Hubpage Challenge 100 Hubs in 30 Days

OK so not a day after I write about diversifying to other Web 2.0 article sites and review  InfoBarrel the great Hubpage challenge blows up all over the Internet. If you have been asleep under a rock and not paying attention it went like the: Court decided to have a new money making experiment: 100 hubs in 30 days. Well Hubpage’s marketing guy Ryan Hupfer noticed this (btw if you are wondering how this sort of thing happens – I have 2 words for you “google alerts” a great way to know what people are saying about you!). Long story short we now have The Great Hub Challenge:

Actually I am crazier than that because  I also want to get to earn 30 points in the May InfoBarrel promotion which will increase my Adsense share there to 90% for June.

A little over a year I was part of a contest on HubPages which basically meant writing as many hubs as possible on a daily given topic. It was a good way to just get stuff out there – and some of those hubs make me money to  this day – some – I didn’t know what I was doing. This time I think I do know what I am doing – so I am going to do some of my own experimenting:

1. Use a new identity and see how long it takes it to rank or get done for spamming. My theory is that most spammers will only publish hubs on the same niche. So my new ID will publish over a range of niches. My new ID will however publish multiple similar hubs on the same niche over the month – I have at least 16 niches to spread out over and I am sure more will come along over the month (which starts Monday 11 May BTW so there is still time to join).
2. See what sort of PR my new ID can get for their profile page – again I believe that having a mixture of topics on the page is a better way to get to PR than being too specialised.
3. I tend to write long hubs – but for this I will focus on shorter “capstone” hubs – the definition of which are: 300 words, 1 image, 2 links to authority sites in a link capsule, 2 contextual links to other hubs, news feed, 10 tags. That is the requirement for one of HubPages own paying programs so  I don’t expect to get hit with “spam” using those guidelines. The requirements also fit nicely with my understanding of SEO and I think this will mitigate that the experiment will see HubPages hit the Google spam filter (see SEO expert Justin for the contrary view).
4. I want to see just how important being social on hubpages matters. I have always felt that “lissie” does well partly because new hubs are emailed to 1000 + fans every time I publish. The new ID won’t be doing any commenting or forum posting so that should minimise the fans to other spammers – I am intrigued to see what this will do to my hubscore and author score.

Where Does HubPages Fit Into My Online Real Estate ?

I use Hubpages for four main purposes:

1. To get backlinks to other sites that  I am trying to push up the search engine rankings;
2. To make money – I still earn most of my eBay and Adsense income from HubPages though that percentage will go down as my other sites start producing;
3. To try new ideas –  I am going to specifically build some hubs to be landing pages for affiliate offers: its a lot easier than developing a mini-site from scratch and I think it might work better too…
4. When I want to write way of topic like Star Trek 11 2009 for example!

So am I mad  – will you join me in this challenge?  There is even a babies version of 30 hubs in 30 days – but that’s just for wussies! Oh and if you are not already a member or you need a new identity feel free to use my referral link!