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Your writer’s Web site needs content - search engine secrets

July 25th, 2007    Subscribe To Our Feed

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Like the shoemaker’s children who go barefoot, Web writers’ Web sites and blogs are often skimpy affairs. Who has time to write for themselves when they’re busy making a living?

This is short-sighted. Organic search engine traffic is NO COST advertising for your writing services. Once your site becomes an authority site, trusted by the search engines, it will bring you dozens of offers of writing gigs every month - more than you can handle. This means that you can pick and choose the best offers.

Content and time: the two major search engine secrets

You need to ensure that when potential clients search for a term like “Web content” or “Web writer”, a page on your site appears in the search engine query results. If you don’t have sufficient content on your site, the pages on your site just won’t appear.

The search engines index content. So not only do you need content, you need that content to be online for some time. The Web is becoming more competitive every day as millions of Web pages are added every day. Of all these pages, many millions are simply spam pages; this makes the search engines wary until your site earns some trust.

I received an email message from a depressed Web writer last week, saying: “My site doesn’t work. It’s been online for a month, and I’m not getting any clients at all.”

When I checked out the site, it consisted of two pages, one of which was a giant graphic. I couldn’t find any links which pointed to the site.

I advised the writer to steadily add content: the more content added over time, and the longer the site stayed online, the more trust it would gain. In 2007 writers, like other business people, are discovering the immense power of the Web. As more writers become Web savvy, you need to face the fact that you have competition online.

Competition is GOOD. The more writers presenting their Web writing and other services online, the more clients become aware that they can hand their writing challenges to writers. This means that the pool of Web writing clients grows, so all writers make more money.

I urge you to learn as much as you can about how the Web works. As a Web writer, you need to know more about the Web than your clients. This means that not only can you provide better writing services to them, but your own Web writing business will grow.

More on Web sites in my ebook “Super-Fast Money-Making Web Sites For Writers: Join The Web-Publishing Bonanza”.

Your Web writer’s Web site: grow it and benefit

July 20th, 2007    Subscribe To Our Feed

A Web site is a unique marketing tool: it keeps on working for you 24×7x365, and the results you get from it are CUMULATIVE. The longer your site is online, the more authority it gets. In that sense, your Web site is unlike any other form of advertising.

I’ve just been noodling with my angelabooth.com site; changing the template and cleaning out a few odds and ends. I first put that site online in 2005, and it’s doing very well indeed.

That’s the beauty of a Web site, it’s very forgiving, you can leave a site alone for long periods of time, and the site keeps working anyway. The last “News” I posted on the site was posted in late 2006, but the site hasn’t suffered through my neglect.

Look on your Web writer’s site as a laboratory: you can practice on your site, and then use the skills you learn to benefit your Web writing clients.

Now let’s talk about growing your site(s).

It’s all about TARGETED traffic

Newbie Web publishers focus on traffic. However, traffic is useless unless it’s targeted: that is, the people who visit your site are the people you want to attract. They may be people who can hire you, if you’re selling your writing services on the site, or buyers of products you’re selling.

Your main targeting tool is keywords. Often these keywords are not the keywords you would choose. For example, I’ve always been twitchy about the “freelance” word when applied to independent writers. I don’t like it. Tant pis. “Freelance” is a word that people use, and search on, so I need to use it if I want targeted traffic.

So grow your site by researching the terms that people use to find you, and making sure that those keywords appear in your site’s content.

Grow a site with links

The Web is LINKS. However, as with traffic, your links must be targeted. For your writer’s Web site, all the links pointing to your site should be writing-related. Don’t be conned into joining linking schemes. If you collect a bunch of totally unrelated links, they won’t help your site, and they could even harm it.

As a web writer, you must have a Web site, or sites, so that people know what you do and can hire you. The benefits that Web sites provide for your career are immeasurable, and your sites will do more for you as they age, and gain trust and credibility.

Happy site creation.

My Web writing resources for you

* Writing For The Web

* Writing Success with Blogs, by Angela Booth. How to use your blog to start, develop and power your writing career

* Beat Your Paycheck! Web Writing SECRETS

* New Videos: Create Your Own Web Sites With NVU Free Web Site Creation Software

Web writing: when you build a Web site and nobody comes

May 23rd, 2007    Subscribe To Our Feed

Creating your Web writer’s Web site is both exciting and a lot of fun. However, once the site’s up, you need to put a little effort into promotion, because if you don’t, you’ll get no visitors.

Think of it as if you’ve prepared for a big party - you’d send out lots of invitations, wouldn’t you? Same with you site. You’ve got to invite people to come and see it.

Let’s look at how you’ll send out your invitations - that is, how you’ll promote your site.

Here’s a three step process that’s easy to implement:

1. Add your URL (your Web address) to the end of all your email messages in a signature file. This seems like a small thing, and it is, but it’s easy to do, and if you send out ten or 20 emails a day, you’ll soon spread the word. This is especially useful if you’re communicating with people in the writing business - editors, other writers, and publishers.

2. Get links! Links are what make the Web. No links, no Web. So links are vital, because the number and quality of the links you build to your site is one of the ways in which the search engines rank you. So get links. Ask your writer pals, your clients and anyone who’s vaguely related to the writing industry to give you a link.

3. Advertise. Think of a little advertising as priming the pump of your traffic. Most Web advertising is reasonably priced, and you’ll only need to advertise for a month or two to start traffic flowing to your site.

Resource: “Super-Fast Money-Making Web Sites For Writers: Join The Web-Publishing Bonanza”

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Credits: Angela Booth's Web writing manual, "Writing For The Web" | Fab Digital Photography Blog - Digital Photography Tips And Inspiration - If you write for the Web, you need to take photos for the Web too.