Great Hub? You tell me.

Well, after posting more than 700 of them, I hope that I know (or have at last learned) a thing or two about writing an effective — perhaps even great — Hub.

It probably helps to start with a relatively popular topic, one your readers and viewers might find interesting. (That being said, although pawn stars, Kardashians, primary politics, speedy weight loss, and underwater mortgages might all be currently popular topics, I'm not sure how many of us find them interesting enough to wade through yet one more online article flogging them.)

Some consider it an online axiom that cats will always attract attention. But then so too do dogs, vampires, superheroes, money management and anything related to dating or making someone find you really attractive.

As examples, you might instead choose to write about any of the above, or trending social media, or romance fantasies, or middle-aged rock-and-rollers, or animé, or Southern cooking, or really cool smartphone apps, or vintage grandfather clocks, or your favorite movie. Whatever you choose, your subject should have some appeal to a certain definable segment of the vast online audience out there, and should also enable you to write something unique and interesting and emotive about that subject.

I happen to by a voracious reader with many diverse interests. So, to make my own writings eclectically reflective of my personality, I have purposely leapt about among many widely varied subjects: Santa, taxes, The Beatles, divorce, Florence, life as a cat, the Pope, dorm rooms, pasta, Junkanoo, stamp collecting, green roofs, detectives, root canals, lawsuits, reindeer, etc. Don't be afraid to try any topic that appeals to you — chances are it appeals to someone else, too.

And personality is crucial to any successful writing. If you read the great humorists — from Mark Twain to S.J. Perelman to Ogden Nash to James Thurber — you find their own unique personality and style and idiosyncratic world view emanating from their writings. If you can let your reader sense a little of your persona peeping between the lines of your writing, you will have gone a long way to gaining a follower.

To further enhance your Hubs, get out of the ruts of bland, droning writing. Vary sentence length. Enrich your vocabulary. (When was the last time you happened upon a Hub that employed ‘wade’, ‘flogging’, ‘cool’, ‘eclectically’, ‘leapt’, ‘crucial’, ‘idiosyncratic’, ‘persona’, ‘inject’, ‘blithely’, and ‘catchy’?) Stretch your imagination to encompass new ways of seeing things, and then new ways of relating them to others. You’ve got to become a storyteller, if you expect anyone to want to read your stories. Try to inject flow and rhythm and an occasional bit of surprise.

Always use a spell-check and grammar-check program or system. There's nothing more off-putting than running into simple spelling errors, or patches of improper grammar. In fact, it’s a great habit to create your Hubs within a word processing program — where you can rewrite, refine, proof and putter — before transferring them into your Hub window. It's also a letdown when an author displays poor word choice or sloppy punctuation. Review your work carefully before blithely posting it to the internet (where it may reside potentially forever). And far too few writers vary the length and style and character of their sentences — making for dry and tedious reading.

Finally, be sure to spice your Hub with a sprinkling of photos or illustrations and links. On the iPad or laptop screen, Hubs must be visually appealing as well as catchy in text and tone.

Pick up on just a few of these recommendations as you continue to write, write, write, and you can’t go wrong.