Beyond Writing and Publishing a Blog: Site Promotion

Site Promotion is the key to any blogs’ success

As writers we have something of a dual life, we need to promote our work both online and offline.  We have people who read our work in the “real” world and people who read our online writing. Often, if promoted or marketed correctly these readers will be one and the same.

The main factor in success in a small market is that both connections can make money, but unlike the real world where you can offer something tangible, such as a book you can not do it as easily online.  Online, you are competing with other writers who need to do much the same thing as you do.  They need to write and sell their books to every more savvy readers.  They need to go beyond writing and publishing, and go into networking in a non traditional way.

Writers, for the most part, are not online wizards who are interested in getting a stronger page rank or SEO (search engine optimization), but they are, more often than not, interested in promoting their work online.  To do this, they need to market themselves as a brand and as a professional website.  There are a few simple and effective ways to build and influence your readership into wanting to read and spread your sites.

1) Write great content:

First write a strong blog which is helpful to anyone long after you have published it.  The fact that the post is seven years old, or only a day old doesn’t matter. To your reader what you have to say in this one post matters. Then focus on the next blog post.  The more you write the more people will come.

Stop worrying about what you think readers want to read, if a blog post is short, they have no reason to stay if a blog post is focused on the personal, and not related to them, it’s not as strong a content as it could be.

2) Write on other online article sites:

There are countless online writing websites out there. If there is any doubt as to this, simply do a google search and millions will come up.  What this does is offer choice to you as a writer as to how you can write and publish. This is important when beginning to offer your writing to the online world.  You need to have as many places as you can so that people find you.

A word of caution: Don’t let this be the only place you focus your attention on.  Popular sites now, might not be popular sites later, and this can lead to heartache when a site shuts down.  Over time this has happened and it will happen again. (Update: Since it post was written in 2010, one of the major sites Squidoo was disbanded. Many online writing sites are close to going out of business, but in terms of site promotion they are still good ones to consider)

3) Learn about basic site promotion:

Basic site promotion is one of the hardest things to do for writers. While they can choose to share their work with others online, they have a multitude of ways to do so.  It’s partly about making enough money to keep writing but it is also about getting and giving from your readers.

Basic site promotion is simple:  When you write a blog post add a link to the last post so that a reader does not have to go and find the archive section of your blog to find your last post.  Make it simple for your readers.  If they find it simple to navigate, they will share it with others.  If they don’t then they won’t.

Another tool is word choice and word count.  A short blog post won’t help you in the end. Marketing several hundred short posts is not as smart time management or search engine planning.  One really good post works better if it’s about 500-700 words, and much of it is spent helping your readers with their own blogs and writing.