How I Earned Hub of the Day

I earned Hub of the Day on Sept 29th 2011 for my hub The Best Coffee in San Francisco. In writing this hub, my aim was not to win Hub of the Day, but rather produce a high quality hub with an interesting topic that was relevant to several people and was nice to look at. I also wanted the hub to have a certain amount of utility so people could come back to the hub when they were looking for good coffee in San Francisco. The best piece of advice I can give if you want to earn Hub of the Day is to write honest and interesting material that you enjoy. The rest should eventually fall into place. Hubs that are overly promotional, discuss very common topics, and have poor grammar and sentence structure have a transparency to them and are not as interesting to read. With this hub, I hope to offer advice that one can act on to help move towards the achievement of Hub of the Day. This is the same process I followed in writing Choosing the Correct Running Shoes - A New Thought.

The first step I took toward writing my Hub of the Day was deciding on a topic to write about. I had recently read an article about coffee and thought most people living in or visiting San Francisco might not know where to get great coffee. I live in San Francisco, so the location choice was easy, and being such a food town, I hoped people were yearning for something better than Starbuck's. I also love coffee, so I was excited and knowledgeable about the topic already.

In most of my hubs I like to provide a little background or history. I did some brief research on coffee and San Francisco and summarized my findings in the first paragraph. With the history, I tried to show the progression of coffee in San Francisco and point out the fact that it was still very alive in the city.

I then chose all my favorite coffee shops and created a text capsule for each one. I provided some brief information about each roaster and importantly made a recommendation based on my experience. I believe the recommendation empowers readers to make a decision on where they might want to go. It also gives them a starting point if they are new to the world of coffee.

Even if a reader purchased their specialty coffee, they might not have knowledge on preparation. Brewing method is an important part of enjoying coffee so I decided to include the preferred brewing method for many of these roasters. A brief description of the method with a picture is a good start, but for such a methodical process I thought video was a must.

Next I decided to link to Amazon where one may purchase the proper brewing tools. I do not have an affiliate account with Amazon, but included the product links anyways as it adds to the usefulness of the hub.

Maybe it was my own curiosity, but I also included a poll for people's favorite coffee regions. The poll might help someone make a decision about what coffee to buy, so again, it adds to the hubs utility.

By this point in my hub, my goal was to make readers excited and want to go buy some coffee. The process is much easier when you have a map and know exactly where to go, so I included one with several of the roasters shops.

I added finishing touches by selecting a few images from flickr creative commons and citing appropriately. I also added the link to each roasters website and a few other links to other useful hubs. I played with the formatting a bit to ensure the hub was nice to look at.

In general, I tried to take the reader through the entire process and preemptively answer any questions that I thought would arise. I also addressed several topics including history, location, and brewing method. Apply this process to your own writing and you are sure to get a useful, popular hub.

• Choose a topic that excites you.
• Map out your hub.
• Include background information.
• Make the hub useful.
• Try to preemptively answer any questions that readers may have.
• Address appearance with formatting and pictures.
• Use the capsules available to you.