Yep, it’s now official — HubPages is now a top 100 website in the US. Here’s the screenshot to prove it. Thanks to all of you awesome Hubbers who have helped us get to this point and let’s keep on moving up that list!

UPDATE: Here’s a quick video of our top 100 champagne celebration here at the HubPages HQ (you can also watch it over here on YouTube):

p.s. We didn’t let Frank have any champagne, but he did enjoy the cork.

I just rolled in early this morning from Las Vegas where I was spreading the HubPages love at the 2009 BlogWorld Expo, which is basically a huge event (2,500+ attendees) that attracts some of the biggest names in blogging, podcasting, social media and other web stuff. Me and most of the web-geeks who decide to make the journey to Vegas for BlogWorld are basically going for 3 reasons: to meet people, to create business opportunities and to learn some new things along the way. I posted a blog last week before I took off to Vegas and out of the list of people that I wanted to meet I would say that I pretty much got ‘em all covered over the past couple of days — well, except for finding someone who knew where all of the hot slots were. I definitely didn’t end up meeting someone who knew that (and I lost $80 in about 5 minutes that can prove it).

So, who exactly were all of these awesomely amazing and super-cool people that I met during the BlogWorld madness and why am I so happy that I met each of them? Well, if you don’t mind, I’d like to give you all a little run-down of the who left a memorable impression on me, how we hit it off so well and why I will definitely be staying in contact with each and every one of them. This probably won’t be a 100% complete list as I met so many great peeps while in Vegas, but this will give you a pretty good idea of who I ran into and why I’m happy that I did. Oh, and some of these people might have nothing to do with HubPages (no real business opportunity/partnership in the near future), but they still stuck in my mind as someone who was doing some really cool stuff.

How I’ll do this is by listing their full name, a link to their Twitter account and then a brief description of how I met them, why they were so memorable (or talkable) and what they’re up to on the web. If for some reason I left you off, feel free to yell at me in the comments and I’ll add you in if you’re legit.

>> I met Lacy Kemp (@realtweeter) and John Karalis (@redsarmy) on my first of many Monorail trips from the Hilton to the Convention Center (the official tweet). Lacy runs the blog and other social media for all of Real Networks products and not to mention that she became one of my favorite BlogWorld ‘09 dance partners. John is a sports blogger who manages a Boston Celtics blog, RedsArmy.com. He’s just as tall as I am and although we tried to connect for an old has-beens game of horse, it never ended up happening.

>> When I was first hitting the hotel, Eric Berto (@GeekGiant), was standing out in front and that’s when I first realized that I was not the tallest geek at BlogWorld. In fact, he not only had me beat by a few inches, but he was much better looking than me, too (and he wasn’t shy about sharing that little tidbit of information). Me and Eric ended up running into each other several times during the event and I’m still sad that I missed him winning the FatBurger eating contest.

>> One of the most energetic and down-to-Earth guys that I met at BlogWorld was Chris Patterson (@ChrisBPatterson), who is the CEO of interchanges — an Internet/social media strategies business based in Florida. We talked for a while about the crazy world of social media and how we could help each other out. One of the coolest things about Chris is that he somehow got to stay in an amazing loft while in Las Vegas during BlogWorld. You can see a video of the loft below or over here on YouTube.

>> I met the wonderful (and tall) Shauna Causey (@ShaunaCausey) while taking the elevator down to grab some lunch during the first day of BlogWorld Expo. I fired up a quick conversation with her and when I told her how I was starving and was getting ready to grab something to eat, she told me that she was getting ready to go on a tour of Zappos and that there might be a couple of spots open. Well, I told her that I guess I’m going to go hungry a little bit longer because I wasn’t going to miss out on the chance to check out Zappos. The rest is pretty much history after that — we all went on the tour, has a TON of fun and I ended up hangin’ with Shauna and he friends a lot over the rest of the weekend. Shauna was reppin’ Voluntweetup, which is helping non-profits utilize social media to pull off big things.

Shauna doin’ her thing…

>> If you’re looking to connect with someone who not only talks about making a difference in this world with social media, but actually goes out and does it then look no farther than Sloane Berrent (@sloane). I first met Sloane when I randomly crashed the Zappos tour because she’s the one who organized it. From the very first time that I met Sloane she was super cool, smart, sweet and a little fiesty, which isn’t a real easy combo to find these days. I had a great time learning more about and hanging out with Sloane the rest of the weekend and if you want to find out more about what she’s up to you can check out The Causemopolitan or her personal web directory, SloaneBerrent.com. Also, check out the video of her below or over here on YouTube when you get a chance — it’s all about her crazy ‘Cause it’s my birthday’ tour where she raised thousands of dollars for Malaria-fighting mosquito nets. Oh, and p.s. Sloane loved my bromance for one of our mutual friends and she loved to tell others all about it. How embarrassing (yet, true).

Well, that’s a good first list of peeps that I loved meeting and hangin’ with at BlogWorld 2009 and I could go on for a lot longer, but this post has already gotten way out of hand so I’m going to stop. If you’re wondering how I remember all of this info about these people that I met (especially after talking to literally several hundred at my booth), I might just have to give you all some tips on how I do it in a later blog post. Thanks again to all of the amazing people that stopped and talked to me and I’m looking forward to keeping up with with all of you now that I’m back in San Francisco. Oh, and if you’re ever out my way, be sure hit me up — I’d love to buy you lunch (for real).

I’m happy to announce that for the second year in a row I’m heading out to Las Vegas to partake in what I think is the greatest social media event that anyone in the industry could go to — BlogWorld 2009. I know that’s saying a lot and coming from a guy who has been around the social media block a few times let me tell you that this isn’t my first rodeo and I at least mostly know what I’m talking about. Oh, and yes, I’ve even been to the storied South By Southwest Interactive conference (party) and I still think that BlogWorld comes out on top.

I say this because BlogWorld, even though it’s a pretty big event (and will probably double this year), still has a very personal and intimate feel to it and if you ever get the chance to go and check it out you’ll know exactly what I mean. Also, the fact that Rick Calvert, one of the coolest dudes in the blogging/social media/events world started and still gets his hands dirty with the whole thing keeps me confident that BlogWorld will never outgrow itself into something that turns into more of a party than an event that’s worth your time. Of course, don’t get me wrong here — BlogWorld is in Las Vegas, so there will be plenty of entertaining/embarrassing things to see and hear about on Twitter, but at the end of the day BlogWorld will still give you most bang for your buck (still only $495 for a weekend pass, which is all you really need).

So, I guess all there is to say now is who I’d like to meet at BlogWorld while I’m out there, since it really is all about the connections created with the people that are attending and not just about the technology that we’re all talking about and using to connect with each other during the event.

I would like to meet people who:

• are doing some awesome stuff in the web/social media space (that’s pretty broad, I know)
• are potential partners of HubPages and have an interesting way that we could work together
• have cool online services that could potentially be implemented on HubPages as a way to create a win-win for both of us
• are looking for a new way to learn about how the web economy works and would like to generate some earnings by writing about the topics they know about/have interest in
• know what slot machines are hot right now in Vegas
• would like to write/talk about HubPages on their blog/website/video  (we’re doing some pretty cool stuff and we’re growing like crazy)
• would be interested in doing something outrageous in Vegas that I have never done before (we can chat about that later)

If you’re planning on going to BlogWorld, too then be sure to follow me on Twitter — I’m @Hup on there, so hit me up.

It’s been a while since I put on my conference-attending hat and hung out at the Search Engine Strategies down in San Jose. But, just when it had almost left my memory bank forever I got an email saying that a video interview that me and my man Ren Chin of our sister company YieldBuild did during the event was just posted online for all of the world to see. Check it out below or over here on YouTube if you’re interested in witnessing the best interview, ever. OK, maybe that’s a little exaggerated, but it’s not that bad.

About a week ago something caught my eye in the 30 Day HubChallengers Forum. It was a post from a guy named Ryan Kett who seemed to be pretty confident (aka ‘a little bit cocky’) about his ability to knock out several Hubs in a fairly short amount of time. To be more specific, he was asking people what the fuss was all about with the 30 Hubs in 30 Days HubChallenge after he had knocked out 36 Hubs in only 28 Days.

Well, after chatting with him a little bit more over email I quickly found out that even though he sounded a little full of himself in that forum post, he actually had the stats to back up all of the claims that he was making. In fact, he was seeing over 1,000 daily impressions and was only gaining more and more traffic every day.

I decided to ask him a few questions about how he got to the level that he is at today and he gave me some pretty interesting information that I thought each of you might enjoy reading about. So sit back, relax and read about what this crazy Hubber has to say.

1. Tell me a little bit about what you’ve learned since joining HubPages and why you’ve decided to stick around and write.
   

   In the two and a half months since I published my first hub I have found hubpages and its community to be a great place to learn and develop my SEO skills, and I continue to learn every day. I genuinely believe that new hubbers can achieve fantastic results through reading about the experiences of other hubbers and feeding off of their knowledge.

2. You have seen some pretty impressive results very quickly here on HubPages. What is your thought process when you’re publishing Hubs?
   I am now finding that the best way to build traffic fast is to publish as much high quality content as possible, whilst also considering the benefits of internal backlinking. In my latest hub challenge success I have tried to write several articles on the same topic, for example my series of hubs on Facebook, and then offering hyperlinks on each article to each all of my related hubs. This has reflected well on my ‘bounce rate’ which suggests that people are staying within my pages. Not only is each hub bringing in search engine traffic, but they now compliment each other by driving some of that organic traffic across some of my other hubs. Seeing an improvement in my traffic stats was all the motivation I needed to push out at least one hub a day, if I missed a day then I would force myself to churn out two the next day; I expect that I will be rewarded for these endeavors in the short, medium, and long term.
3. So it sounds like you have quite a system and strategy in place, so I guess what I want to know now is how is all of this work paying off for you now?
   About 2 months ago I was looking at less than 100 page views per day, this has increased to a current daily figure of between 800-1000, and rising! Whilst and increasing quantity of completed hubs has played a huge part in this, I cannot emphasize enough the need to focus on quality and taking the time to improve existing hubs. It was not until one week ago that I fully understood the hubpages tagging system, at the time I had 78 hubs and I decided to spend two days of hubbing time going through every single one of my hubs to implement my new found tagging skills. I estimate that this exercise alone has added around 100 views a day to my traffic stats, much of which will be organic traffic driven through the ‘related hubs’ box. In addition, I have seen my earnings suddenly double in the past couple of weeks - I cannot remember the last time I had a zero click day, it must be about 4 weeks now.
4. This has been all great information, Ryan! Any last bits of helpful information that you would like to pass on to other Hubbers who might be reading this blog?
   Although writing is a passion, I have to admit that my primary focus on hubpages is the potential for earnings, therefore I now use the google keyword tool as my main inspiration for finding titles. This allows me to identify decent paying keywords on which to base my article title and URL, almost allowing me control over my potential earnings. I recommend that any new or old hubber utilizes this tool, my highest earning article gets just 3 or 4 page views per day, it has earned me about ten times the amount that my ‘hottest’ article achieves; many of my earliest hubs earned a pittance, something which I now know how to avoid.

Looks like the HubChallenge might of paid off for Ryan, eh?

Thanks to Ryan for all of the great info and if you would like to find out more information on the HubPages 30 Hubs in 30 Days hubChallenge, be sure to check out this forum post to see how you get started!

Just as I told you all about in the post that I put up last week after my first day at the Search Engine Strategies conference, having some fun and interactive way to get some of the attendees interested in your product is key in getting some value out of these types of events. Now that I’ve had another day and a weekend to think about HubPage’s presence at the conference and how my homemade keyword researching game impacted the attendees, I would say that we got a pretty solid bang for our buck. The game gave me an easy way to talk to complete strangers while still being related to HubPages and our overall value proposition.

Of course, there are a few things that I would probably change about how I ran the game (and other things at the event), but overall I think that it worked out well. If you’re interested in hearing some of my random thoughts, the following lists are some random thoughts on what I thought went well at the conference and what I could improve upon next time as far as our conference strategy goes:

Things That Went Well

1. I thought that the game was a great idea and was a great attention-grabber and ice-breaker for the attendees who walked by our booth.
2. The game was a relatively low investment ($100 X 2 days = $200) and since I made the boxes and everything else myself, the overall costs were very low.
3. The game got the attendees thinking about keyword research, which can be an important part of HubPages and it also allowed me to explain what HubPages was all about to every single person who played the game (nearly 75 players total).
4. We used a case study from the 100 Hubs in 30 Days HubChallenge and included it on a one-sheeter that we handed out to the attendees that stopped by our booth. Several of them mentioned reading it and saying that they were excited to give HubPages a shot (nice!).
5. We had some pretty sweet (and pink) HubPages mints (see below) that we were handing out to the attendees and I’m not sure why they loved them so much, but people couldn’t get enough of them. One woman actually said that they were the best free swag that she’s seen at the show! I’m not sure if I would say that (there was some really good stuff), but I definitely think that they’re pretty cool.
   
6. I was able to have a great interview with the guys over at WebMasterRadio, which was a lot of fun (podcast coming soon).
7. I met some amazing people who could potentially help HubPages become even more awesome, which is always great. A lot of people are excited to partner up with us on some interesting things, which is a sign that our name is getting out there more and more as we continue to grow.
8. This conference had a great lunch offering, which is rare when it comes to large conferences. Not really something that I had to add to this list, but something I noticed and wanted to throw out there nonetheless.

OK, so those were some of the things that went well, now for some of the things that I would like to improve upon before I hit up my next conference for Hubpages:

Things To Improve

1. I shared the booth with our parent company, YieldBuild, which made sense and was a great idea, but the fact that we only had 2 people in the booth made for some very long days. Until we grow, I don’t think that we can do much about this (we have 6 employees (James works for YieldBuild and HubPages)), but it’s something that I wanted to bring up.
2. I need to make the game more self-explanatory so that I can actually talk by the second day (and not have a sore throat). I think that I talked more than I have in a looong time during the first day of the conference, which is great, but the more energy that I can save the better and a lot of effort went into explaining the game that I was running. Of course, the explaining is what usually allowed me to tell the attendees all about HubPages, so I guess that I lost my voice for a good reason.
3. I feel like I should have made a better effort to meet more of the other companies that had a booth at the conference. This is easier said than done and even though I did meet quite a few, I still feel like I could have met more. Only having 2 people in the booth makes this pretty tough, too.
4. I feel like I could have made a bigger scene when I was going to give away the $100 each day by making the players be there in person when I give it away so that I could gather a crowd at our booth. Having a lot of excitement at your booth is never a bad thing, and doing it this way I could have probably made quite a scene.

Overall I think that the conference went great and just like with anything else, it takes some time to master the conference scene and as you can probably tell, I have some work to do before I attend my next one. If you have any other conference tips, feel free to share them with me in the comments.

One last thing — I never announced the winner of the second $100 that I was giving away to one of the attendees who picked the right box when playing my game during day two if the conference. There were only 4 people who picked the correct title the second day and the overall winner that I chose from that box was Peter F. Young, who is actually a professor who told me that he teaches his classes all about HubPages as part of his standard curriculum. I thought that this was pretty cool and be sure to check out another blog post that I’ll post all about him later on. Who knows, maybe he’ll end up spending his winnings on his students…I mean, $100 can buy a lot of pizza, right?

I always love going to conferences that have to do with the different things that are part of my work here at HubPages, so when I heard that I was going to have a booth at the Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose this week, I was pretty excited. Obviously search is a very important part of what HubPages has to offer the world, so being able to immerse myself in it for a couple days and to be able to meet some of the big players that are also involved with it (Google, Bing, Yahoo!, etc.) is pretty sweet.

Like I said, one of the cool things about this particular conference is that I’m not only attending the conference, but I also have an actual booth on the Expo Floor for HubPages, which is a great way for us to get some exposure to lots of new people (and potential Hubbers). But, even though having a booth is pretty awesome, you need to realize that there are like 150 other booths that are in the Expo Hall, too so getting te attendees attention isn’t really easy sometimes. To help out with getting some of this much-needed attention and to attract the masses to the HubPages booth I decided to come up with a game that would not only be a little fun, but would also be a great way to let people know just how awesome HubPages is and what we’re all about.

The game that I came up with is based on trying to help people understand how Hubbers can write Hubs that have the highest earning potential possible (which I also blogged more about here). Basically what the game makes people think about is once they know topic they want to write about, how they can come up with a great title and focus that will help them give them the highest earning potential possible. I did this by giving them a main topic area and then 4 possible Hub titles, with their goal being to choose the title with the highest possible potential to get traffic and make them money. The topic area that I used for game was Trade Shows and the 4 titles that they had to choose from were:

• The Best Event Booths For Your Next Conference
• How To Get The Most Out Of Your Trade Show Exhibit
• How To Attract Visitors To You Booth Using Banner Stands
• Finding The Right Table Top Displays For Your Conference Booth

Each of the people who played the game had to choose one of the titles and put their business card in the box that it was taped to. I had a ton of people play the game and thanks to the fact that I was giving out $100 to someone that picked the right title, it created a lot of buzz around our booth. Here’s what the boxes look like:

After yesterday was over I pulled out all of the business cards from the winning title box (the winning title was ‘Finding The Right Table Top Displays For Your Conference Booth’) and the first day’s overall winner was Jennifer Stafford who works for HomeAway down in Austin,Texas. Congrats to her and to the fact that she’s now $100 richer!

Now, who’s going to win the $100 today?

I’m not sure if you ever caught wind of a little somethin’ somethin’ we called the 100 Hubs in 30 Days Challenge that launched a couple of months ago in May, but it was absolute and complete madness and you can get the details of how it came about over here in this blog post and you can see how quickly it blew up into something huge over here in the forums.

All in all, there were nearly 5,000 HubChallenge Hubs created  during the 30 day it was going on and although several Hubbers seemed to get burnt out (100 Hubs is a lot), there were still many Hubbers that stuck through the whole thing and as a result ended up seeing some major boosts in their traffic, earnings and overall HubPages know-how. For example, check our my main man Waynet’s stats before and after the HubChallenge (and he only ended up publishing 42 Hubs):

As you can see, it made just a liiiitle bit of a difference in his overall HubPages performance.

So, after I saw the success (and some of the failures) of the initial 100 Hubs in 30 Days HubChallenge, I decided to create another opportunity for other Hubbers to participate in the same type of challenge, but with a few subtle differences. Here’s what the new 30 Hubs in 30 Days HubChallenge is all about;

1. This time around we’re not shooting for the stars with 100 Hubs, we’re keeping the pace a little more attainable by making it one Hub per day (you can do that, right?)
2. There is no official beginning and end to this HubChallenge, meaning that Hubbers can kick off their own 30 Hubs in 30 Days HubChallenge whenever they feel like it.
3. There is a new forum that was created specifically for the new 30 Hubs in 30 Day HubChallengers, which will allow for every Hubbers that is taking on the HubChallenge (no matter the day they started) to help each other out, to ask questions and to have much more fun while doing it.
4. We have an amazing HubChallenge Team that is on call to help any Hubber along the 30 days of their own, personal HubChallenge. If you have a question or need some motivation to keep pushing through, this team will be there to help you out. The team is made up of darkside (the official ring leader and Australian sensation), Waynet, Julie-Ann Amos, Trekkiemelissa, KCC Big Country and of course I’m all up in the mix, too.

If you would like to join up and take on the latest and greatest HubPages challenge, head on over here and get all of the details on how to get started now!

I’ll tell you what, there’s never a dull moment here in San Francisco, even when you’re simply walking into work in the morning. I’ve been walking into work here lately because I wrecked my bike a few days ago and since I’ve been moving a little slower, I’ve seemed to notice a lot more stuff that’s been going on around me. It’s sometimes amazing the things that I see during one day of work — here’s a few examples for you to check out:

When I got off the train at the SF CalTrain station I noticed that someone was singing and that it sounded like they were singing opera. Well, there actually was a woman singing and she was indeed singing opera. Well, Ava Maria to be exact. I caught this video of her on my cell phone:

Next I ran into a juggler who was getting paid to entertain people while they parked and walked down the sidewalk in from of a San Francisco museum. This seemed like a pretty sweet gig, what do you think?

Finally I ended up at the HubPages HQ and to top off the day, James (one of our designers), decided to show me that he can put his leg behind his head, which he did very easily. Almost too easily…

There’s something awesome about working here in San Francisco that is really hard to explain, but hopefully these 3 videos helped give you a better look at what it’s like. Also, if you want to see my walking route into work, check out this Google Map that I created. Be sure to check out the various pushpins that I added along the way, too.

Today on CalTrain I met another interesting person who I had a great conversation with on the ride up to San Francisco. Her name is Ann Crady and she is the Senior Vice President of Consumer Experience over at Johnson & Johnson’s super popular website BabyCenter.com. It’s a place where any mother (or expecting mother) can go for expert advice and information on all things that have to do with being a mom. BabyCenter also has a social side to it, which means that if you’re making the journey into motherhood, there are plenty of other women who are right there with you to give you some valuable help along the way. I mean, everyone can use some help now and then, right?

This social side of BabyCenter (which was called Maya’s Mom) was actually created by Ann and was aquired by Johnson & Johnson back in August of 2007. Ann is now part of the management team over at BabyCenter and she really seemed excited and passionate about what she’s doing.

Hopefully Ann and I can meet up soon so that I can learn more about BabyCenter and come up with some ways for us to do some amazing work togther. But, until then, you should definitely go check them out and see all of the cool things that they’re doing. Oh, and if you happen to run into Ann over there, tell her that I said hello.