Fine-Tuning Your Hub Experience

This Hub is more of my personal advice on how to improve your overall HubPages experience. This information is geared towards the Hub author who is interested in writing evergreen, content-rich Hubs with good earning potential that will continue to deliver over the long-term. If you use HubPages as a blog to rant in, or to post poetry or serialize a novel, or you're just flooding the place with hundreds of picture Hubs, what I'm talking about here probably won't change much of anything for you.

I've never wanted to have the most Hubs, I've wanted to have the most-efficient Hubs. So here are some more Hub tips and tricks to help you get stronger performance from your present Hubs. This advice works if you are building new Hubs, and it's great for going back and making some changes to Hubs that you wish were performing better. I've also got some helpful information on how to defend your work if you find someone has plagiarized one of your Hubs.

Your individual web presence really does have an effect on your readers. Making sure your profile presents you well does have an effect on whether readers perceive you as a credible and knowledgeable person versus someone just messing around.

Picture - Do you have one? Does it look nice? You don't need to go hire a professional, but having a nice picture helps. Too many people snap something with their cell phone and wind up looking like washed-out vampires who are trying to give us a tour of their nasal passages. If your picture is all choppy with big pixels, you are sending a message to the readers that you don't know what you're doing. If you skip having a picture altogether, it makes you look less professional and says you don't care. If you use a picture of a celebrity, it makes you seem egotistical, so try not to do that one either. Pay attention to file size guidelines too, which are like Goldilocks and the Three Bears: they must neither be too big nor too small, but just right.

Biography - Some Hub authors don't write anything, some put up a sentence or two and some seem to have told their entire life stories. None of those methods is going to work as well for you as a few basic paragraphs. Remember to use full sentences, don't write like you're texting and spell-check too. The more a reader has to scroll down, the more likely you will lose their interest. If you keep your bio short and sweet, the reader can read it and still see some of your latest/hot/best Hubs listed on their screen. That gives you a much better chance that they will go on to read some of your other Hubs and not just look at your profile and then decide to go someplace else.

If you look at your Hub Metrics, you'll see that there's a line labeled "Earnings Potential" and it gives a rough indication of how well you're doing on hitting keywords that have good earning potential. One star and you're not going to be earning much at all, five stars and you've got something which could potentially make you money if you get good traffic and present writing and products worth sticking around and checking out.

Notice that having a five-star earning potential does not automatically make you money. It just means you're in a much better position to make money.

I went through all my Hubs and made note of which ones only showed one star for their earning potential. And then I went to work on the tags. It didn't take long for me to realize that some tags will drop your earning potential like a stone. These tend to be words that are so general and so over-represented on the web that no one pays much for them. They might be accurate for what your Hub is about, but chances are they can be replaced with terms that are much more specific and direct to the topic. Just by eliminating a few tags from various Hubs, I was seeing one-star Hubs turn into two and three stars for earnings potential. And when I watched over the next few months after I did this, my earnings increased.

So you've put in hours of hard work writing content for your Hubs, you took some great pictures yourself for it, and made sure to pick some very specific products that you just know your readers will find amazingly helpful and irresistible. And then one day you see on your Hub Statistic page that there's a little red copyright symbol next to the name of the Hub.

That means your content is appearing somewhere else on the web. Most often this is a sign that some has just irresponsibly and unethically taken your work and reproduced it on their blog or web site. If you remember from the HubPages Terms of Service (you did read the TOS when you signed up at the site, right?) you own and are responsible for your content. So it's not HubPages job to do something about it, it's yours. The fact that HubPages built a tool into their site features that helps alert you is actually pretty ground-breaking as far as web sites go.

So, what do you do next? First, go to the Hub and read the copy notice screen that now appears, as that will tell you where the copied content is appearing. Follow the link, and check it out. Then decide if you want to file an official Notice of Infringement as outlined in the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. When you hear someone talk of "filing a DMCA" with a site, this is what they are referring to. Just like you are responsible for your own content, you're responsible for learning about the DMCA, and how to properly file a complaint. Legally, certain phrases and statements need to be made and specific proof needs to be included.

I keep a form letter on my computer with all the necessary statements and affirmations, and all I have to do when one of my Hubs gets copied is fill in the spots for the website URLs and I can have it sent in about two minutes.

What to do if the site doesn't have a proper copyright page or contact info

Some websites don't have any contact info listed, or don't have a copyright policy posted, making it harder to file a NOI with them. Remember, you can always look up the web site registration at sites like whois.net and find out who owns the site. Sending DMCA complaints to the administrative contact is the next step if the site doesn't have a moderator or way of contacting them. Even if a site has their ownership cloaked, you can file with the company that is protecting their identify and get the content taken down. The next step if that doesn't work is to email the Internet Service Provider who hosts the site. And of course if the site is running AdSense ads, you can file a NOI with Google (it has to be mailed or faxed to them). Google will terminate AdSense accounts of sites that steal work, as it violates their TOS. That's a real attention-getter! You can also request that Google block or remove the offending page from their search engine if the site does not have AdSense.