Accepting a Challenge to Write 30 Hubs in 30 Days

February 15, 2010

HubPages is all about writing and, for most Hubbers, making money by writing.

Making money on HubPages involves writing Hubs that will not only attract people but, more specifically, attract those who will click on the ads.

Clicking on the my account tab on the HubPages Menu Bar will give you tools from HubPages such as the Statistics tool which shows the number of visitors per day/week/month etc. for each Hub Published.

The Traffic Sources tool is another option available on the my account page and this shows where your traffic is coming from and lists this by search engine. By looking at the country code at the end of each search engine listed you can also get an idea as to what countries or regions your readers are coming from.

As for tracking clicks, which is were the money comes from, your Google AdSense reports and Google Analytics (both free tools from Google) will give you this information.
Google also provides a Key Words Tool (see Links section below for link to this) which helps you find key words to include in the body of your Hub article and in the Tags box that accompanies each article.

These suggested words are words that are frequently used by people when searching and, if your Hub contains them, you chances of the Hub appearing higher in search results increase.

However, given that one only receives a fraction of a cent or so per click on Google Ads, for most of us, quantity is as important as quality. The more good Hubs you have the more opportunities visitors have to click on the ads.

About a year ago Ryan Hubfer, who was the marketing manager for the HubPage organization, put out a challenge for people to write 100 Hubs in 30 days. Many found this to be too much of a challenge so a companion challenge of 30 Hubs in 30 days was launched.

A number of people, including Ryan I believe, actually made the 100 Hub goal and many others made the 30 Hub goal.

I started out trying to make the 100 Hub goal but time constraints forced me to drop back to the 30 Hub goal and even that eluded me. I did, however, get ten or fifteen Hubs written and published before being forced to give up the writing pace due to other demands on my time.

Last week fellow Hubber, Darlene Sabella, ended a comment on one of my Hubs by noting that she had just undertaken the 30 Hubs in 30 Days challenge and suggested that I to join her.

Even though the 30 Hubs in 30 Days was a thing started last spring, it seems to have taken on a life of its own and can now be found in the Forums section of HubPages under the name of 30 Hubs in 30 Days HubChallengers .

Anyone can undertake this and in doing so can either go solo or post and discuss your progress in the Forum as you proceed.

While my schedule is still tight as, in addition to my full time job and writing for HubPages, I also teach a class online on the side as well as am in the process of getting a network marketing business off the ground, I felt that the challenge could be beneficial for a couple of reasons.

First, in order to write and post one Hub a day in the limited time I have, I have to find ways to use my writing time and resources more efficiently.  I also have to discipline myself to come up with a way to write shorter Hubs in less time and on popular topics without sacrificing quality.

Second, despite my best efforts, I was unable to achieve my goal last year of bringing my total Hubs published past the 500 Hubs mark.  At the end of 2008 I was close to 400 Hubs published  but missed publishing enough new ones to take me past 500 in 2009.

I accepted Darlene's challenge and started immediately. This was good, but didn't give me time to find ways to become more efficient.

Since I was already very busy, I realized that both writing and seeking efficiency would be difficult and decided to take a short cut by hiring someone to help me write. Since I couldn't afford to pay any one that limited my hiring pool to my family.

My wife turned my offer down immediately. I didn't even get to ask my two collage age sons (known on HubPages as SithPenguin and VadimAkhanov) as they are so busy and away so much that I often have to email them to get in touch with them even though they live in the same house. Besides, they rarely have had time to publish their own Hubs.

That left Chika, our little chihuahua. In addition to being the dog, Chika is also the only one in the house who believes me when I say that I am the master of the house. She was easily conscripted for the job.

We had our first writing session on Saturday morning, the day after I had decided to go ahead with the challenge.  You can view the pictures of our session below to see how our working  relationship started out.