Flagships and Using Hubpages
There aren’t many places on the web today, where you can place your highly valued, original content and wait for the traffic to come. Most of these content sharing sites are spammy and don’t contain any non-commercial content. Since I’m an SMO freak and really obsessed with finding new ways to promote our content via various web 2.0 and social media channels when I ran into the flagships idea I couldn’t avoid trying it.
What is Hubpages.com and what is a Flagship?
Hubpages defines itself as an online content publishing eco-system. The “hubbers” (Hubpages users) use this platform to create “hubs” (their own unique pages), in which they upload content. This is a useful and friendly platform to share the world with your knowledge and expertise. Flagships are actually the top-quality-hubs, which follow a long list of requirements and demands. The main idea of the flagships concept is to create unique and valuable content database. Furthermore, flagship hubs are SEO (Search Engine Optimization) friendly, and when built properly, can gain very good rankings, as well as revenue (Hubpages offers incentive based on revenue share with the writers).
How can you leverage Hubpages for Web Marketing purposes?
Hubpages is a great online platform that enables you to create content pages containing videos, images, links, RSS feeds, related tags lists and more. The main advantage of this platform, which is more significant in flagships, is that an excellent and popular content can be promoted independently on search engines, thanks to the friendliness of this platform to search engines.
Suppose you’re a nutrition expert, and you write this great article about the importance of eating in various colors. Creating a flagship in this theme is much better than any article syndication act or even a blog posting. After submitting the nutrition flagship, the Hubpages staff will review your flagship content, and once accepted, they will actively promote the page and you may do the same.
So basically, your high valued content does the work for you! You can reach the top of the search results pages very quickly (suppose they aren’t that competitive) and your target audience will stumble upon your flagship. Since this types of pages are very informative and professional, they have a high tendency to convert later on.
In order to create a flagship, you have to register to the flagships program, choose a unique subject from the subjects’ pool and sign the flagships contract. You can view some finished flagship examples here.
Some Flagships Tips
1 – Write creatively, use unique images, videos and news updates.
Don’t spam or use the flagship as a link farm (in this case, you will also be banned by the flagships program).
2 – Link to other unique and interesting sources that have a real added value to your readers. If your flagship will be a real information source for a high-searched term, you can make great profits.
3 – Let’s not forget the SMO and the full circle SEO strategy! Always create social media links to your new flagship – Facebook it, twitter it and so on… If it’s a niche flagship, don’t hesitate to create links in niche blogs, forums and more. Just be creative about it. Another important thing is that every link to your flagship increases the chance to earn more money.
To conclude, hubpages.com is above all a content sharing platform, which can be used as a web marketing tool, especially when using the flagships with unique and high-quality content. Don’t forget to follow Hubpages requirement and you’ll probably get great results. Of course, there are many other similar content platforms that you can use (such as Scribd.com, Squidoo.com etc) but I’ll write about them specifically next time.
Final Verdict,
The problem with Hubpages is that they have recently become very hostile to their platform being used by any marketers of any products. About one month ago, complaints about whoever is auditing Hubpages websites began streaming in. In my own dealing with Hubpages, I have found their service to be offensive and a waste of time.
For example, I’m an author of a book, seems straightforward enough to offer valuable content to people and if they like what I have to say, they can buy my book. Harassment from Hubpages began on day one. First, they shut down my Hubpage because it was too “promotional”. After I dropped all reference to my book and just gave links to my book selling on Amazon.com with keyword tags, they refused to publish the page because the hyperlinks like “internet marketing” were attempting to drive people away from Hubpages to my book on Amazon… Well yeah! Gee, I’m guilty of that one. The final straw was when they would still would not publish my Hubpage because, now get this, I used a quote in my Hubpage. Here’s the funny thing, it was MY quote!
I think Hubpages is involved in their own affiliate marketing and products and if you try and publish a hub that is in competition to their own in-house work, then they basically nit pick you to death until you give up on publishing your Hubpage.
Time is your most valuable asset for time is the stuff life is made of. Life is too precious to be wasting time arguing with the screener at Hubpages. Several years ago, Hubpages was good. Today it is terrible in my opinion. I’ll never go back to Hubpages and I can’t recommend their service to anyone else. Squidoo is much more marketer friendly and I have not had a single problem getting any of my lenses published.