Tag Archives: San Francisco

HubCamp SF – October 6th!

Great news! The first HubCamp ever, to be held in San Francisco, will be taking place on Wednesday, October 6th, from 6:00 to 8:30pm.

The meeting of hubbers will be held in the Golden Gate Ballroom of the Serrano Hotel, which is right off Union Square and walking distance from the San Francisco bus terminal, ferry terminal, and Powell bus stops.  There’s no registration fee, so all you have to do is get there.  What’s more, Paul Edmondson will be speaking!

At HubCamp, we’ll be showing you how to become an even better hubber- and how to improve your online writing in general.  More speicifically, we’ll be covering the following topics*:

  1. Basic keyword research & How to select topics & titles
    1. basic keyword research
    2. how to select topics
    3. topics and earning potential
    4. titling for search traffic
  2. Writing an effective Hub
    1. basic tips on writing  content for an online audience
    2. the profile of an ideal Hub
      1. text length
      2. rich media capsules
      3. layout variants
      4. comments
  3. Attracting traffic
    1. Basic linking & Driving traffic
    2. Promotion via social media
  4. Monetizing Hubs
    1. How the program works (example, how authors are paid by google)
    2. AdSense overview
    3. Amazon and eBay

*We’re still adding the final touches to our lessons, so if there’s something else we really must cover in this lesson, let us know!

If you’re interested in attending, please email Jason Menayan.  We hope you can make it!

A Visit from thisisoli

thisisoliThis afternoon, HubPages HQ was visited by none other than thisisoli, an Austin-based hubber who is visiting San Francisco at the end of a lovely California vacation with his wife.

thisisoli, a HubPages member of two years now, is the third hubber to visit us at 95 Minna Street.  He had a look at the office, and met the team, after which we adjourned for a great lunch at Osha.

We had a great time chatting, and learned a lot from thisisoli’s superior hubbing skills. He’s especially adept at working with Amazon and eBay capsules, and is looking forward to the holiday season, which can be quite lucrative!

thisisoli shared with us that he had originally joined HubPages looking to set down some backlinks for his wife’s website, My Vegan Planet.  After publishing some hubs, he left the site alone, but noticed after some months that a decent chuck of AdSense revenue was coming from HubPages and decided to give it a more thorough look.  Now, thisisoli has over 175 hubs and is very adept at measuring his success and finding exactly what it takes to write useful, lucrative hubs.

We were all tickled to meet a fellow hubber in person, and we look forward to meeting more of you in the future!

Thanks for stopping by, Oli!

Bike Time Trials In The Office

Last week we decided to fire up a little competition in the office and held some bike time trials to see who could ride around the office the fastest without killing someone else (I almost ran over Larry) or killing ourselves (I ate it pretty hard during a run) in the process. Check out the video below to see who came away with the fastest time of them all. Hint: it was me. 🙂

SF NewTech, Here We Come

One week from now on November 18th I’ll be giving yet another demo of HubPages to hundreds of early-adopting, cocktail-drinking and uber-socializing San Franciscans at SF NewTech. I’m looking forward to getting a chance to preach the HubPages gospel once again, all while better refining my live demo skills. My last two demo opportunities at Snap Summit^3 and SiliconValley NewTech turned out to be great experiences, but believe me, there’s always plenty of room for improvement.

Oh, and I wanted to send out a huge thanks to Myles Weissleder, the official SF NewTech organizer of awesome. Sweet ‘stache.

If you’d like more info on how to join the technology-filled fun, head on over here when you get a chance.

Meet Khevan, the San Francisco street sax player

Today was yet another wonderful day in the beautiful city of San Francisco and as I have done a few times already before, I’d like to continue to post different things, places and people who seem to catch my interest as I do my day-to-day thing here at HubPages Headquarters.

One thing that I love about being in a big city like San Francisco is that if you’re willing to chat it up with complete strangers(which I love to do), you can meet and get to know some truly amazing and interesting people…which brings me to Khevan, the street sax player.

I met Khevan today as I was walking back from grabbing some drinks at the 7-11 that’s a few blocks away and as I walked up to him he was already jammin’ out some sweet-sounding jazz to everyone who was walking down 2nd Street. Of course I had to stop and see what he was up to, which led me to grabbing a quick video of my chat with the slick-dressed street hustler.

Here are a couple things that you can check out after watching the video:

  • He was rocking out some ostrich skin shoes, which I didn’t even know existed
  • He was playing music from a jazz legend named Bobby Timmons
  • I gave him $2 for a tip and he gave me a CD of his jazzy goodness – great deal if you ask me

Just another morning ride into the office

I love working in San Francisco, but one of the first things that I had to get used to when I began commuting from Palo Alto on the train was riding my bike through traffic. It’s pretty amazing how comfortable I’ve become with weaving in and out of cars, buses, trolleys and homeless people while pedaling up and down the infamous hills of San Francisco. Obviously I’m getting pretty used to it considering that I was riding while shooting the video that’s posted below from my cell phone and even though it’s probably not the safest way to travel, it definitely wakes you up in the morning.

Behind the scenes at the San Francisco HubPages HQ

As you can probably already tell, this blog is going to have a very wide range of post topics ranging anywhere from new HubPages features to Hubber(members of the HubPages community) spotlights to random bits of information that we’d like to share with the world. But, as a whole, this blog will help you build up a great all around feel for who we all are and what we’re all like to be around. Well, that’s the goal at least.

For this post in particular I wanted to share some videos that I recorded on my phone over the last week or so. These videos are simple, short clips of different types of people and situations that I found interesting, odd, funny or weird as I work day-to-day here at the HubPages HQ in the beautifully unique city of San Francisco, CA. I’ll add more of these as things stick out to me…which they seem to do quite often.

A Man and His Penny Whistle
This video is of a man names Maury who was playing a penny whistle on the corner by our office as I was walking back from lunch. I had to stop and see what he was up to. Oh, and if you’re wondering, he wasn’t even asking for money – just playing for the fun of it.

An Impatient Trucker
I shot this video early in the morning as a driver of a semi truck was obviously impatient and had somewhere to go. When he realized that he was stuck and had no where to go he started laying on his horn for about 5 minutes straight. If you listen closely you can hear some people yelling SHUT UP! out of their office windows.

A Noisy Day in the Office
There has been people working on an elevator in our building for a couple months now and today they decided to fire up probably the loudest machine that I have ever heard in my life and it was right underneath our office windows. I’m not even sure what this crazy contraption is used for, but my guess would be that it’s a type of pump or something. All I know is that it was loud ALL DAY long. Not that I’m bitter.