is also very prevalent in television shows (especially talk shows and reality shows), movies, and computer games.

Most recently, we see sarcasm being widely used by our political leaders and their advisers. Perhaps that is why many of us do not see that there is anything wrong with sarcasm.

Sarcasm, however, is an extremely dangerous communication style. Its wide usage in the political arena has already created great rifts between elected Republicans and Democrats. More than that, it has severely divided us as a nation. Just like our elected leaders, we sit on opposite sides and spout sarcastic invectives at each other. This only serves to divide us more, to the detriment of all.

Sarcasm may make you laugh at the expense of the victim, but consider that things will hardly seem so funny when you later become the brunt of someone else's sarcastic joke. Sarcasm is similar to the dog humping move. When directed at long-time friends, it is considered dog play and harmless fun. When directed at new or relatively unknown members it may be taken as a dominance move and lead to a fight.

Sarcasm is easily misconstrued, and has the capacity to divide communities and alienate community members. It is best to stay clear of it.

2. Don't engage in personal attacks.

Disagreements and debates are a natural and healthy part of any vibrant HubPages community. Everyone should feel welcome to voice their opinion as well as disagreements.

In heated debates, you may feel tempted to respond personally to an attack directed at your point of view. Indeed, it can be difficult to separate your position, from your person.

Who we are as a person, is in part made up of our various points of views. An attack on our point of view, can very easily be taken as a personal attack.

The best way to deal with personal attacks is to walk away.

For extreme personal attacks which may include racial, sexual, or religious slurs, or threats, report the abuser to the administration. Responding directly to the attacker will only cause the situation to deteriorate, and waste your precious time, and energy on an unproductive enterprise.

Nobody wins in a tit-for-tat personal attack "discussion", and they will never end unless someone chooses to stop playing.

Don't play this game. Your time will be much better spent in working on a new hub!

3. Don't spam, filibuster, or provoke just to get quick attention.

When you first join the HubPages community, there is a tendency to try and get as many friends/fans as possible, in as short a time as possible. Some techniques that people try include:

• Creating controversy in the HubPages Forums.
• Adding as many HubPages community members in their fan list as possible in the hopes that it will be reciprocated.
• Posting one-liner comments like "cool article" on hubs in the hopes that people will notice them.

These techniques do not work. Most HubPages community members will only see you as a spammer, and either report you or block you.

The best method for getting linked in, is to become an active,contributing member of the HubPages community. Do not try overly hard to make friends, but always be open to the possibility. Comment on things that truly interest you, and help others where you can, without expecting anything in return.

If you do this, the friends, and fans will follow and very soon you will find that you are linked-in and getting good ideas and good traffic from the HubPages community.

I love the HubPages community. There are many interesting and colorful personalities here that help make HubPages into an outstanding online community.

So let's throw in our support and do something positive today. Go visit some hubs from your favorite and most helpful hubbers and give them a thumbs up. For extra karma points, order something that you were about to order anyway, through their Amazon or eBay modules. Those special hubbers are the ones that make this place so fun, engaging, and profitable for all of us, so let's give them some loving. They deserve it!

"A united comunity is a stronger one and hubbers should support each other. Let the admins worry about the troublemakers." ~~ [anime_nanet]

Special thanks to all the people who helped me with this hub.