Juiced On Writing

Many internet entrepreneurs, bloggers and internet marketers know of the power of using social sites like Squidoo, Weebly, Hubpages or Tumblr to simply build quick pages – which Google still loves – to provide a back link to your own new website or blog.

There are copious marketing courses and challenges which suggest you do just that. But I went searching for the top content pages on these sites, looking for bookmarkable content for Writers. And I chose my top picks.

Squidoo, Hubpages, Weebly and Tumblr

Note that Weebly, although used in internet marketing, and loved by Google, is a little different than the other Social sites listed, in that it offers more like a social networking website, with various pages to fill of content. Weebly also allows weebly sites to be hosted under people’s own domain name and with custom templates. It is therefore difficult to recognise a business Weebly site, and there is no Listing facility found on Weebly’s site.

Tumblr is a microblogging service which was popular for providing backlinks back to one website – until recently when Tumblr’s terms and conditions consider this to be abuse. Unfortunately, Tumblr does not offer a search facility across all of the tumblr blogs so I can not find other writing tumble logs in that way.

I am therefore left looking at Squidoo and Hubpages for the best writing content.

If you have a look around Squidoo and the others, and do a search for your topic of interest, it becomes quite relevant how many people are using the sites in a marketing attempt to promote their own services or site, yet aren’t offering any well wealth of knowledge on the social site pages. Squidoo and Hubpages are full of websites started off with one 100 word article which (in my opinion) suffer from a lack of depth. And of course, they link out to their new website – or even an affiliate product they hope to sell. The rest of the site is the easy-content supplied by Squidoo et el – youtube videos found with the search keywords, google adwords, maybe some loosely related books from amazon.com…

There is nothing wrong with such practices – but as noted above, Tumblr recently stopped allowing such microblogs to be created for this purpose, wanting to offer truer content to those who read it. And there is nothing wrong with linking back to your website where you have more to offer, it’s just the dead one article pages used for that quick back-link in Google that annoy me.

Squidoo and Hubpages actually encourage this one-article approach. At Squidoo the more lens you create, the more you are rewarded. After fifty lenses, for instance, you might become a “big squid”. People are therefore splitting information across pages micro-niche by micro-niche. These Web2.0 Social Sites are therefore a lot different from any normal website or blog, and providing good content in this arena is a particular skill that I would like to encourage and promote.

Squidoo, Weebly, Hubpages, and others offer any person the ability to provide a quick and working website with some great features out-of-the-box. But for many (and I admit – I do hold one or two of those sites myself) maintaining each site with content becomes more of a burden than actually starting it up.

Which brings me to my search for the best Squidoo, Weebly, Hubpages et el sites for the topic of “Writing” and my attempts at avoiding recommending sites which are basically dead in the water and have been created not to inform, but to link back to somewhere else.

My Process of Selection

Let me first warn you – my process was whole-heartedly unscientific, and it went like this -

1. I simply entered a search for “writing” and took a look at what came up in the top few listed pages.
2. I had to plough through a few top sites which I have no idea why they are listed as top sites, given the lack of content on them.
3. And out of sheer over-internet-marketed-by-obvious-wow-factor-word-choices, I discounted most page headings that asked me a question, or used words or phrases like “easy”, “earn lots of money”, “blitz”, “fast” or “how I…made a million bucks”.
4. I also threw out hubpages listed which didn’t have an image uploaded for them. I know this may be discounting many non-professional writers – but hey – I’m a visual person and like the design aspects also.
5. My brief list below is therefore based on personal choice, and I’m sure I missed some fresh apples in the cart amongst the mush. If you know of any I have missed, nominate in the comments.

Hubpages Best in the Topic of Writing

1. Judy Cullins

My No. 1 recommendation is those (many) hubpages maintained by Judy Cullins. Judy is a writing coach, and uses her hubs to advertise her site, www.bookcoaching.com in a dignified and informational way.

I particularly like her Book Chapters – Organize and Outline with Mind-Mapping page, but she has literally pages and pages of hubpages, based mainly around her interest subject of articles and ebook writing. On her website, Judy sells quite a few ebooks on these subjects herself, but also offers dozens of free articles to use (with her bio credits) on the subjects also.

Going back to Judy’s Hubpages, although it now is obvious that she is an extremely prolific article writer, and quite a lot of her work is up as a Hubpage, leading us to hopefully buy her ebooks from her site, this does not distract from the fact that each Hubpage contains a large article, with some good information, and that Judy appears to spend special care on commenting back on comments. She also notices other writing topic hubpages appearing, and welcomes those pages to the site.

2. Runners Up

• Crash Jones – Crash has three hubpages on Writing.
• Stutin – there are many great writing articles written by women on Hubpages who have also got hubpages on a diverse range of other topics. Hubpage profressionals, perhaps? And Stutin is one of these. However, she’s got a few on writing, and with her location in India, has an interesting slant on some of her other hubpage topics, making her an interesting read. I enjoyed Stutin’s Benefits of Having a Creative Writing Team hubpage.

Squidoo Best in the Topic of Writing

1. Linda Jo Martin – Creating and Using Your Writer’s Notebook

This might seem a very specific choice, and initially I was going to suggest this lens as a runner up. The lens itself is a very thorough how-to with some excellent ideas I might even use. But Linda has also written 50 lens, including Books for Writers – which you can add your recommendations to a growing book list, and there are many others.

2. Runners Up

• Eric Olsen – How I Write : My Methods of Writing and Idea Generation. Eric’s Lens at Squidoo comes up top – literally. Do a search for writing there, and you will find there are hundreds of Squidoo lens on writing, and almost as many groups. But the search shows the How I Write… lens as rated in the 23,000s as against its nearest rivals which are a good 70,000 more in the listings. How did it get there? Well, firstly, the lens gives some good copy on Eric’s own personal methods, and he’s received five stars from seven people. How did he get those? Probably by content, but also the lens has joined with quite a few interesting groups, which has sent those lens readers and owners his way.
• NaNoWriMo – How I Reach 50K in 30 Days & How You Can Too! by Eelkat. I chose this because it’s topical, and up to date ready for NaNoWriMo 2008, and Eelkat is a past participant with a lot of handy tips. The lens is full of information, and runs a little long with additional content, but Eelkat has created oveer 300 lens, and despite this, the NaNoWriMo lens provides usable and timely information for those about to pursue this challenge.

Have I missed any? Yes, I’m not surprised by that at all. Feel free to recommend your own favourite sites containing writing topics, using the comments field below.

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