Freshen Up Your Hubs

In recent months, I admit to not keeping up with regular hub releases or even blogging. The Web is very much guided by the latest content, like in showbiz you are only as good as your last show and if you drop out of sight because you do not post content or refresh your content by adding new material you drift lower and lower into the realms of obscurity.

Death if you are an online writer looking for views to generate income.

HubPages does offer us an answer to this problem. A Link to the RSS feed of any Blog out there.

A few days ago, bored with sitting around, I tweaked a couple of my Blogs back imto life. My hub views had fallen from over 155 per day to just 32 per day in recent weeks. Pretty poor you'll admit.

Most of my Blogs are linked by RSS Feeds to my various hubs, so for instance this is linked to my Hubs based on HubPages activities, another Blog on my favorite books is linked to Hubs of book reviews.

Well I posted some new Blog posts over the 19th and 20th  September and the feeds kicked in pretty quickly. Thus feeding new content to several hubs at once.

Today, 21st September the hub gviews on my statistics page are rising, A few minutes ago the views for the last 24 hours stood at 69 that is an approximate 120% increase in a few hours.

To the Search Engines the hubs have new content and so worthy of a look. Most of those new views may be search engine spiders but at least the hubs are being viewed and so will possibly climb in the search engine library rankings and appear on results pages.

Building a Blog and linking it back to your Hub by an RSS feed is a simple and effective way of updating several HubPages at one time without incurring a penalty of having duplicate content.

Try it just create a Blogger.com or Wordpress.com account then consider putting your Blog into Technorati.com database for a wider audience.

Then watch your readership grow!

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Yahoo Article How I Became a US Citizen

I became a US Citizen in December 2010.  My path to US Citizenship was quite straightforward.

I have heard of the experience taking several years and taking tens of thousands of dollars.

I spent less than $2,000 on my citizenship application and it was completed in less than four months, just fourteen weeks from initial downloading of the paperwork to attending a swearing in ceremony.

To read how I did this My Path to US Citizenship CLICK HERE

Yahoo! Voices Getting Better

Last December, Yahoo! Contributor Network (YCN) changed its name to Yahoo! Voices and instigated a new level of editorial control. Writers could no longer post articles directly but had to submit their work to be examined by a team of editors
Last week I submitted two articles. One on my experience becoming a US citizen the other a summertime poem.

I submitted them both on Sunday June 3, and within 48 hours I was offered a cash payment for my US citizenship article and it was published. The Summertime poem took just 24 hours longer to publish, that on a display payment basis.

Yahoo! Voices seems to be getting its act together. Times for reviewing have been getting faster particularly in the last month. Whether this is due to increased numbers of reviewers or dropping numbers of submitted articles I don't know.

I do know however that it is good news for writers and a vast improvement over the situation six months ago.

More Promotional Hubs?

Is it just me finding them or are there a growing number of product promotional Hubs appearing?

This last week I have found hubs appearing that have been mere promotional tools for various products. By this I don't mean product reviews. I mean here is a link to this medication or this body product.

I am fearful that if HubPages is seen by marketers as a place to merely post product ads, then this will seriously affect HubPages reputation as a online arena for serious writing.

I would advocate that serious users of HubPages flag this sort of content and move to oust these marketers before they destroy our community.

Who is Spandau Ballet!

This weekend I did a little fun hub.

We can just write so much about making money and pondering the forthcoming Presidential Election.

This Hub was pure fluff, vane of me and meant to show some fun. In my time I have been a "New Romantic", a wild party animal inside with a passion for nice suits and good shoes.

Try a look at this little fun hub.

Spandau Ballet; Bananarama; Rick Astley et al: My Favorite Five Hit Songs of the Eighties

The answer to the shocking question. Spandau Ballet was and is a band from England. Though formed in the late 1970's they were the core band for the "New Rommantic" movement in music.  Famous for their songs 'True' and 'Gold' my choice on the above hub is one of their lesser known song, 'Muscle Bound' but that may be due to the included Video for the song, which is possibly one of the worst song promo videos ever made.

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Get "Expert" Backlinks to Drive Traffic.

One way to drive traffic to your hubs is to create backlinks.

So What are Backlinks?

Backlinks are permanent links from other sites, hubs, blogs, or websites.

A quick form of backlink to your hub would be a link from Twitter or Facebook.  These are ok to a point. You may gain short term traffic while the link is up, but they are only visible to a limited number of people, unleess your friends and followers have a habit of forwarding and re-tweeting.

Those links then soon disappear and you have enjoyed a brief moment of increased viewing.

Better Backlinks:

The best back lins are in the form of permanent links from "Expert" websites. These links are beloved of the search engines, but How would you get an expert website to link to your hubs?

Simple: Create your own expert website, in the form of a blog or website.

Create a blog or website which is very specific to one small niche group of viewers.

Post on this regularly, link to your hubs, also very tightly grouped to the main niche of your blog or website.

As your blog or website matures, after three months at least, the Search Engines see it as maturing and with so many links it becomes "expert".

So here is an example.

You write a hub on trainspotting.

Your hub gets a few views from friends and goes away down the ranks.

So you build a hub on trainspotting.

Here you post lots of information on trains, where a particular engine or train will be.

It is watched by Google and the other Search engines and you get some good views, a few dozen per day.

As you build this blog or website, you post more hubs on trainspotting.

You link your blog to hubs and vice verdsa.

The Search Engines see all this two way traffic and you can now after a month or two add a listing on Technoratti, the blog catalogue.

Traffic continues to build and you will notice as you add each new hub and link back to it from your blog the traffic between the blog and hub maintains a higher level.

This will depend on the topic but as long as you at first maintain a tight niche topic, you will see your "expertise" level keep your SEO rank higher, traffic higher and hopefully revenue higher.

Then as your original niche becomes too narroew, you might need to add supporting ideas, so a train spotter needs his "anorak" what is the best trainspotting anorak? Add a clothing niche. You need somewhere to stay as a trainspotter, add hotel reviews. All the time linking in to your trainspotting niche, your expertise you are building a wider network of connections.

Your traffic will increase and search engines will take notice of you more.

In a real world example, I have a blindness blog alongside this one. I posted a story on that blog about Glaucoma, an easily preventable cause of blindness, within three hours, because of expertise status on the blog, being within the niche and good use of keywords within the niche, the blog post on glaucoma reached number three on Google.  That also caused a spike in traffic on my blindness related hubs on HubPages.

Is this a Worthwhile e-book Proposal?

It seems that I am building the idea for a Kindle e-book in my mind.

Well it is 3:30am and my mind is fully awake and has been for over an hour now. Either that or it is a high from the cold medicine I took yesterday afternoon.

Anyway.

Would anyone be interested in a book about the last ten years of my life. It would start around 9/11 2001. That was a big day for me in many ways. It was a day when I think the first blood clot was forming which would take my vision in my right eye within weeks. It was also more famous for the events in New York City, Virginia and Pennsylvania. It was also around that time that the idea to travel the United States by train began to form. A decision that would dramatically change my life. Forever.

This is not a rhetorical question. Would YOU be interested in the story? Would you want to know a story of How I went blind? How I found my way through the red tape of the US Immigration System to become first a permanent resident then a citizen?How I fought blindness to gain a degree? How I met a wonderful group of people, and how one was so special that I had to fall in love with her and marry her? She has stood by me through many of the last ten years, sometimes praising me on to higher things, sometimes delivering the ultimatums that I need to pull me from the pity parties.

So be honest is there a book in here somewhere?