60 Day Challenge - Principles of Success - Introduction

Online writing can be a solitary endeavor...lets fix that for a moment

(We are only in Day 1 of the Team Building Aspect for the second edition of The 60day Challenge - the following information was created for the initial Challenge but has been slightly modified for this second edition)

An essential aspect of the this inaugural 60 day challenge is the aspect of group promotion. This will probably be the primary motivation of many participants. An important secondary aspect of this experiment is the group encouragement and for lack of a better word, accountability.

The 30 Day Challenge at Hubpages and many similar activities across the internet are very much self managed. This experiment is not much different but we are trying to add an additional element of an encouraging level of group participation. Members of the challenge have taken the personal goal of writing 30 hubs in 30 days and made it very public by creating a log of their achievements and publicly stating their goals and motivations.

With that in mind, a team hub showcasing the participating members of the group and their individual logs was created.

The HubPages 60 Day Challenge Official Team Hub (From Season 1)

If you havent already be sure to swing by and Meet and Greet your fellow challengers

...each hub challengelog should have at least 25 comments!

*There were a few late joiners, they will be added at my first free moment*

You can also find your fellow participants personal logs via the rss tag link "online writing goals"

I hope this level of group involvement will help US all achieve the personal goals we have set for ourselves.

Suggestion: For the course of the challenge take a moment to "follow" your fellow participants, this may prove to be a temporary activity but by following you can easily use the HubFeed to see actions taken by your team members.

some special 60dc Team building tools include a private forum a dashboard and a 60dc/Hubpages Tolbar

As was pointed out by one of our great examples of a goal log, characteristics of goal should include these factors:

• Specific - Create a well defined goal, write it down as a personal act of permanence
  
• Measurable - Create the goal in a way that can be tracked
  
• Achievable- Anything is possible, but create your goals in smaller attainable steps
  
• Public- Let the world know- so they can assist you and hold you to your quest !

I feel our Hubpages 60 Day Challenge Log is great tool that fulfills these requirements.

The 60 Day Challenge includes suggested courses of action, the majority of these suggestions regarding the logs are geared towards allowing our later promotional efforts and creating a single place each participant can communicate and share with each other.

Suggestions:

You should attempt to make a daily entry, even if you do not make an action towards your goal. Over the days you can see what type of events cause you to lose productivity and perhaps make changes or write more on your action days.

Take a snapshot of your traffic stats right now. Post a pre-challenge image, later post a 30 day image and a final image. This will be a great way to see your progress. If you would like to take out specifics most screen shot add-ons include an edit function. I suggest Fireshot for Firefox.

Within the format of each added link in your chronicle include these fields:

The Title as an anchored keyword link ( A general Good practice whenever possible)

The URL in plain text, so your team members can quickly copy and paste your link text.

Summary create a summary, rich with keywords, these will have tons of uses in our promotional efforts, You can just copy and paste your "custom summary" from within your hub, but taking a moment while the idea is still fresh in your head to write a small chunk of unique text is highly suggested.

A Checklist Your own personal method of keeping track of what promotional activities you have done to date, some challengers have created very detailed tables using hub capsules, use whatever is easiest for your own needs.

a limited example of this format is available here at my own 60DC log - im sure team members will create much more elaborate and professional methods that I can learn from too!

Suggestion: During the course of your challenge create a ""Group" and place all of your new challenge hubs into this group. You will then be able to use the drop down menu in your stats page (its called "article group" in the stats window) to quickly see the performance of just this bunch of hubs. This will make your logging process much easier. You can go ahead and make new groups after the challenge is over if you want to have the "forward and back"esque links be more related for perpetuity. Using the groups just to link together some related hubs is a pretty half assed method compared to the rss feed options you now know about and the taking the time to create anchored keyword  text links.

There are no official quality control levels enforceable in the 60 Day Challenge. But there of course some more suggestions.

In a stand on the shoulders of giants type of way, I really suggest making serious efforts to model your hubs after the Flagship Hubs program model. The creators of this site certainly have a very solid understanding of SEO. No reason to recreate the wheel.

(The FlagShip Hub program is not very active - Im merely suggesting you follow the criteria)

How to write a Flagship Hub? - by Lissie

• A minimum of 1500 words, of your own, purely original writing
• A minimum of 3 relevant video capsules (YouTube or Google)
• A minimum of 5 relevant non-copyrighted images
• At least 10 relevant, helpful links to other sources, each with your own 30-50 word description
• A news capsule (or highly-relevant RSS feed), or eBay Capsule if your topic is product-related
• 15 relevant tags, including 2-3 common misspellings or spelling variants (if any)
• Maximum 150 word succinct description of the utility of your Flagship Hub in the Summary Text (uncheck the Calculate Summary Automatically box)
• Excellent thematic and aesthetic organization - please use the Capsule Ordering setup to the right (or something similar) when laying out your Hub—trust us, it will look great when you enter all the content

From Flagship Hub Criteria

Each of their criteria has far reaching effects on your searchability, following this model should do wonders for your rankings.

Some possibly variations - rather than write 1500 words, I write 3 Hubs with 500 words. I than use my analytics information to find long tails over the coming months which I use to add more content to these hubs.

I dont give away 10 outgoing links. If I was to.. I would make them out of sight below my comments capsule.

Critical Input of your team members

Although, as artists and writers most of us are probably a little touchy about criticism, there is a way in which we can assist each other in correcting small errors like typos and broken links. Regardless of your theories on how to best gain "clicks"and "sales"and "viewers" , search engines work via keywords, if your targetting the sale of iPads and you consistently type iPod, you probably will fail. So perhaps keep the glaring criticism into narrative voice and proper grammatical structure and punctuation alone but be sure to point out typos and technical errors to assist your fellow participants.

Suggestion:

Set all of your 60DC comment capsules to "comments must be approved before they appear"

This way, your fellow participants can write notes to you quickly. You can choose to fix things as you please and simply not approve the comment.

As Sufidreamer pointed out, a participant could comment twice, one that is intended for public viewing and one that is meant for deletion.

Why are we writing in related groups?

There are a multiple reasons:

Writing Phase:

Personally, I find the research and contemplation phase of any new topic to be much more time intensive than the actual writing phase. After understanding a new concept it is quite easy to approach the same concept from a multiple different "thesis statements"

Other reasons:

• Test a selection of related keywords in titles
• Be able to create anchored keyword rich links amongst a set of related hubs
• Focus on different commercial or affiliate aspects to see how traffic responds

Example 5 hubs set:

1. One general descriptive hub of a topic (Think Wikipedia) high traffic and conquerable but not necessarily profitable or filled with "commercial intent"
2. A review / comparison hub of 3-5 products ie. iPod vs Zune , Top 5 Music Players ..
3. A specific review of an individual product - adsense monetized and optimized
4. A specific review of an individual product - ebay monetized and optimized
5. A specific review of an individual product- amazon monetized and optimized

Your general hub can act as a funnel that filters viewers with more commercial intent into your more "sales" focused writings. Each hub can be edited afterwards to link among each other with anchored keyword rich text as needed.

Once again standing on the shoulders of giants:

Reason to write a several hubs on one topic - Paul Edmondson -Hubpages CEO

My example was merely suggested as an experiment in lateral thinking, not every ones purpose is purely commercial and one can instead think of "broad"" to "specific", within a related field. But as a small note to "non-commercial" writers, even if your motivation isnt sales - you do have a goal of some sort - is it to get readers to hire you for writing jobs, is it to promote a concept that you believe in (vegetarianism, pro-life, anti-drug., MADD..etc..blah, blah, etc) - Identify the action that you want your visitor to do and work toward s attracting visitors more prone to that action.

Promotion Phase:

The promotion phase will involve some partnering up among participants, as not all of this info will be public. I will just say, most of your good ideas of why w would do such a thing are exactly why - as for the rest of the good ideas, we might as well incorporate those too!

A lot of the tasks we do will involve taking advantage of the wonders of automation, I work online because I like my free time, I love it when computers make my life easier.

When using the 60dc rss feeds inside of your 60DC hubs set the capsule to display the full amount of links (8) and the least amount of info - "one line only" Stick this below your comments if you like. Using a news feed set to "full" with your keywords below can help assuage any concerns you may have with the varied topics that our challengers are using.

The Current RSS feeds:

Every tag on hubpages can be made into a usable rss feed link by adding ?rss to the end of it.

Each tag will automatically have 3 variations latest , hot and best

Our current feed tags are:

taggety

http://hubpages.com/tag/taggety/hot

taggety taggety too

http://hubpages.com/tag/taggety taggety too/hot

taggety taggety three

http://hubpages.com/tag/taggety taggety three/hot

So we have multiple permutations of the feed available - simply change "hot" to "best"and you have a new feed and then add /?rss I dont suggest using the "latest" feed for internal hub use.

Some simple broadcast options:

By using the "latest" feed off of hubpages at the 60DC suggested places, you can automatically broadcast your new entries and the entries of your teammates at various places.Which is why you should do these steps as soon as possible.

http://hubpages.com/tag/taggety/latest/?rss

Get yourself a new email to be used only for sign-ups (As to not have your personal mail inundated)

Gmail.com works great and they like to send adwords vouchers out to multiple emails

Through gmail you can use the Feedburner service-turn our generic feed into your own unique feed and save this for yourself to use in all off our offsite promotions (unique feeds-same links)

If you go the feedburner link above, just enter our "latest" rss feed mentioned above, you can then just click burn - it will let you create a new title - which makes a unique new feed, no worries about any duplication in our promotions!

See I turned the latest feed into this:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/60dc-LatestHubs

same content, new, unique link!

You may want to use the same email as you use for adsense in this step only

You can also monetize this feed through your adsense options if you like!

Get a Twitter account. You wont have to be involved with your account, there are hundreds of services that aggregate and syndicate rss feeds based on twitter posts and google indexes twitter feeds. I dont care if you have followers, I dont care if you never log in agai. just get the account.

Now use YOUR feed at twitterfeed.com - Get an account and set your new feed to post automatically to your account.

( I will dig up or write a tutorial, but its very easy - 30 secs to do)

see an example: twitter.com/sunforged

Set and forget...for now

Is the 60DC Still Open?

No

What is the private forum address?

http://60dc.hubsacademy.com/

Here we can discuss some of our private use of feeds and linking sources, simply register and somehow confirm via your hub account (comment, forum post, mail that you have registered and I will activate your account)

Where else can I find 60DC information ?

Occasionally, information that is not evergreen or of sufficient length for a hub will be published at the 60DC Blog.

http://hubsacademy.com/category/60dc-blog/