This is the second in my series of hubs about the writing site Triond. I will group all these hubs together so you should easily be able to navigate between them.

So assuming you have just signed up and got your free Triond account, it's now time to explore the writer's dashboard. This hub is going to focus purely on the first page you will see on your dashboard, so let's get started and see what we can find.

This is the first thing you will see when you log into your dashboard. Once you start having articles published you will be able to see how well they are performing here.

The top performing ones will be listed individually along with how many views they have achieved during the last day, and how much they have earned for you. It's a good way of keeping an eye on which articles are performing the best - and as such, it can also give you good ideas for future articles. If you write a new one and it doesn't appear on this list, then you should consider changing subjects to see if you can do any better in future.

In short, you can learn a lot from this part of your dashboard. 

Underneath the section on content, you'll see a small section which has the latest Triond news headlines in it.

It's worth keeping an eye on this because not only does it take you into their own blog - well worth reading as it's packed with knowledge and advice - but it will also highlight anything important that you should be aware of as a writer.

This includes the date when the payments are sent out! 

Keep scrolling down the page and you'll come across a list of the hottest articles on Triond at the moment.

This list is real gold, because it tells you exactly what topics, titles and articles are being read by LOTS of people.  And if you read the regular Triond newsletter that gets emailed to you (make sure you do - it's really useful) you will see that some people do appear to make a decent amount of money from their articles.  I have also read about some people getting thousands and thousands of page views, and that will certainly add up to some serious cash.

In short, it's good to read this list every time you log in, as it will help you to get a feel of what you could be writing about. 

Just across from the hot content section you'll see another section called hot tags.

Basically the bigger the word is, the hotter the tag is!  And again this should give you some inspiration for the kind of subjects people are reading about. 

Some Triond users will explore the various sites that Triond runs to read what people are publishing.  But many more people will come across the sites simply to read what is there.  They may have found the content via a search engine - and that's where these tags will win you more page views.

So watch those tag clouds and see where they lead you. 

There is one more thing I want to point out that appears prominently on your main dashboard page.

On the right hand side as soon as you've logged in, you should see a green box that invites you to 'configure your profile page'.  This is what my next hub in this series will be about.  It's very important to have a decent profile page as it provides you with a chance to tell people a bit more about yourself.

And that's exactly what we'll be doing next.  Don't forget that all the hubs I am writing in this series are grouped together, so you can flit between them as and when you need to know more.

Stay tuned for hub number three - and thanks for reading! 

This hub was written by Allison Whitehead, a full time freelance writer living in the UK.  You can visit her website at http://www.allisonwhitehead.co.uk.