How to reach 50000 page views in 60 days Chapter 8 (final chapter)
It's over.
Damn it. I was running the wrong race.
This is the last chapter of the series detailing my attempt to reach 50000 page views in 60 days. I started the first chapter of the series on 2 August 08 after making a page view of over 100 on 1 August. It was meant to be a personal write-a-thon to develop a routine to write and promote my writing. I started this rather hastily and probably picked a wrong target. Anyway, this is what happened.
The following is a comparison between my statistics then and now:
Number of hubs: 49 (then) vs 81 (now)
Accumulated page views: 1447 vs 5351
Highest HubScore reached: 85 vs 96
Highest Daily Page Views reached: 105 vs 250
So, to wrap up the exercise: it was very difficult to make time to write consistently and even more difficult to engage in promoting the written work. I actually stopped digging my articles after a while, even though I was still blogging about them in my own webpage and my blog at Englishbaby.com. The writing was fun, but not the promoting. While I was trying to learn about writing, improving my page views and hubscores, I had the chance to exchange ideas with many fellow hubbers. This communication has helped me to mix with the gang and get encouraged. I’m no longer the lonely guy who sits in front of the computer and talks to the atmosphere. I am one of this group of people who try to enrich their own and other people’s lives by writing and exchanging the written work. One day, I was thrilled to find myself exchanging comments with top hubbers about my story. This reminded me of an experience I had during a 15km road race five years ago. I was running for fun at the time and was entering fun races regularly. The running community in Hong Kong was rather small at that time and I used to find familiar faces around me throughout the races. This Sunday morning, I was running and feeling well in the race when I suddenly realized that the runners around me were not the usual pack I was with. They looked leaner, meaner and faster. Yet I was keeping up effortlessly. I even managed to overtake a few runners at the final km. By running regularly and seriously, without my realizing it, I had already become one of the lean, mean, fast (by my humble standard) runners. The same has happened to me in this arena for writing. I have become one of the serious pack and found my brief profile appearing between pages 8 and 12 of the “Best Hubbers”. (You can see I have started rubbing shoulders with celebrities.) I started my personal write-a-thon setting a randomly picked page view number as my target. I missed the target all together but ended up in the right place, finding myself writing more regularly and expressing myself more boldly.
What am I up to next?
I shall spend some time digesting the lessons from this exercise and plan ahead. Just like the way finishing my first marathon has kept me running the subsequent 11 marathons, I’m sure you haven’t seen the last of me here yet. However, with the summer now behind us, it’s about time for me to get serious with my running. My personal best time at marathons has not been broken in the past five years. It may just be the right time to break it. Who knows?