100 Hubs: Success or Failure?

This is our 101^st ‘official hub’.  It is customary at this point to reflect on lessons that have been learnt from HubPages. 

In order to determine whether an endeavour has been a success or a failure, it is necessary to identify what the objectives were when starting out on the project, and try to decide whether or not they have been achieved.

In 2007 we (that’s Tricia and me, Pat) decided to set up our own website.  We had in mind an online magazine for women that would be different from printed magazines.  We wanted our website to be free, and to be based on ‘real life’, rather than focus on celebrities or feature clothes that only the rich could afford.

When we came up with this idea, neither of us had any technical knowledge nor had we much experience at writing.  We decided that Tricia would figure out how to set up a website, and Pat would research topics to include on the website.

After thought and research, we named our website Look Lovely, and went officially launched the site on 1^st January 2008.

As part of her research, Tricia determined that we must establish a presence on the internet.   She found HubPages, and joined using the name 2Patricias.

We added a page to the website called about the 2Patricias on the basis that the search engines might find us through the link with HubPages.

After joining HubPages we took a few weeks to decide what to do with it.  Our first idea was to recycle articles that we had used on Look Lovely.

At that time we thought that after we had published a feature on our website, we should remove it after a few weeks or the site would become stale.

Rather than delete the pages, we republished them as hubs.

We quickly learned that our website articles were too short to succeed as hubs.  We knew that the average time on our site was less than a minute, and were working on the basis that our viewers had a very limited attention span.

We learned that a successful Hub has more detail and depth than a feature that forms part of the page on a website.

One of our very first hubs was called something like “How to Walk Safely”.  It consisted of little more than advice to carry a personal alarm when walking along.  We tried adding photos and links but it had so few views that we removed it.

Advice from other Hubbers helped us to improve.  Our first attempt at writing a Hub on Chichester was flagged (down) by The Indexer who kindly explained that the Hub was too short.  I then added more text, links and photos, and he responded with a positive comment.  This Hub continues to attract a reasonable number of views every week.

 We retain a  hub about pedicures: Pretty Feet, Prepare to Show them Off.  It you look at this hub you will not see much, as we have removed all the photos, and most of the content.  We keep it ‘live’ through a sort of morbid curiosity.

Some days this has the highest score of any of our hubs, and most days it has the highest number of views.  Overall, it has received far and away the most views.

We have come to the conclusion that this interest is not from people who are interested in pedicures.   We guess that there are people out there with a strange fascination with feet. Maybe there is a whole genre of foot porn – yuck.

Strangely, we get even more views of this hub on or around holidays.  I think we had 40 views on Christmas Eve.  Could this be something to do with stress?

In the early days we wondered how the score for each Hub was calculated. We are still mystified. Our Hub about the Sleeper Train to Scotland has reached the maximum score of 100; other days it sinks to the mid-80s.

We think that the score reflects the number of views, and how quickly the views accumulate. Possibly it also includes length, links, photos etc. Some days we think it is based on our Star Signs.

One of the things we like about HubPages is that from time to time there are new features that can be added to improve Hubs. 

In the early days Tricia wrote a quiz hub that was called something like “Are you a Couch Potato?”  It didn’t work terribly well, so we unpublished it.

Later HubPages added the Poll capsule (or course it could have been there and we didn’t notice).  We used it to put together Women vs. Men in the Kitchen. We count this as one of our successful hubs because it attracted a good number of comments, it continues to receive views and it appears to entertain people.

We have added maps to some of our hubs using the Google maps capsule. Recently we discovered the ‘groups’ tool on the My Account page, and have been using it to make it easier for viewers to navigate from one hub to another.

In our opinion making use of the capsules and tools whenever appropriate can improve statistics.

Our most successful hubs have been based on subjects that we are close to our hearts.  Tricia is a keen sailor (Pat doesn’t like leaving dry land) and wrote our hub about dinghy sailing.

This hub has a consistently high score, and gets views almost every day.  We have observed one odd trait: when the weather is bad we get more views.  Last month we had cold weather and heavy snow and the number of views for the hub shot up!

 We have published hubs on the lessons that we have learned from Hubs, looking at both success and failure.  Strangely, the hub on learning from failure has provoked more comments.

We write for pleasure, which is a good thing, as we do not earn much money.  Perhaps if we took more time over technicalities such as search engine optimisation we would do better.  In fact, we have one example of a hub gaining more views after we did some SEO work.   One of Pat’s Garden Diary hubs made reference to fence panels, and after some research we decided that we should include the words ‘fence’ and ‘panel’ in the title.  This is now one of the more successful garden hubs.

Our most recent hubs have all been episodes of Pat’s novel “Respect for the King”. We never expected that we would make any money by publishing here, but there has been a very encouraging volume of constructive comment.

We have now written hub on what we have learned about fiction on HubPages.

Overall, we think that we have succeeded in achieving the goals we set ourselves when we joined HubPages.  This is in large part due to the support of fellow Hubbers, so thank you all very much.