Here Is A Way You Can Help Yourself and Your Fellow Hubbers

Here is a secret, you can help others and help yourself at the same time. There is a lot of quality hubs on Hubpages. As you are Hub Hopping or commenting on Hubs, you will invariably find some exceptional hubs. These are hubs that grab your attention, they are visually appealing and contain great information. When you come across a hub like this, you think "I am going to bookmark this so I can come back to it."

The fact that you found a hub useful enough to bookmark it or save it some other way, means that you are probably not the only person who will find the hub to be helpful, beautiful, interesting, or whatever reason the hub caught your attention. Your friends on Facebook and other social networks will probably also like the hub. You should share the hub on Facebook, or Twitter, or any other social network that you use.

I am not talking about creating back links for SEO. I am talking about sharing good information with your friends. You do not have to worry about spamming anyone because that is not what you are doing. You are genuinely helping your friends by sharing information that you believe they will like or find useful.

The reason I am making the careful distinction between bookmarking, or back links, and sharing on social networks that you actually use, is because nothing is more likely to be read than an article shared between friends. These people trust you and value your input, information from you ranks high to them. When you only share top quality hubs, you do not have to worry about bothering your friends because your not bothering them, you are helping them discover information that they may not otherwise come across.

Here is what you can do to help your friends on the social networks, help your fellow hubbers, and help yourself at the same time, share that hub with your friends. If you share the hub with a tracker attached, you will enjoy traffic from your friends for the next 120 minutes. Here is how you do it. You have to create a referral tracker, the process goes like this.

From your Hub Pages account click on the Earnings button. Then on the left side of your screen you will see the option that says 'Referral Tracker.' Click on the Referral Tracker and you will come to a screen that shows your automatic referral tracker ID. You can add a tracker ID by entering a combination of letters and selecting the 'ADD' button. You have to select a Referral Tracker that has not been selected by another hubber before, so you may have to try a few Custom Referral Trackers before you get one that is unique.

You do not have to create a custom Referral Tracker, but the one you are given automatically is difficult to remember, so I recommend creating one that you can remember. Once you get a custom Referral Tracker that is easy to remember, keep it in your head and move to the next step.

Now that you have discovered great content that you know your friends will value and you have your custom Referral Tracker, you are ready to share this content. When you are on the Hub Page that you want to share, copy the URL for the hubpage. You can find the URL in the box near the top of your browser. Select the URL, then copy it. Now navigate to your favorite social networking site and paste the URL that you copied into a message to a friend or on your wall if it is Facebook.

Now find the portion of the URL that looks like this: http://hubpages.com/hub/

Right after the 'http://hubpages.com/' insert an underscore and your Referral Tracker. So if your Referral Tracker was NEWBIE, then it would look like this: 'http://hubpages.com/_NEWBIE/' The single quotes indicate what it should look like to you without the quotes.

Now that you feel good about sharing a quality hub with a friend, here is the part that helps you. Hubpages has an excellent referral program. The program works two ways. If someone signs up to create content on Hubpages, you receive 10% of the page views their content generates, for the life of the hubber. The 10% comes out of Hubpages' share, not the new Hubber's share.

Allow me to clarify pageviews and how money is earned on Hubpages. Each time a person views a hub, ads will be displayed along with the content from the hubber. The ads that are displayed at any given time represent an opportunity for someone to earn money. Sixty percent of the time, the ads represent a chance for the hubber to earn money, the other 40 percent of the time, the ads represent a chance for Hubpages to earn money.

If the adds are not clicked on, nobody makes money. (This is not the case for CPM advertising, but to keep it simple I am describing CPC advertising which is what Google Adsense delivers on Hubpages) When a hubber signs up under your referral, Hubpages gives 10 percent of the pageviews to you for all hubs the hubber creates. The new hubber does not lose anything because the ten percent comes out of Hubpages 40 percent.

The other way you can earn money from Hubpages' referral program is Traffic Referrals. Traffic referrals are the pageviews generated by a person that came from a link that included your Referral Tracker. Once a person comes to Hubpages from a link that included your Referral Tracker, for the next 120 minutes you will get a percentage of the pageviews generated by that person as they look at various hubs.

It gets a little complicated here, but I wil try to explain it the best I can. The number of pageviews that are allocated to you for the Traffic Referral depends on whether or not the specific hub that the person views has an affiliate relationship with Hubpages. Suffice it to say that you will be given either 9% or 12% of the pageviews that are served to the person that followed your Referral Tracker, for 120 minutes.

Share Great Hubs

Now that you have the information about how to share hubs and help yourself, hop some hubs, or check out topics that you are interested in and read some hubs related to those topics. When you come across a hub that is excellent, share it with your friends.