Writing for Your Wealth

When I first started trying to make money online, I hadn’t yet figured out I could write my way to financial independence. That came later.

In the beginning, I signed up for a paid-surfing program where you installed a special toolbar and made a tiny bit of money for each site you visited in the network (and I do mean tiny–it was something crazy like 1/4th of a penny per site).

It was a bit like Stumble Upon except no matter which category preferences you chose, you’d be looking at junk, and you had to stay on each page for a certain length of time before you could click through to the next site. I watched TV or read while I waited for those seconds to tick by. When I visited the forums for the program, I heard others admitting to similarly distracted viewing. No one was at all interested in the sites they were surfing to, so it couldn’t have been that rewarding for the companies paying for this dubious traffic. And yet there were always new sites to visit in the queue, and a few people were actually making money from this paid surfing (I never did make it to the $20 minimum required for a payout).

In the end, these companies were wasting their time, and we writers need to make sure we’re not doing the same thing.

Oh, I’m sure none of you are paying for paid-to-surf companies (do these things even exist any more?) to send visitors to your site, but if you’re like me, you may forget sometimes that only certain visitors really matter for you. Only certain visitors should be invited to your site.

The Importance of Attracting Your Target Audience to Your Site (and forgetting the rest)

Whether you’re a blogger or an author (or both), you probably already know that only certain people are going to be attracted by what you write. Certain people are going to click the ads on your site, or sign up for your newsletter, or buy products through your affiliate links, or order your book from Amazon. The rest of the population… isn’t.

And that’s okay. We really only want the folks who identify with us, like our writing style, and are genuinely interested in the topics we write about. We can’t–and shouldn’t want to–force ourselves on those who don’t fit the characteristics of our target audience.

This seems obvious, and yet we bloggers in particular are bad about this.

We keep track of how many people come to our site obsessively, sometimes checking our traffic stats multiple times a day. We’re always trying to drum up more page impressions, more unique visitors. We sign up for programs such as StumbleUpon, Digg, and Twitter, hoping that we can work a bit of magic and flood our site with new readers.

While it’s certainly beneficial to have a goal of continued growth, we really only want to spend our time attracting members of our target audience. We want the folks who will buy our products, or click our ads, or sign up for our newsletters. Anyone who doesn’t fall into that category, we wish them well but in the end they’re just sucking up our bandwidth. They may be a part of someone else’s target audience, but they’re not ours. So why invite them to visit in the first place?

Let’s take a look at a few tips for making sure you’re attracting the right visitors to your site:

Comment on the right kinds of blogs

It always bemuses when I click an intelligent comment on a blog on internet marketing or some such, and the poster’s link takes me to his site on race cars, pest control, yoga, or some other topic that is completely unrelated to the blog he is commenting on.

Now, I’m not going to tell you that you can’t post on any blog you want to (there’s certainly something to be said for participating in conversations on subjects that interest you), but if your primary reason for leaving comments is to gain more traffic to your site, leave those comments where they can do some good: on blogs related to yours.

The readers visiting that related blog found it because they’re interested in the same topic you’re blogging about. After reading your insightful comment, a visitor might click through to your site, find out they jive with what you’re writing about, and become a fan!

In addition, the writer for that related blog might visit your site and see that you’ve written something that might interest her readers, and post a link to your article.

It’s far less likely for that to happen when you’re commenting on a blog on European Travel and leaving a signature link to your site on warts and corns.

Post in the right kinds of forums

This is, of course, along the same lines as blog commenting. It’s fine to visit a webmaster forum and become a part of that community, but leaving signature links that promote your ferret grooming site is again probably a waste of time. Odds are there aren’t going to be many ferret owners in that group.

On the other hand, posting on Ferret World puts you in touch with your target audience right off the bat.

We’re drawn to forums that allow us to communicate with other writers or other entrepreneurs, but unless we’re actually writing on those subjects, these folks aren’t our target market.

The simple lesson here is to hang out where your target audience hangs out. Become a trusted member of their communities.

Be very careful with social media marketing

It’s easy to invest a lot of time in becoming a reputable member of StumbleUpon, MySpace, Digg, etc., but if your primary reason for signing up for these social media sites is to get more people to visit your blog or buy your book, then make sure the work you are putting into these sites is actually converting for you. Watch your traffic statistics. Note what these visitors are clicking or buying.

As wiser folks than I have said, that which gets measured gets improved.

Some people have carved out niches for themselves on sites like MySpace, and they’re doing very well marketing their products there, but more people have found themselves frustrated, seeing no tangible benefit after countless hours wasted.

In some niches, social media can be effective, but in other niches (for example, those that target the sorts of people who blink in confusion at talk of “Twittering”) it may be a waste of time.

Another potential pitfall of social media is that those who use Stumble, Digg, Plurk, etc. are probably looking for entertainment rather than information. When we want information, we Google it.

So…

Don’t underestimate the power of basic SEO

There is a lot of advice out there that suggests people ignore search engine optimization. That’s a shame. While there’s little point in trying to game the system, there’s a lot to be said for working on getting people who are looking for information on losing weight with the Paleo Diet to your blog and book that’s all about the Paleo Diet.

It’s certainly not necessary to optimize every post with specific keywords, but it’s definitely useful to study the keywords people are using to find things in your niche. Then use those words liberally on pages on your site that happen to be about what these folks are looking for.

Now that I’ve had my say, do you have any suggestions for attracting the right people to your site?