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

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Friday, July 20th, 2007 Subscribe To Our Feed

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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.