Writing for Your Wealth

One of the hardest parts of being a blogger is staying motivated to keep knocking out content on a regular basis. (I write this as I notice it’s been two weeks since I last updated this site, ahem.) It helps (immensely) when you start making decent money from a site, but it can take a while before the bucks start flowing in. So how do you stick with blogging in that first year where the rewards often aren’t financial (or at least not financial to the extent we wish!)?

When I look across the several blogs I maintain, I find that the only one I update daily (and have done consistently for more than three years) revolves around short posts. They’re usually in the neighborhood of 150-200 words and focus on one product or one tip or a short series of ideas related to one specific concept.

You’ve probably seen quite a few blogs like this (just think of all the gadget blogs such as Gizmodo and Engadget for starters).

Perhaps the biggest benefit (and what motivated me to write this entry) is that it takes less time to write short posts. There’s usually less research involved, less actual writing, less proofreading, and less all around procrastinating. It’s easy to convince yourself to sit down and knock out a post that takes 10 or 15 minutes to write; finding an hour or more of time can be busy, especially when you’re also working a day job and–we hope–having a life.

There are some other benefits to the short-post style as well:

• More pages of content to attract search engines — If you’re writing the long monster posts (as I’m often guilty of on this site!), it can take a year to get 50 or 75 pages of content out there. Even if you post every weekday (let’s at least take the weekends and holidays off, shall we?), you’re only looking at 250 pages or so in a year. This may seem like a lot, but compare this to a site such as Gizmodo that publishes thousands of posts a year. Now we don’t need to be that prolific (especially since our blogs usually aren’t the work of multiple authors), but remember that every page of content you write is another doorway through which people can find and enter your site.
• Every post is a chance to get noticed — Other bloggers spend a lot of time monitoring their feed readers, watching for news on certain keywords. Professional bloggers, in particular, (those who have committing to posting X times a day for someone) are always looking for story ideas. If they spot your post and use it to launch a post of their own, chances are they’re give you credit for the story with a link to your site. Those freebie links are the best kind!
• Internet readers often have short attention spans — Numerous studies have shown that folks read differently on the Internet. They treat websites more like newspapers than novels. You might even be the same way. You zip through pages, only reading the stories that interest you, and even then you often skim. Maybe you’re reading from work (with a boss who might wander by at any time), or maybe you’re watching the kids, or maybe you’re multitasking and working on some of your own projects at the same time. Anyway you roll it, short posts can be attractive to busy web surfers.

Now, lest this entry itself get too much longer, I’ll end by admitting that the short-post style may not be a fit for every blog. Still there are enough benefits that it may be worth tinkering with on occasion.

Instead of publishing a 2,000-word list of the Top 10 Movies Comic Book Fans Must Rent Right Now, try breaking it across 10 posts and a few days. You might just find the task less daunting!

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Whether you’re selling biographies, cookbooks, or crime novels, the internet is doubtlessly the most cost-effective way to promote your books. If you’re an author in this day and age, you know you’re supposed to have a website, a blog, and maybe you’re even Twittering, MySpacing, and FaceBooking too. But do you have a mailing list yet?

Believe it or not, out of all the online tools you can employ, a mailing list is probably going to sell more copies of your book than anything else.

The Power of Mailing Lists

Those in the internet marketing world know all about the power of newsletters, and you won’t catch a successful ebook author, software distributor, or even online candle company without a list.

Why a list?

A list…

• is the easiest way to build a personal relationship with your fan base.
• lets you send messages right to a person’s inbox (where they’re more likely to be read than blog posts competing for attention in a feedreader).
• reaches the folks who may be interested in your message but weren’t ready to buy the book the first time they visited your site.
• makes it easy for your fans to forward news of your books on to friends.
• reminds readers you exist! (Hey, people get busy and don’t necessarily remember authors they read a year ago, but if they’re getting messages from you every month, they’ll remember to check out your new books when they’re published.)

In short, a mailing list is the one tool that’s essential for anyone selling anything online.

How to Start up a Mailing List

The easiest way to start a list is to simply add a sign-up form to your existing website or blog.

That sign-up form should be prominent too. It’s easier to get people to sign up for a free newsletter than plunk down $20 for a book right away. And once you’ve got them on your mailing list, you’ll have a lot more chances to sell that book (and the next one, and the next one, and … you get the idea).

As for the technical details, you’ll need some software to automate subscriptions, unsubscriptions, and the mass sending of messages.

You can sign up with a company such as Aweber (I use these guys, and they’re something of a gold standard in the internet marketing business). It does cost money to sign up with them, so if you’re pinching pennies, you may want to look into some of the free options. Even a yahoo groups mailing list is better than nothing. (The downside with the free lists is that the company will add advertising into your messages.)

Through the use of a wizard, an outfit like Aweber makes it easy to set up an “opt-in” box (the form that goes on your site and tells people how to sign up).

Aweber also lets you set up messages ahead of time. For example, with the list I have on this site, I wrote the 7-part “Writing for Your Wealth 101″ e-course back in September, but if you sign up today, you’ll get the daily messages as if I were writing them each morning this week and sending them right out to you.

What to Write About in Your Mailing List

As you might guess, just sending emails to people that say “buy my book” isn’t going to be that well received. You’ll probably get a lot of unsubscribe requests that way.

The best thing to do is to send out helpful information related to your niche. Send the sort of stuff your fans would be thrilled to get in their email boxes once a week, twice a month, or however often you decide to communicate.

If you send valuable information (or, for my novelists out there, entertainment), nobody is going to begrudge you a “sales pitch” mixed in here and there. There’s nothing wrong with putting a “Oh, and if you want to buy my book…” P.S. in each newsletter.

The marketing gurus say a person may need to be exposed to a product up to 7 times before deciding to purchase–this is why getting people to sign up for a newsletter that you send out regularly has so much potential to increase your book sales.

I’ve mentioned blog carnivals in a couple of posts as a method for building links, and folks have asked what they are. I actually didn’t know myself until last year, so don’t feel bad if you haven’t heard of them. Here’s a short definition and a bit on how they can help increase links and traffic to your site.

What is a blog carnival?

A blog carnival is a collection of links submitted by bloggers. They highlight recent posts across the blogosphere that are related to the carnival’s theme (i.e. personal finance, diet and fitness, writing, etc.)

Posted on blogs themselves, carnivals are ideally published on a regular basis (weekly, bi-monthly, monthly). In the best case scenario, the hosts rotate, so each week a link to one of your posts has a chance to appear on a different blog. (Sometimes they’re published on the same site each week which limits the usefulness of the links–you may want to submit a couple times, but there’s less SEO benefit from submitting frequently).

You can usually volunteer to host an existing carnival, and of course you can start one up yourself (this may be worth doing if there isn’t anything out there in your niche).

How useful are blog carnivals for increasing links and traffic?

I regard any link to my site from another regularly updated site as a good thing, and when we’re talking about a blog in a related niche, it’s even better.

However… when your link is one of dozens listed in a blog post, you may wonder how much it’s going to count for in the broad scheme of things. Honestly it probably won’t matter much. It’s certainly not going to take your blog from a 10,000,000-something search engine ranking to a top 10 ranking.

Still, every little bit helps. As they say, don’t look a gift link horse in the mouth.

Blog carnival links are free, and it’s easy to submit your posts for consideration (just head to the aptly named Blog Carnival site to browse the list and find related carnivals).

Other reasons to participate in blog carnivals

It’s always worth thinking beyond the links. Blog carnivals can provide an opportunity to network with fellow niche bloggers.

When your post appears in a blog carnival, you can head over and see all the other bloggers writing in your niche. If you go visit these related sites, you might find some good people to strike up relationships with. Leave some comments on their sites, and maybe drop them a line. This could lead to blogroll link exchanges and–even better–guest blogging opportunities.