Personal Tutorial for a Brand New HubPages Author
60For My Photographer Friend
It's a small world. My online friend and I hadn't been in touch for more than a year when he commented on one of my hubs...and I suddenly realized he needed a personal tutorial in order to produce his first hub as a brand new HubPages author. Sure, I could have directed him to all sorts of help at HP (HubPages), ranging from topic-specific help forums to Frequently Asked Questions to any number of excellent articles by other writers.
But no.
See, this fine gentleman knew me. Learning a brand new skill like this--which is not as simple for a newcomer as we "oldtimers" would like to think--can blow you right into "overwhelm" in a heartbeat. Scare you off. Send you running for the tall timber. Leave you baying at the full moon.
We don't need that!
So I emailed him a blow-by-blow tutorial...and then realized I'd just written a hub--my 597th (not counting a few I've deleted over the years), not my first. Here it is.
The First Five Hints
Trouble finding where to type in the text for your first hub? Nothing dumb about you; don't ever think that for a second. New territory, that's all. You ought to have seen me trying to learn how to build websites in 2007!!
1. You clicked on Start a New Hub and entered the title, you said, presumably on Line #1 of your new hub page.
2. Line #2 you can ignore--the URL will automatically fill in, using the title wording.
3. You have to work Line #3 before the program will let you go any farther. I've learned (the hard way) that it's best to FIRST, (a) click on "Browse" in the "Choose a Category" section and THEN (b) click on the actual "Choose a Category" words.
This will bring up a pull-down menu. I recommend (for this hub, since it's about photography) "Arts and Designs". Clicking on that will take you to another menu where you can click "Photos and Photography". THAT will take you to a THIRD menu where you can pick from a number of different Photography topics.
(SEE WHY I RECOMMENDED KEEPING MY TUTORIAL EMAILS WHERE YOU CAN FIND 'EM? EH? EH?) HP has its own tutorial pages, plenty of 'em, but hollering at me is going to be easier for a while, I"m thinking.
4. Line #4 wants you to Choose a Layout. I ALWAYS use the one on the left (at least on my screen), though it means adjusting some positioning vertically a little later. Clicking on the one you want will highlight it...and you're good to go for that line.
5. Line #5 will stop you cold until you put in at least two Tags. I usually type in a couple of words from the title, but you can also click on any of the blue words in the column to the right and they'll hop right into place automatically. Just be sure any Tag you use (I always use at least 10 when I publish, but never more than 30) are words that actually appear in your finished text.
And...Five More!
6. Click on the "Continue" button at the bottom of the page.
7. Click on the "Continue" button that shows up on the next page, also.
8. This will bring you to the truly "magic page" where you can begin cobbling stuff together to Wow the World. In your case--being a crack photographer dude--you might want to go ahead and just leave the Photo Capsule at the beginning (if you used the layout I used). If so, just click on "Edit", decide if you want a border or not, click on Browse, and snag any photo you want to use from the Picture Library on your computer.
9. For Text, click Edit on that capsule...and start typing.
10. To really get things crackling, take a gander to the upper right corner of that page--see that "ADD MORE CAPSULES" section? Whenever you want to break things up a bit more, add a link to a super website, or just play around--CLICK! You can add more photos, more sections ("Capsules") of text, videos, even stuff I don't even wanna know about.
When you're ready to publish, there's a button to click for that (upper left page portion)--or you can simply save it "Unpublished" so that only you can see it but you can go back to work on it at any time in the future.
One thing: If you're hung up at nothing but the title and close the page--or click the Save Unpublished button--it will save it, but with a big, bright, printed warning that this hub may run the risk of being tagged as (gasp!) SUBSTANDARD!!! Oh, HORRORS! The first time I saw a notice like that, I FREAKED. Especially since in my case that usually happens when our generator shuts down without warning (low oil or whatever) and we lose power.
Point being, that warning is "no big" as long as you type some text in before actually Publishing. HP just doesn't want hubs going out to Google and the rest of the world without any real content. Even 15 lines of text or so seems to be enough to keep the Warning Monster happy.
Clear as mud? Hey, I'm only an email away!
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Pam and Ghost say Thank You! Both for the blessings AND for the positive feedback on the tutorial. Especially when it comes to passing on "procedural stuff" like writing a hub, I'm never totally confident I've made something understandable until other folks say so.
Bottom line: You're not so bad yourself!
you are a real pro.
that was very informative and very simple in words.
Thanks! You just double-made my day!
Oh, if only I'd have read this a couple of months ago before I published my first hub! It took me hours (I'm not that bright) to figure out that my profile was not a hub, a hub was not a blog, and somehow they were all separate but connected.
I learned this week that if you use the word "topless" in your title adsense will drop your hub like a hot potato!
This is always a learning process, but what a great hub to help the new additions to our hub family start out on the right foot!
Awesome! Voted up and useful!!! :)
Great tip--not to use the "t-word" in your title, that is. I've stumbled across one or two AdSense doesn't like, too.
It took ME months...okay, make that YEARS to get comfortable with calling an article a "hub". I'd grown up using car hubCAPS as great portable feeders for giving a bit of grain to horses, there were still movies around where the actors were going, "Hubba hubba!" Stuff like that. But a page like this one?
HP finally "wore me down", though. And I always did understand the public relations value of the term--it's proprietary (nobody else out there overusing the word) and does well as an image for an "important center" of things.
God, I wish this had been here when I wrote my first hub. I still don't know if I do it right!!!
Uhhh...175 currently published hubs to your credit and you're doubting yourself??
That's impressive!
In a way, though, I suspect I do know what you mean. It was only LAST WEEK that I finally picked up on TWO separate "cool deals" available as HubPages "things-you-can-do":
1. On the Stats page, that "Published" header over the far right column. Click on that, and your hubs magically arrange themselves in the order in which they were originally published. How helpful! And how blind can Old Mother Hubbard's son Ghost GET, not to see that for 3 full years!
2. When clicking on the "Edit Groups" button and then rescuing your most recently published "orphan" hub by placing it into whatever group, the obvious way to do so is to FIRST click on the "Collapse All" button. Again, for 3 full years I NEVER thought to try that. Instead, with multiple hundreds of entries, I laboriously "worked" each new hub, up, up, up--however far it needed to go to find its natural home.
Are we feeling dumb yet? LOL!
Wow, 10 keywords? and they should be in the text somewhere? Now I need to go back and edit all my Hubs, and add some keywords. Great tutorial.
Have you ever found a way to review all the items available from the edit (after publish) tabs without actually opening each and every article?
Jim, I'm not saying they "should" be in the text--that's just the way I do it.
Sometimes "keyword" might be a little optimistic for some of my tags, though. I just like to tag every page at least 10 times...call it superstition, maybe? Sometimes that's not easy, either. On THIS page, it wasn't, and I ended up tagging some pretty obscure terms: "Picture library" and "full moon", for example.
In cases like that, even the views those terms might pull are unlikely to be looking for a HubPages tutorial. I'm just slinging stuff up there on the wall.
Any tags really SHOULD be in the text, though. Common sense, or at least 'twould seem so: Telling the world (via a tag) that there's content relating to a given term and then including no such content...just doesn't seem right.
Ghost,
Wish I'd read this two weeks ago. I stumbled through how to do everything without reading anything. Learned an amazing amount in two weeks, but this sure would have helped!
LOL Keywords and placement are the first things you learn in advertising. THEY ARE THE KEY ...to the Holy Grail of readers. SEO comes next, but if your keywords are there, ya got it made How in the heck do you think Ghost became as widely read as he is any how???? I will venture to say that his analytics show that 3/4 of his readers come from google, bing or one of the major search engines.
All should look in their accounts and familiarize themselves with what each one of those little statistic buttons are and look at the affiliate links....
Ghost, maybe help is needed in setting those up as well..Your tutorials are wonderful!!!!
DIYWeddingPlanner, I'd have gotten this in place sooner but reckon I just needed the right motivation. It really wasn't until I went through the process line by line to help my friend that I began to understand how much I actually knew about how to do this hub writing thang!
WMH, you're on target with the analytics. That's not true for the new hubs, usually--views from hubpages almost always lead the count for a little while. But for any hub that's "hung around" for a while, you betcha...and most DEFINITELY for any hub that's getting daily views after being online for a number of months.
For my TOP hub (in terms of view count), the numbers are REALLY noticeable: Only .032 percent (3/100 of ONE percent) come from HubPages. Maybe that much more from miscellaneous "non-search websites". And the rest (roughly 99.67%) comes from search engines.
Of those search engines, U.S. Google alone accounts for almost half of the TOTAL views--Bing, Ask, Yahoo, and all the other Googles around the planet fill in the rest.
You've got a good point about the "little statistics buttons". I'll have to ponder that....
I just signed up today, and this is the best, most practical how-to-get-started hub I've found Of course there will still be a lot to learn as I go along, but your advice in this hub has already cleared up quite a few questions I had. Thank you!
Appreciate the appreciation, L-speth. Welcome to HubPages!
Thanks so much (and you, too, Ghost32's photography friend, for needing assistance)for posting this tutorial!! I found it extremely helpful, as I referred to it while in the midst of publishing my first hub. I see you are accomplished in this grand community, and hope to learn a bit just by keeping up with you. :)
You're welcome!
To my other readers: I just checked out Joyalyn1111's first Hub, The Broke Ness Monster...and I'm IMPRESSED. Despite my crammed-to-the-gills-who-needs-sleep schedule, this is one Hubber's page I'll be monitoring regularly.
Great info! I could have used this back 3 years, I think it took me 6 or 8 months to figure this out and being new to computers (2008 first time to have one)I got gifted a computer, laptop from my little brother when he came to try and get me to move to Tennessee and live with him and his wife. After he figured out I didn't have a phone and wasn't going to pay for one, no lines and no cell phone connectivity, and doubtful there would be any he sent his laptop and a satellite rig all set up except the aiming of the dish and running of wires, I got that done with a lensatic compass and an Old Loran System [another program that obama destroyed and shut down, never reported by the media, surprise! your lost and your signal is no-longer broadcasting, 2010] I got my position and used it via northern sky angle I was on line. Turned it on and was on a page for a list of stuff and was with out a clue what the fark, to do next then found the search and started pecking in words and shortly after I got an article from hubpages and then learned how to log on and join so I could comment as I read how to and entertaining stories as well.
All that said I really could have used this hub back then. You did large here for an introduction on the process.
Voted big for a job well done. Peace
Dust
Thanks, Dusty. I've come to realize this really is a pretty good tutorial for beginners and would like to see it be a bit easier to find. No clue on how to do that, though, so I guess it's a matter of being grateful for those that do find it, and let it go at that.
I wish I'd read this hub when I first started, Ghost32. thank you.
You're welcome, John.
Oh thank you so much Fred,this will sure make it easy. If it hadn't been for my grandsons help I couldnt have done it. My grandson sure could have used this yesterday. He finally did it but it took awhile. wow now even I will be able to do it. I didn't understand the tags or line 2, hope they don't bounce me, because I don't think the same words are in my poem.
I'm really happy with the way it turned out, with the upside-down rainbow. Now with your help I'll be able to do another. Than maybe I'll know how to get visitors, the ones who went in gave me good marks and ups. But I think only 10 people even looked. Your the greatest Fred.
thanks Kay. Ps why does it say undo when I give you vote up and all the other above?
Kay, the "Undo" button is a fairly recent innovation here at HP, and I LOVE it. What it does is give you the option to CHANGE what you just did--that is, let's say you clicked on "Beautiful" when the story was perhaps "Useful" but "Beautiful" just really wasn't in it. The "Undo" button let's you correct your mistake...or even change you mind.
Glad the tutorial helps.
Not to worry about "only 10" people even looking. I've got Hubs to this day that have garnered under 20 views, and some of them have been published for years. It takes time...and maybe a catchy title or two, here and there. :)
About your Tags: There's a "Tags" button over on the right side when you call up your Hub. Just click on that, and it'll open up a window showing the tags you have there and/or any suggested tags the computer might come up with.
Then you can delete OR add new Tags as you choose.
Iguanid Fred.I've got lots of tags but I can't even find a quick way to look at Mt hub, I know that I don't have a URL, so maybe that's a problem. I think I can fix the URL
If I can get in
Okay, I'm thoroughly confused. I've literally never seen a Hub of my own that didn't have a URL automatically generated by the computer when I entered the title.
This is such great hub, next time I'll use it. I feel so bad about loosing my hub. But there's no one to talk to ,so I think it was because no URL and me having it published years back. I might be able to unpublished. I was big into a poetry site before 911. So even I Believe would be published. Guess I just have to write more. Poems are fun, don't even have to know where the commas go. Thanks for all the help Kay
Not much point in trying to have your poem (on the other site) unpublished...'cause the search engines have long memories and would quite possibly still show it as "out there" regardless. A page cached by Google can at times have a shelf life of just about "forever".
On the other hand--yeah, by all means, write more! Being able to ignore those nasty commas can be a real plus....
You're welcome, too. Of course.
Earth Angel Level 3 Commenter 16 months ago
Well blessings again to you Ghost and Pam as well!
What a lovely and loving gesture to write such a clear and simple Hub about how to begin with the most basic steps! Your friend may just write his first Hub as a thank you to you for all your instruction and support!
You are the BEST!! EarthAngel!