So You Want To Start A Blog? Consider HubPages

If you’re new to blogging you might consider starting to blog with HubPages. HubPages is a free publishing site where you can write about what you love and not get caught up in the technical stuff surrounding other blogging software like WordPress.

More Traffic

You might get more traffic as a new blogger using HubPages. That traffic might show up quicker as well. Let’s consider how to start blogging with WordPress, the WordPress.org version not the WordPress.com version.

Your Domain Name

With WordPress you have to come up with a domain name. What is a domain name? A domain name is whatever name you want to call your blog’s URL. What is a URL? The URL to your blog is, for example www.MyWordPressBlog.com. You have to buy the domain at ProudDomains or GoDaddy, or any other domain registration site which can be as low as $10.00 a year. Feeling overwhelmed yet? Well you would if you’ve never blogged or started a website on your own. There are a bunch of ways to start a website but we’ll stick to blogging right now, which is a type of website.

You Hosting Account

After you’ve decided on a domain name, you need to pick a site where you’re going to run the WordPress blogging software at. This is called a host site or hosting account. So you read about or do a search on Google for where to host your WordPress blog. You commit to a hosting plan like HostGator’s $10.00 a month plan. So now you know, you’ve already invested $10.00 once a year for a domain name and now $10.00 a month for hosting for a total of $130.00 if you decide to try and blog for a year. Are you still interested in blogging? It’s all about the passion and your audience. Who are you writing for?

More Technical Stuff

Ok, assuming you know how to setup your domain name, understand and possibly set variuos attributes at the domain registration site, now you have to work on setting up WordPress on the hosting site. Typically this is pretty easy to do, but for newbie bloggers who are not technical or have very little cash to pay someone to setup a blog using WordPress for them, this can be a daunting and time intensive undertaking. Albeit, a learning experience.

Some settings at the hosting site might not get set right. The newbie blogger could possibly be introduced to the wildly popular hosting software that help you setup software on a host site called Fantastico or Fantastico Deluxe. Wha-tastisco-What? Holy Cow!! What happened to “Click here to install some possibly useful software you might want to use on your blog.” Or better yet, “Click here to install WordPress.” Nevertheless, Fantastico is a name. Meaningful? No.

To summarize for the newbie blogger so far we have:

• Domain Name
• URL
• Hosting Site
• WordPress – The version you install yourself

Blogging With WordPress

Since this article is supposed to be mostly about HubPages, I’ll list some of the other tasks and attributes our newbie blogger will contend with after starting their own WordPress blog.

• Blog Title
• Blog Description
• Themes
• SEO Themes
• SEO
• Keywords
• Tags
• Plugins
• Code
• Images in Posts
• Videos in Posts
• Audio in Posts
• Difference between Posts and Pages
• Categories and how NOT to end up with a billion of them
• What is a Blogroll?
• No traffic at all – When will the traffic come? How do I know I have traffic?
• When will people comment?
• How do I build traffic?
• Should I monetize my blog from the beginning or later or what? What does it mean to monetize a blog anyway?
• AWStats – Again, What? How do you use it?
• SiteMeter
• StatCounter
• Google Analytics
• Google Webmaster Tools
• WWW or Non-WWW
• What are Plugins?
• Backup your WordPress database – What’s a backup and how the hell would I restore if I needed to?
• Outdated Plugins
• Plugins that are not kept up to date
• On and on and on and on…
• Feeling a bit overwhelmed?
• Actually the above points are turning out to be potential blog posts. 🙂

Now with that out of the way, onto HubPages.

What are HubPages?

Welcome to HubPages, where you can easily publish information on a topic you love to write about. Simple to use, 100% free, HubPages allows you to:

• Publish online with easy, non-techie tools
• Be widely read thanks to the heavy internet traffic of HubPages
• Create ongoing royalty opportunities

HubPages tagline on their home page is Publish your passion. This is a great tagline whether you’re creating HubPages or starting a blog somewhere else.

The first thing you do at HubPages is take a quick tour and sign up. What you’re doing at this step is creating an account on HubPages. HubPages have little help screens to the right of the account page that help guide you through setting up an account. While creating your account you’ll be asked:

• To provide an email address and password to your email account so HubPages can see if any of your contacts in your email address book are already on HubPages. You don’t have to provide this information at this point, you can click on “Do it later”.
• The next screen will ask you if you want to monetize your HubPages using Google AdSense and if you do, provide basic information so your AdSense account is linked with your HubPages account. You can also skip this step and do it later.
• When you’ve finished creating your account you are at a screen where you can create a Hub. What’s a Hub? A Hub is equivalent to a blog Post in WordPress. With HubPages you create Hubs (Posts).
• That’s it. You’re off to the races!!

As you work your way through creating your first Hub page, those little boxes of help sit over to the right of your Hub page helping you decide what to type in where. Kind of nice for newbies or reminders for the rest of us.

Eventually you end up on a page called “Assemble Your Capsules” (see below).

As you might be able to tell, Capsules are bits of information or content you can include on your Hub. If you look at the screen above you will see that there will be capsules on our hub called “text”, “photo” and “comments”. These provide various content that will make up this hub page.

This page is where you can set the priority of your Google AdSense Ads to None, Low, Medium or High. You can also provide summary text that would show up in search engines. So the summary would contain text that relates to your hub and most likely search engines will pick up and index so when people go to search on topics that you are writing about, you might show up on the Google search results page.

At this point you can preview your hub immediately so you can see what it will look like.

If you look to the right of the hub you’re working on, you’ll see all the various capsules you can include on your hub page. You can edit capsules, move them around – up and down, etc.

Here is a screenshot of the text capsule during edit mode:

After you’re done adding capsules of content to your hub and arranging them how you like, you can preview and ultimately publish your hub.

There are some nice features of the HubPages community which include the following:

• Requests – This is where you can look at what type of Hubs people are asking for you to possibly write about.
• Topics – This is an area where you can view various hubs by topic – Diet, Advice, Children, Finance, Internet, etc.
• Hubbers – A place to see some of the best hubbers and what they’ve written about.
• Forums – A place for everyone to hang out and interact.
• Statistics – Allows you to see how many times your Hub has been viewed, your score of your hub and where people are coming from to view your hub.

I would recommend any family or friends who are interested in blogging to take a look at HubPages. It makes it rather simple to get going. Although it’s a far cry from what WordPress offers, it might just be the place for you to get started writing about your passion.  HubPages is a community with rules you have to live by.  See the HubPages Terms of Use.