HubPages Quick Start Guide for Squidoo Lensmasters

Squidoo Lensmasters can apply their experience to get started quickly with HubPages. Lensmasters have already learned many skills that apply to HubPages. One great thing about hubs is that they are easier to create and edit than lenses. This illustrated hub will quickly walk you through process of getting started.

Click to start the process. This will open a new window that you can place next to this instructional hub.

Enter your personal information.

If you have a hotmail, msn, yahoo, aol, or gmail address, HubPages will ask you to see if any of your contacts are already on HubPages. You may either go down that path or skip this step.

On the welcome screen, click on What are the rules? and then click here (the bottom red arrow.) The HubPages Getting Started page is a must read for all Lensmasters since some things are very different on HubPages.

Rather than creating a hub immediately, I recommend first clicking on my account...

... to edit your profile and enter your personal information.

Now is the time to create a hub. Since you're a Lensmaster, this should be the easy part. The terminology is different so you may want to read the lens on Squidoo vs HubPages. One idea to get started is to create a hub that compliments your best lenses. WARNING! Don't copy content since both HubPages and Google will penalize duplicate content. (Learn from my experience on this.)

Once you've published your first hub, you need to enter affiliate settings since that's a source of revenue on HubPages. They're in your my account area.

If you don't already have a Google AdSense account, sign up using the link on the affiliate settings page. You'll get faster response using this link than going directly to Google. If you don't already have Amazon Associates, eBay Partner, Kontera, and Google Analytics accounts, you need to visit those sites directly to get an account number.

How to setup Google Analytics with Hubpages: Screenshot Tutorial is a good resource that you'll want to come back to in the future when you need advanced metrics tracking.

Now is the time to understand URL Trackers. The HubPages Getting Started introduces the concept but left me with a lot of questions. My questions were answered by How HubPage Tracking Works. For motivation, check out this forum post by SunSeven. At the time (Aug '08) she had 870 referral sign ups. That meant she was earning a percentage of AdSense for 1,750 hubs. You'll want to add URL trackers to all links into HubPages from Squidoo and other web pages.

That should get you started. Have fun and create some great content on HubPages!