My 50th Hub
My Readers/Followers
At 50 hubs I can tell you that there was a lot more to hubbing than I knew when I started. I had signed up for all the programs, Adsense, Amazon Affiliates and Google Analytics. It hasn’t worked as quickly as I would have liked but it has been wonderful to become a member of this community. And my learning curve has been steep. I have to own I am a terrible speller which I didn’t catch immediately. And I have had to revise and edit a lot of things I have written as they were substandard.
These are perhaps the sagest people in the world. They have been exceptionally kind to me and generous in their advice. My followers have really endured my fledgling begins and have been generous to praise me when I have done something even worthy of a nod. So to all my Readers/Followers I am eternally grateful and I will work on being a better write for all of you. I only have 15 to date but they are some of the best people on the Hub.
Fan Letters
I only have three from great writers that have encouraged me to continue. I am not worthy of their praise but it has helped me refocus and continue to write and again, I am eternally grateful.
Feedback
I am not getting much feedback. I believe 13 at the last count. But in time I will probably get more feedback. As I write I also read everyone else's material. I try to always give feedback or thumbs up. I try to stay away form writing negative comments as I feel that is the moderator’s job but I will mix it up on opinion pieces by leaving comments. I try to leave comments often. It has been my philosophy that by being generous to other people on the Hub I will be treated with generosity as well and so far it has worked.
Reading Other Hubs
Each day I try to read ten articles at least. It is a minimum I try to set for myself. I don’t always comment on them. There are really two purposes on this. First, I wish to give back support and feed back to other writers so they might be better writers as well. For instance I suggested a Hub writer from Canada who wrote about taking a flight to the wrong country to put a map in his hub so we might be able to visualize how far off the mark he was. Whether he did it or not is not relevant. I just added my opinion but I also praised what I thought was a really funny article. So I try to hand out even handed criticism. I find something good in each article and then I try to suggest something to enhance each article. This is how I have been criticized and I think it is an even fairly measured way to actually assist writers.
Inspiration
I get my inspiration from many places and I have tried to limit how many photos I use in articles on purpose. I am trying to minimize my up front costs until I am paid for the work I have done. In time I plan on creating art to go with my articles. I am an artist. And I will add photos and hopefully I will learn to nail down the quizzes. I have to say being a researcher has spoiled me a bit for the Hub process. I’m out of my comfort zone writing on the hub. I am used to having an editor that catches all my mistakes and I not good with the quiz format systems I am use to making my own quizzes for qualitative research.
1,200 Reads to Date
At the time this article was written I have been read over a 1,200 times. I would have never expected to have so many readers so quickly. It does show everyone the exposure they can obtain from publishing on the Hub pages.
Adsense
I am still working on this to make it work within my articles. I am having trouble though. I spent all last night reinserting the codes back into the articles to be tracked and I have merged Adsense and Google Analytics. Hopefully it will show up today and start generating revenue.
Google Analytics
I have made several mistakes trying to get his set up properly. First I should have figured out the systems before writing. Although I must say writing has helped me tremendously. I feel much better and stronger since I have been publishing on the Hub. I have also dropped a significant amount of weight. But I should have figured out how everything needed to be set up before I wrote so many articles. Last night I spent the majority of my evening registering each hub with Google analytics and then pasting the codes back into the hubs. I have almost 50 hubs actually it will be fifty when I publish this one if nothing else gets flagged. And it was quite an evening posting URL to Google Analytics and the pasting code snippets back into my articles. HINT: The code for every article is different. You must first register your URL with Google Analytics and then obtain the code to paste into your corresponding articles. I had spent the last several weeks pasting the same code into all my articles which didn’t work. Hopefully today Google Analytics will be up and running on all my articles.
Amazon Affiliate Program
I have set this up but I haven’t registered all my URLs and obtained the appropriate code to put in my articles yet. It is on my list of things to do. I will probably finish this tonight.
My Expectations
I came in with really low expectations from this entire endeavor. I think everyone that does this has those same feelings of doubt. But I have been pleasantly surprised by the goodness of the people associated with the Hub pages and the writers on it. I have associates with folks I truly care for. My first commenter I will also love. He is my sounding board and I truly am appreciative and grateful to him. And while I debate him, I really admire him but don’t tell him. But honestly that can be said of every single person that as written a fan letter or that follows me or that has rated me or even provide comments. I am sincerely grateful to all of you. You have exceed my wildest expectations and I eagerly wait to hear from each and everyone one of you. So as an online community this place rocks.
When will be the next 50?
It is hard to say. There is little point to writing articles if I am not going to be paid whether it is in gear from Amazon or whatever. These are hard economic times and if I had all the money in the world I would do this forever for free. But I don’t. I’ve limits. And if I can’t figure out how to get paid, I might not be able to continue.
I might add that it is quite a quantum leap to go from the publishing world where you have editors to the hub pages. I have found the transition to be very difficult. Where I cursed the editors before in my life, I am missing them now. But I have found an online community that I appreciate greatly. Thank you to everyone that has contributed to my articles and that have helped me to be a better writer.