Top 5 Biggest Distractions on Hubpages Which Can Lead to Failure

I have to admit that I have a lot of love for Hubpages. You can write about almost anything and have the opportunity to earn a living from it. Hubpages is a great place to learn to find your own writing voice. It's also a great place to hone your writing skills and earn some money from your writing, which is always a benefit.

Perhaps, if you are good enough or become good enough, you can even make a living from writing on Hubpages. However, if your goal is to make a full time earning on Hubpages then it is really important you don't get distracted from your Hub goals, otherwise you are likely to never achieve those goals.

It's really easy to get distracted and not even realize. Sometimes I am on Hubpages for hours and then I suddenly "wake up" and realize I haven't actually written a Hub. I have been on the actual site for hours, reading other people's Hubs, answering questions, approving and responding to comments and the list of activities go on.

It's really important that you recognize the biggest distractions on Hubpages and take steps to minimize them so you can actually achieve your Hubpages writing goals.

Here is a list of the 5 biggest distractions I have on Hubpages and how I overcome or deal with them.

The Hubpages Forum is a great resource for information and also for people to share opinions and what's going on round the world. I have seen people spend a lot of time in the Forum, constantly commenting or asking questions.

Luckily for me this is not my biggest distraction but I do find it distracting at times. I manage my time in the forum in a number of ways. I set myself a time limit of how long I can spend in the forum. This may sound harsh but it has helped me to stay focused on writing rather than chatting.

I find it so easy to get distracted answering people's question. I like to get help when I need it so I feel it's only fair to help others when they ask for it. Sometimes the answers I give are very long and hopefully helpful to others.

The question and answers section of Hubpages is a resource I use, instead of asking the same question again or asking in the forum. A lot of times I will type my question into the question box and then check for similar questions to the question I asked. I work off the basis that if I am looking for the answer then someone must have already asked the question before. I find it hard to believe that I am so amazing that I would have thought of something that someone else hasn't already pondered or requested help with. This is actually another way to limit my time in the Forum. Of course, it can mean that I spend more time in the questions section but I get the answers I am looking for faster, so I think that works out well.

If you spend a lot of time giving lengthy answers to Questions then you could increase your income by writing a Hub in response to their question, or limit how many questions you answer a day.

The articles I write are generally based on new TV shows and are fairly popular topics. This can lead to a number of people leaving comments on these Hubs and I like to engage with my audience by responding to my comments. This takes time but I find it rewarding.

It's not necessarily the responding to others comments that takes the most time. A lot of time is spent then following up on the Hubber who left the comment. I end up reading some of their articles; learning what they do well, be it style of writing, how they laid out their Hub or any other nuggets of information they shared.

I also leave comments on other Hubbers Hubs. Sometimes those Hubbers respond and before you now it it's a conversation. It just shows how great the Hubpages community is and how open and talkative we all are. In truth, the comments section almost becomes a Forum type conversation where there is back and forth and great discussion. It's enjoyable and sometimes informative but it can quickly become time consuming.

Hubpages prvovides a number of helpful tools to analyse and assess your Hubs individual performance and also your Hub account performance overall. If you're a maths geek like me then it can be really easy to get almost obsessed with the numbers and constantly check them to see what you are doing well, what you are failing at and where you can make improvements.

You can check the keywords you are ranking for on individual Hubs, how long someone read it, how many backlinks you have and also if you need to tweak the title to help you get more views. There are even suggestions where you can link to other people's Hubs.

Account wide you can see your traffic stats too. You can see where your traffic has come from whether it was from search engines, social media or from Hubpages itself. You can see your graph of visitor numbers and how many Hubs you've written and the list goes on.

Yes, now you truly know how much of a maths geek I am. This stuff would probably put most people to sleep but I learn from seeing and these stats and graphs give me a picture of what's happpening under the hood, which allows me to actually understand what I need to do to improve my performance. However, it can be time consuming and highly distracting.

I have to limit myself to looking at the stats once a day and only perform a full analysis of all my Hubs once a week. That still may seem a lot to you but I am still new and trying to learn what works and what isn't working on my Hub account. In order to do that, I need the feedback that the stats give me in order to move forward and improve.

Although I love looking at numbers, stats and graphs, I have to say my biggest non writing commitment on Hubpages is reading other people's Hubs.

I can read Hubs for hours and I learn so much. I start on a single Hub and end up 2 hours later still reading Hubs and learning even more stuff, and it could be on anything. Hubpages is so addictive in that there are links to more Hubs, within the Hubs or links to related Hubs, at the bottom of the article. I am guilty of clicking these types of links for articles that I want to know more about or I find interesting.

This then leads me to follow more authors on Hubpages and the whole cycle continues.

The only consolation I have with this distraction is that if I am guilty of doing this with other people's Hubs, hopefully people are experiencing the same with my Hubs. This addiction also gives me a clear picture of how to keep people on my Hubs or how to try and keep a reader moving from Hub to Hub. Add to that I learn so much information that I can use that I don't see this as a disadvantage, I see it as an advantage as it keeps my experience on Hubpages fresh and interesting.

If you are looking to make an earning from Hubpages then you have to learn to limit your distractions or find a way for them to aid you in achiveing your Hub goals.