I can already here some of you asking “but didn’t you tell us to post in places to build our platform in earlier posts?” To that question I am forced to respond “Did you actually read the post or just skim?”
There is a distinct difference between going to specific Usenet newsgroups on subjects about your book(s) for a couple of hours per week and trying to be popular on FaceBook. So what if you get 1 million likes for something on FaceBook? Honestly! Can you walk up to an ATM and convert those likes into cold hard cash which can be used to buy food or pay rent? Remember eating and living indoors?
Some years back there was a movie about The Brothers Grimm becoming con artists slaying witches which didn’t exist. They repeatedly referred to the con as “magic beans” because one of them had been conned into trading their cow for magic beans as a child.
You may not have figured out how to monetize social media but social media has figured out how to monetize you. The profitability of most social media companies revolves around an ever growing supply of unpaid content providers. Not only do they provide content for free, but they view the ads and click on the click-bait so they become a double earner for the company.
Let me spell it out for you. If your chosen career is writing then every hour you spend writing for free is taking away from your career unless you have laser focus with your “free” writing. There is an opportunity cost which cannot be fully measured every time you write without getting paid. How long will an auto mechanic stay in business if they always fix cars for free trying to “build a following?”
But you write for this blog, are you getting paid?
No. A group of us authors got together to create a common site for our books. We all still have our own sites. Only some of us are currently writing on this blog. We do not accept outside advertising. We also limit our time. If I’m under contract I spend less than one hour per week writing a post for here. If there is time left over I write something for my blog. Sometimes there is something I absolutely have to write so I write it and post it on my blog.
You will first see this post on October 30, 2016 but I am writing it on June 4, 2016. I had some time after the holiday and decided to stack all of my Sunday posts up through the middle of January. That will free me up for the rest of the year to work on all of my other projects. At least that is the logic behind it. I got on a roll with some of these multi-part posts and simply kept with it. The posts I have in mind for my personal blog will be software development based and they will take quite a bit of time and focus creating build environments, test applications, etc. They will be the precursor to a new geek book.
How many of you have done any research into what it takes for a successful blog? I have. At one time between IT contracts and book writing I had several months to write posts for my blog. Mainly because I didn’t feel like starting another book and I could stagger writing the posts around performing marketing efforts. For several months there was a new post most every day. At one point the visitor stats plug-in was showing 7+K unique visitors per week. That’s right, week.
What happened? I took another contract, got busy with other things including life and writing projects. Since content wasn’t changing daily I went from 7K/week to about 200 unique visitors per day. Sometimes I write something which spikes traffic north of 400, but when you average things out it is about 200/day. When it comes to a blog though, visitor stats don’t tell the entire story. According to WordPress there are north of 16K RSS feed subscribers. Each time I write a post there it goes out to 16K email addresses which physically subscribed on their own. How many send it to the bit bucket? Who knows. They had to exert physical effort to subscribe though.
During the time I had 7K/week (according to the stats plug-in) I was seeing regular sales. Not enough to retire in the manner of which I would like to be accustomed to, but more sales than I see now at the 200 unique visitors per day level.
Every author has to spend more time than they would like marketing themselves. Most tend to do a very poor job because they “justify” everything which they find fun as “marketing.” It may be “fun” to chat on social media, but if it is fun, it most likely isn’t even remotely close to marketing.
Don’t believe me? Put it to the test. In several of your next posts on wherever, use some very specific phrases. Not hot SEO phrases, but phrases you believe are relatively unique. Test them by using DuckDuckGo, Ask and Google to search for them before posting. When you find something you feel is “unique enough” use it in your posts. Wait one week and use the same search engines to search for your specific phrase(s). Do your posts show up?
Lots of sites block search engine indexing. They want you to sign up and view their ads on their systems they don’t want to generate revenue for “the other guys.” This blog is indexed. The more the content changes the more often it will be indexed. When people search for things, if we blogged about it this site will show up in the results. (We will speak more on this with my next installment.)
Creating unique content on a regular basis is much less of a burden when it is spread across a small group of authors. Not all of us are posting on the blog now. When the others finish their current projects they will post some things here. Conversely, when those of us currently posting start getting deep into projects we will slack off. One of the main reasons I’m stacking posts up now is I see a deep dive coming in the near future. Having this obligation filled until after New Years will let me sink as deep as needed.
Yes, we all have different things we expect to get out of this. Boiled down for me and I believe to some extend the others is the fact a successful site needs good/great regularly changing content. This gets a site indexed more often by the main crawlers. With good changing content and frequent indexing comes visitors. With visitors comes subscribers. Hopefully, some of the visitors and subscribers will like our writing enough to try some of our books.
Unlike all of that enjoyable time others spend on social media, this “free labor” is actually marketing. There is no corporation making money from advertising on the site, we are just building our platforms having learned enough from mistakes to now know the right way.