I’ve recently been contacted by a number of writers asking me if i can pass on some tips about marketing their writing and how to get their writing recognised.
It’s my belief that opportunities for writers and content producers have never been better since the early days of the Internet and that we are now in a golden age for writers and marketing writing online.
The most important reason for this is because the large organisations on the Internet that decide which sites to index and publicise are now very sophisticated and have very strong systems in place to identify and give traffic to sites that have interesting and constantly refreshed content. Also, content management systems (blog software), is now easy to use even for the most non-technical author.
Of course, the Internet search indexers are not going to tell us exactly what their criteria for selection is but, in my humble opinion, their criteria for a good piece of writing is going to be the same as any ordinary readers criteria. In other words, they are going to try to identify sites that they observe visitors enjoying visiting.
Therefore, if a writer’s writing is good enough to keep people reading on their site and to regularly return, you can be sure that the search engines will want to observe this fact and give that site greater prominence in their listings.
Of course, having a good writing name that people can remember and use as a reference point is helpful too.
People will want to tell their friends about these good sites and, in commenting on these sites, will create links to them which the search engines will also observe. (Hopefully, the search engines systems are now so sophisticated that they can tell if people are artificially inflating these references.) Again, it is the quality of the writing or content that brings the positive treatment from visiting readers and search engines who monitor their browsing.
This is terrific news for writers. How nice it is that we should be rewarded with visitors for doing the thing we really like to do which is produce good writing? Of course, we have to get the first visitor to our sites via a search engine so that they can monitor how users react to our short stories, articles and discussions but I suspect that the search engines have thought of that one too. If I was a search engine, I would send a few visitors to a new site to test it out. If they bounce back out as fast as they went in, I would conclude it wasn’t up to much and only come back a lot later to see if it had improved.
The whole point of what I am saying is that the visitors on your site and how they respond to your site almost certainly can be monitored by search engines as they send visitors to your site and that this provides an extremely good index of how good your site is. Why wouldn’t the search engines use this information to decide who they give ranking to in their listings?
So write absolutely brilliant copy, entertain your visitors and give them new and interesting things to read about each time they come to your site. Also give them the tools to monitor your site for updates so they can come back often. This is really easy too with the new RSS technology that is built into blogging software.
It’s a passport for doing what you like doing most which is writing well.
The second wonderful aspect of the Internet at the moment is the number of communities that have come into existence. Joining these communities gives you access to having the subjects of your writing searched for by other members of the community. This is already a good thing because you have now got readers but, if you were a search engine, wouldn’t you check to see what sites were popular in the communities? I would and I bet the major site indexers do too.
So, for example, getting a free blog through blogger.com gives you access to searchers within the blogger network. They type in the subject that they want to read about and if you have that word or phrase in your article or story and it is recently written (ie. fresh content), you have a good chance of getting your article or story read.
There are also a whole host of social book marking sites that you can join (see some below), which can give your articles or stories initial publicity.
Once somebody takes the time to submit your writing, it stays on top of the list until it’s pushed down by other pieces of writing. If the readers who see your story when it’s at the top of the list, like your story, they vote on it and it’s pushed back up the list again to receive more prominence. Once more, it’s the quality of your writing submission that’s most important.
So it is my belief that we are in a golden age for online writing. If we can write good and interesting stories, articles or other copy, we will get read. As we are read, we build up our reputations and receive more readers. This, in turn, further builds our reputation.
Of course, all this leaves the big question of inspiration and how to get the ideas for new, refreshing and exciting stories or articles.
But being creative is what we like doing best. More on this soon 
Rob
