You've spent some time to create a great Hub about something that is bound to have an audience. Now the question is: How do I get more people to look at it?

Part of getting more readers is having your Hubs show up on the first few pages of HubPages.com. To do that, you need to raise your Hubs' HubScores. To do that, in large part, you need to get more visitor traffic to your Hubs on your own. Significant weight in computing a Hub's HubScore is given to how much incoming traffic it is getting from outside HubPages.

So how do we get more incoming traffic to your Hubs? Here are a few methods that we've found work remarkably well. Try them out, check out your Hub stats from time to time to see how they're working, and see if your HubScore doesn't climb and climb.

Here are our four suggestions:

1. Email links to people you know.
2. Post links on blogs.
3. Post links in discussion forums.
4. Add links to social bookmarking sites.

Probably the easiest way for most to publicize their Hub: email it! Think of the people that might find your Hub useful or interesting to read, and let them know. There are 2 ways of doing this:

1. Use the "email this page" link to the right of your Hub

We've created an easy tool that you can use to send your Hub to people you know. It will even automatically insert your referral tracker, so you can even earn a lifetime referral bonus if the people you email decide to join HubPages and create Hubs of their own (more on that here). All you have to do is include:

• up to 20 email addresses, separated by commas
• an optional message

You can preview what your outgoing message will look like as you type it.

2. Send an email with Outlook, Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, or whatever else you use for email.

Include the full link to your Hub, as well as your referral tracker (optional -- to set up referral trackers in links, visit the "My Referral Trackers" tab in your "My Account" page).

Be sure to tell people to pass the email on to other people that might be interested!

Have a popular blog, or know someone who does? Post a link to your best Hubs on a blog whose readership might be interested in what your Hub has to say.

There are 3 places you can put relevant Hub links in a blog:

1. In the Links section.

This section, typically to the right or the left of the main body of blog entries, is permanent and has high visibility, and because of that, it tends to get a steady stream of high-volume traffic. Putting a link here to a Hub with information that blog readers ask for prevents them from having to dig through blog archives, and it allows the blog owner to earn ad revenue and potential referral bonuses.

2. In a blog entry.

A blog entry that provides an excerpt of text from a Hub (as a teaser) and a link to the Hub offers the blog owner to send traffic to a Hub that will earn ad revenue and referral bonuses, as well.

3. In a blog entry comment.

Comments have very little visibility and generally have the lowest traffic-building potential, but on blog entries that have a lot of comment activity, there might be some potential. Providing a link to a Hub relevant to the discussion can be a source of useful traffic to your Hub.

4. Use trackbacks/pingbacks

Posting a link in your Hub to a blog entry that accepts trackbacks/pingbacks, using the Link Capsule, can automatically generate a link back to your Hub. Read this Hub to learn more about how this works.

Do you participate in an online discussion forum, or an email list? Sharing a link to a Hub that your fellow discussion group participants might appreciate is another great way to get relevant traffic.

Also, put links to your relevant Hubs in your signature--they'll get seen every time you post another reply.

Here are a few examples:

• if you're a member of an email group for new mothers, then sending a link to your review of a particular stroller might attract a lot of interest from other new mothers reading messages in your group.
• if you participate in a restaurant review forum, a Hub of your review of the new Italian restaurant that opened up nearby would probably be received quite well
• if you belong to an online book club, you can share your thoughts on a book in the form of a Hub, and share that link with fellow book club members.

If you're not already a member of a discussion forum, here are some worth exploring:

- Multi-topic discussion forums: Craigslist.org, Yahoo Groups

- Review of local restaurants, hotels and other attractions: Yelp, CitySearch

- Political discussion forums: Left: Daily Kos, Huffington Post; Right: Free Republic, Redstate

- Online book clubs: Book-Clubs-Resource, Reading Groups Online, Yahoo Reading Groups

- Mom's clubs: GotKidsNetwork.com, BabyZone.com, ClubMom

A relatively easy thing to do, but often overlooked. Social bookmarking sites allow you to submit a link to a Web page that you think is cool. You can often tag the link into a specific category (like "politics" or "humor"), so that people looking for new cool stuff on the Web in that specific category can see your link.

After checking your suggested Web page out, visitors can vote whether they like it or not. Lots of positive votes expose your link to a bigger and bigger audience, lots of negative votes expose it to fewer and fewer people.

Once you set up a new account on these services (always free, and doesn't take too long), then you can submit Hubs that you want to promote very easily by clicking on Share It! button at the bottom of the Hub (to the left of the Thumbs-Up and Thumbs-Down buttons).

When you click those links, the social bookmarking site will usually ask you how you would title and categorize the link, and any comments about why the page is cool.

A few more social bookmarking sites that have the capacity to send lots of visitors to well-designed, useful Hubs:

• Netscape
• Yahoo MyWeb: no additional signup necessary if you already have a Yahoo account

And for the really creative...

• Smartpox: generates a unique barcode from a link which you can print out anywhere, and which can be decoded with a camera phone