Gardening in the Land of HubPages

Writing for HubPages is like keeping a garden. To have a healthy and productive garden, there are other tasks at hand that must be done to help your garden grow after planting the seeds. These tasks include watering, weeding, fertilizing and maybe some more planting. In the Land of HubPages, there are also other things that must be done to keep one's hubs ( garden) active and productive. There are times when I just don't have the time, or the energy to sit down and write a hub. But I do have the energy to do some caretaking of my HubPages garden. As I was adding referral links to some of my most recently written hubs this morning, I pondered these thoughts and here's a list of what I have come up with to help a HubPages account be more productive economically.

Write

Yes, it's true, the more hubs one writes, the more productive the garden is, both personally and financially if one wants to write to earn money here. Writing clear, grammatically correct hubs is a very important first step to having a productive HubPages garden, but the continuation of writing is just as important. As your list of well-written hubs grows, so will your earnings. Just as in a garden, one wouldn't plant a row of cucumbers and sit back and think their garden is complete. So, it's not a good idea to just write a hub or two, or ten and sit back and do nothing more. The more hubs, the better articles written, the more productive your HubPages account will be.

Add The Extras

Extras for your hubs would be things like adding pictures, polls, quizzes, and videos. Sometimes one may have time just to write a hub, and add a beginning picture. If in your mind, you have done this, and plan to add more after publication, the important thing is to actually remember to go back and add other items to make your hubs even better. As you continue writing hubs, you will have more and more individual hubs to work with. You may surprise yourself with what some of your beginning hubs looked like after you become a seasoned pro at writing hubs. Make sure to take the time to go back and update or add pictures.

When I write a hub, I always add a few pictures and then click on the photo link a few extra times so I can add more pictures in the future. Keeping the pictures all together in one area makes your hub look more organized. This works well with hubs about subjects that are reoccurring, such as hubs about festivals or holidays, etc. If you go back to the same fair a year after originally writing a hub about it a year earlier, you may have better pictures to add from a second trip to the fair.

Also, maybe you wrote a hub a few months back, but forgot to add a referral link? On your "gardening days" head back and look at your hubs and see what other things you can add. When you click on your account with HubPages, you can then click on the heading 'published, " and it will organize all your hubs in a list of first hubs published to the most recent. That often helps me to go back and see my most recent hubs and check for whether or not I added referral links, polls, etc.

Add Links

Sometimes I forget to add things, like referral links and links to other hubs. When I write a hub, I always click on the link button a few times, even if I don't have a lot of other hubs to link to at the time of the writing. I know at some point in the future, there will be more, so I can add links later if I remember to go back and do my gardening!

Amazon and eBay Affiliates

Being an affiliate with Amazon helps your hubs earn money. Do you have an Amazon link to each hub you have written? If not, when you are going back to review your hubs, that's a good time to add them. To keep up to date with my affiliates, I sometimes go back and change the wording to find a phrase that will have more auction items to offer that go along with my hub. When I first write a hub, I play around with the wording until I find some available items. I don't usually have a lot of time to find the perfect phrase that brings up the most item. But on my "gardening" days, I do have time to do that.

Promote Your Work

Do you promote your work? You post your hub information on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Redgage, Reddit, etc. When you don't have time to write a full hub, or aren't feeling the urge to actually start one, you can always promote your work on some of these sites. This will bring more readers to your hub, and you may pick up some extra followers from it as well.

HubPages Hopper

It's always a good idea to connect with other HubPages writers and leaping the HubPages hopper will help you do that. You may find some very interesting articles that are on subjects you have a strong interest in but never knew anyone on HubPages was writing about that subject. It's a good way to possibly find someone new to follow and helps improve your hubber score. In turn, when your hubber score goes up, it gives you more credibility with your readers, both old and new.

Ask and Answer Questions

Asking and answering questions are both good ways to connect with the HubPages community. When you don't have time to write a whole new hub, doing either one of these will help you stay connected and also help build up your hubber score, and may even give you some ideas for new hubs.

SEO ( Search Engine Optimization)

I am not a pro at this, but I do know that hub titles have a better chance of attracting new readers depending on the words used. Read up on SEO in the many hubs already published on this subject, or head to the HubPages Learning Center to learn more. Having the best SEO title for your hubs will help deliver more traffic to each of your hubs and earn you more money by increasing your views.

The HubPages Learning Center

Don't have time to write a hub but have a few minutes to learn something new? Head to the HubPages Learning Center which is chock-full of information on everything you ever wanted to know about writing for HubPages. There are many topics in the Table of Contents so once you get to The Learning Center, look for a topic and take the time to read up on it. Then use the knowledge you gain to improve your individual hubs. Here's the link to the Learning Center:

http://hubpages.com/learningcenter/contents

Add Beautiful Pictures

Pictures can really add a lot to a hub. If you have a picture next to the title of your hub, the first picture that you add will be the most significant regarding attracting readers to your hub. This picture will show up next to your hub's title on your profile page and can attract interest. The pictures you had available to you when you first started writing hubs may have been quite limited, so it's helpful to go back and recheck them to see if you can either change the first picture or add more. Or find pictures online that you can add through such sites as Flickr, Dreamstime, or Google Images.

Weed Your Hubs

Go back to your hubs periodically and review them for grammar mistakes. Add to the content where needed or maybe take out some of the wording if the hub is too long. In doing this, you will ensure that you have well-written hubs that may attract new followers. It's hard to want to follow a person even if they have good ideas but poor grammar and sentence structure.

Whenever I go back and edit my hubs in this way, I always see my earnings go up for the particular day I edited a few hubs. I have now made it a habit to edit at least one hub every day if I don't have time to write a new hub. Not updating your hubs periodically is like leaving money on the table. And I am sure none of you want to do that!

In Conclusion

After reading this, you hopefully have some new tools to keep in your HubPages tool shed. Using them will help your hubs be more productive for you, and will create a beautiful and financially rewarding HubPages garden!