Writing is a solitary affair. At times we just want to get onto paper all the stuff that is going round and round in our heads; clogging brain cells; clouding thinking; preventing us moving on. Writing can be very effective for dealing with all this. In which case it is the end of the story; a done deal; filed away and forgotten. We get on with life.
However, for most of us, most of the time our efforts are not therapy but creative, stimulating, exciting and fulfilling. When we write this way, virtually all of us want those products of our creativity to be out in the wider world; read by others; appreciated and responded to. Don’t we all want our babies to be admired?
So it’s at this point that we enter the world of publishers and publication – a world that can be fraught with danger, difficulty and potential disaster.
A couple of weeks ago we told the sad story of friends of ours caught up by a vanity publisher. The joy of having been “accepted” by a “publisher” has turned to frustration and financial loss for them. Fortunately, for them, the disappointment and disillusionment has not killed the urge to write – but it could well have done so.
We have become aware that there seems to be a lot of confusion and misinformation among newbie writers; those of us with big dreams but little experience. This is a confusion we hope to be able to clarify for those of you who are finding the whole thing a bit of a puzzle and are not sure which way to go.
Point #1:
All this publication stuff is a big and complex issue. It will take some time and more than a few words to explain what is involved so we hope you’ll be able to stay the course and give us feedback if we do not make things clear and understandable.
Point #2:
Publication is linked to “publicity” – a word my big fat Macquarie dictionary tells me means (among other things!) “the measures, process or business of securing public notice” and also (but denser and less comprehensible) “the state of being brought to public notice by announcement; by mention in the mass media or by other means serving to effect the purpose”.
Point #3: Printers and publishers are different; connected but different; playing different roles; fulfilling different niches in the whole deal. They must never be spoken of as if they are interchangeable because they are NOT. Publishers use printers but printers are not publishers. They are merely one aspect of the publishing business; one cog in the system as it were, – a critically important cog to be sure but one that, as part of their own business has nothing to do with publicity; i.e. “securing public notice”.
In future blogs we will go into detail about various specific aspects of this whole deal.
After a long hot week—the first “heatwave” since 2019, I sat at my computer, blank for blogging inspiration. Finally, I discovered this little gem in my collection…
THROW AWAY THE CRITICAL PARENT IN YOUR HEAD
February, your New Years’ resolution, a not-so-distant memory, and you stare at the computer screen full of resolve. Time to start that great [nominate your country] novel. It’s a job, right? Hammer away on the keys eight hours a day. Right? You shift your weight in that padded, ergonomic office chair you bought for your project. Now what? Think!…
Check social media and the news. Pay a few bills. Back to your Word page, crack your knuckles and…time for a coffee. Get rid of that brain fog. Last week’s weather played havoc with your brain. Limber the old grey cells up with some solitaire. Or perhaps a quick crossword.
Back to the blank screen…and sigh!
You tap out a sentence. The first sentence, the hook. Must engage those millions of readers on Amazon, or that elusive publisher. You stop. Reread the sentence. Blah! It’s rubbish. You delete sentence.
You gaze out the window. Birds warble. The sky’s clear and blue. Maybe go outside with a paper and pen? There’s connection between you, the pen and paper. Outside, white paper on pad dazzles you. First sentence in black ink. What? Who’s going to want to read that?
An hour later, sun on your face and surrounded by scrunched up wads of paper, you nap. Nice with the sun on the back of your neck…and another morning of good writing-intentions wasted.
Brain Freeze and Platitudes
It strikes, anywhere, anytime. A work mate is leaving, or a friend is having a birthday. Some wise-guy buys a card and circulates it. Card arrives on your lap. You have two minutes to write some warm and witty sentiments. What do you do?
‘You’re a wordsmith, Lee-Anne, go on,’ my mum says.
But the clever words refuse to bubble to the surface of my brain. I locate the blank space where my wishes will go and then check out the preceding words of well-wishing. Pity, if I’m the first one to write this card.
I blame a relative of mine. Back as a teenager, I attended a funeral. The relative approached me and said, ‘I think you should go and comfort your aunty. But please don’t give her platitudes.’
Ever since, whenever I need to produce formal comfort or congratulations, that relative’s advice comes back to haunt me and all I can think of are platitudes.
It’s the “pink elephant” effect. When told not to think of “pink elephants”, what does our brain do? Yep, pink elephants in abundance.
So, when we stare at the blank screen or paper and remember our school days; our English teacher saying, ‘Don’t do this and that, and so on’, we sit there, frozen with our mental doors barred to the creative zone.
How do you get started? What works for you?
Some Suggestions
What works for me:
· First of all, and this is legitimate. Years ago, a writing mentor advised us. They said, ‘Pack up your critical parent that is in your mind, you know the one who’s never satisfied, no matter how hard you try? Yes, that’s right, tie them up, gag them, and wrap them up like an Egyptian mummy. Then, in your mind, take them to the jetty and throw them in the sea.’
· Then, have fun with your inner, natural child and with the story. You have permission not to put a jot on your computer screen or paper. Go outside, sit under a tree, or go for a walk. Imagine, daydream and if you wish, talk to yourself. This is the incubation phase.
· After cooking the ideas for however long it takes you to be ready, pick up a pen and paper, and go to your favourite place, and brainstorm. Probably a good idea to stay away from the computer and the temptation to check social media, news, or play solitaire. Well, I need to anyway.
· Find your characters, or should I say, allow them to find you. Do lots of reading. Also, observe others say in a coffee shop, beach, on the street, and even on television. You may find some interesting characters out there. You may be surprised at how these characters reveal themselves to you and even become your imaginary friends. Just like when we were children. Some people I know, okay, I confess, me, have created characters out of people I have known—usually a blend of a couple of people I know, from way back in my past, I mean.
· Imagine having a drink with those characters or going for a walk with them. Ask them questions as you would a new friend. Warning: I do find this dangerous as I soon have a story, or at least a back-story.
· Then put your character together in a restaurant, playing ten-pin bowling or going on a road trip. Now the ideas will flow, the story will flow and as the Borg in Star Trek say, “Resistance is Futile”.
· Finally, write the story. It’s your first draft. Your mind’s critical parent is at the bottom of the sea, so allow your inner natural child to have free reign. Write as you’d tell the story to a friend on a camping trip or a child. Get the words down. I emphasise, it’s a first draft, you have permission to make mistakes while the ideas flow. Editing will and does come later.
· Another suggestion: why stick to writing? If drawing, storyboard, or voice-recording works for you, do that. It’s your story. It’s your “child”.
Try this:
Create an oral story. You may do this as a game with friends, around the table as a family, or with your writers’ group. One person begins the story with two or three sentences. The next person continues the story and so on around the group, until the last person concludes the story.
For example:
Gnomes, they appeared everywhere; all over the seaside town of Glenelg. They popped up in odd places. Gnomes, stuck up poles, perched on tree branches, and even balancing rather precariously on television antennas….
In the Zone Challenge: Write your continuation of this oral story. Or create your own to share.You are invited to send us a linkin our comments section.
If you have made yourself a website, please pat yourself on the back and feel proud. The experience is challenging, but it is a wonderful way to boost your skills on the computer and get to understand the way modern businesses operate.
You need to know how to use your website and make it popular. Some people are happy to use a website to communicate with an audience, to inform, educate and entertain, but they will still want to know if they have an audience. However, most people with websites will have something they want to advertise and sell from their website.
Indie Scriptorium is mainly a self-help information website that shares the trials and tribulations of our members as we learn about the complex business of self-publishing. But it is linked to our individual web sites where we sell and advertise our novels and art.
The Indie Scriptorium website is built with WordPress, a popular web building site that can be started up for free. The WordPress program allows you to view who is using the site, where they come from in the world, how long they stay on the site and what are the most popular pages of the site. WordPress also allows people to follow the website. The goal of any website is to get more and more followers.
Analytics–the first step in building a better website is to learn how to access data about who is using your site, and then gain an understanding which part of your website attracts the most attention. What’s working and what isn’t.
WordPress has built in analytics, which provide quick reports on what traffic is coming to your site. It is a program called Jetpack Stats. For more complex analysis, you can also use Google Analytics, which provides a more complex analysis of how visitors to your site use the site.
As a newbie to my own WIX site, I’m still learning how to read the traffic reports. I’ve found it’s a matter of logging into the WIX login page and the site takes you to the Analytics page first. If you then click on the site sessions and post views graphs WIX takes you to another screen and gives you a breakdown of how many people visited, how many were unique and how long they stayed on the site. It also provides a lovely map of where your visitors live in the world. I also use the blog activity graph which provides information about how many people visited each blog so you can work out what is popular for future blog posts.
A good way of attracting visitors to your website is by posting regular interesting blogs that attract regular followers. It is recommended that when you blog you use key-words that attract the right attention. For example: Indie Scriptorium is aimed at people who want to self-publish their books. Our blog titles are therefore important and should contain key-words that attract people searching for self-publishing information. Blogs are most effective when posted regularly. They need to be researched, timely and well written.
When it comes to a search engine optimisation (SEO) you want a bullet train rather than a puffing billy train. The speed of someone finding your site is important apparently, and I wondered why?
Search Engine Optimisation is best described as a process for getting the right people, and more of them, to your website. This is very important if you want to sell something. For authors it may be a newly published novel, a book launch or a date for an author signing. For artists, it may be a painting for sale, news about an exhibition or sets of your original artworks printed as cards for sale.
Not all websites are about selling. Blogs can build your personal brand online, becoming an influencer, or just sharing your thoughts and ideas.
So, you may need to think about SEOs when you start up your website. My goal was to have a place where a person can look at my novels, have a link to buy one and find out about me as a person and writer. So yes, eventually I would like to bring people to my website to increase my sales of books and possibly art as well.
There are about thirty different big world-wide search engines and many more that offer specialized and local information searches, but the biggest is certainly Google.
I love Google. I’m constantly using it for many things, weird, wonderful, entertaining and useful. As a writer, I zip in and out of Google all the time. Lots of other people do too. It is the most visited website in the world and enjoys 92% of the SEO market. It’s rather magical really, how you put a few words in a box, press a button and Wham-O you get the information you need. But it does more than that. It can give you pages and pages of options to browse through until you find the best one, and that one site probably has the best SEO and comes up number one on page one. And that’s where you want your website to be when someone is looking for a book to buy.
It’s not magic that gets your website up the front, but it is a complex process involving crawling spiders, algorithms, keywords and black and white hatted hackers. Too much information for this little black duck, but do browse Wikipedia’s SEO explanation for all the details.
Having decided that my aim is to sell my books and art (publishing will happen later in this year) what I needed was some tips for making my website a good place to visit now. Good old Google comes up with a wonderful list of tips for getting your website noticed. (Optimize your site for search engines for beginners.) They provide some simple guidelines which I will briefly mention here.
Use accurate descriptive titles for your pages.
Use a different page for different products and clearly name them in your menu.
Mention everything that you sell or offer.
Update your content regularly so your readers know when to visit your site.
Keep your site up to date. Remove references to things that are in the past.
Use text as much as possible as Google understands text better than images.
Get referrals from other places. If you are in a writer’s group, ask that they have links to your site or share links with other authors you know.
WIX also has some good short tutorials about SEOs and marketing. I will address these ideas in my next blog.
If anyone reading this wants to share their own experience with building up visitors to your web sites, then please contact us at Indie Scriptorium. We would love to hear from you.
Marketing Books and Monopoly—My Journey around the Board
Recently, my brother introduced me to “Monopoly for Sore Losers”. Since, in my family I have the reputation from childhood, reinforced and maintained by those around me as a “sore loser”, I had to get it. As I played the game, I realised how much marketing and being a dominant player on the internet, is like Monopoly and Mr. Monopoly from the “Sore Loser” edition, like the “Best Sellers” on Amazon.
Now, about marketing, I’m not an expert by any means. But, since I began this indie-publishing journey back in late 2015, I have learnt what works for me.
This last summer, for me in Australia, I have been concentrating on the “housekeeping” side of marketing my books. Thus, my first, Mission of the Unwilling, had a makeover and re-released as a second edition. Then all four books cycled through their five-day free promotion on Amazon. Next I’m looking into paying some money for advertising.
It seems my marketing skills have a way to go in gaining a monopoly on Amazon shelves and being sold. You see, marketing and advertising one’s product, my books and artwork, takes time. The issue with time is that I’d rather be creating than slogging away pushing my product in an already saturated market.
When I started on this journey, I, like many a writer, thought that mine was the great (insert country) novel, that readers will be hanging out to get their hands on. The book would sell itself. It didn’t happen, as I dreamed.
A foray into the publishing world, and its history reveals an unexpected picture. Although amazing authors and brilliant books exist, and are sold in abundance world-wide, the literary world is full of mediocre tomes stacked on the shelves of bookshops and online distributers. Some are bestsellers.
How, is this so?
Answer, effective marketing. Often, especially with traditional publishing, the writers have a “platform”. Traditional publishing is a business and they go for the safe option—someone who is famous or becomes famous through their authored works. They bank on reader curiosity, who sells well, has a “brand” and longevity.
Needless to say, I didn’t have a “platform”. However, I have been developing a network and influence through my “blogsite” and Website, “Tru-Kling Creations”, and most recently this publishing collective, “Indie Scriptorium”.
The challenge with my blogsite when I first started was to make it visible. Way back in 2015, it was so buried by the competition, that I couldn’t even find it—even when I typed in the precise address.
After embarking on some more research, I discovered a phenomena called “algorithms”. To put it simply, think of Monopoly; the more properties you acquire, the more likely someone is to land on you.
In my blogsite’s case, the more visitors you get, the more visible your site becomes. The “Mr. Monopolies” of the cyberworld actually employ computer experts to manipulate the algorithms. That is how a mediocre book can become a bestseller.
So, how do we, the so called “Plebs” of the internet, compete with these “Mr. Monopolies”? How do we get our blog/webpage onto page 1? How can our masterpieces rise to the top like cream and become bestsellers like they ought to be?
Well, first make sure our books are the best they can be. Start with good editing and proofreading. Check out Indie Scriptorium’s posts on editing. Then once you and your test-readers are satisfied with your product, then the next step is marketing and advertising. This includes doing your research, figuring out who your audience is, and pitching to your potential readers.
As I wrote before, I found that blogging and setting up a webpage has worked for me. I now have over 550 followers of my blog. But it has taken time. I found that inviting friends and family to follow, visit and like my posts helped boost activity. This then led to a wider-worldwide audience. I persevered. I’m still in the game. Even though I am not like some bloggers who have thousands of followers, I am encouraged when I get visitors who come via the “Search Engine” as it means my blogs are visible.
It’s the same with our books and the competition from the big sellers, those Mr. Monopolies of the book world. True, the mediocre best sellers will have their time in the sun. But, it won’t last. Good literature, I believe will shine through in the end. I realise now, that my novels are not the great Australian work I had dreamed they were, but for some who have read them, they have found great enjoyment, and are asking, ‘When’s the next one coming out?’
[In response to Elsie King’s post on Website building, fellow writer, Mary McDee shares her insights on the challenges of technology.
I have abbreviated this Shakespearean quote somewhat, out of respect for space…and cats. Especially ones who get caught up in webs as my cat Storm has the habit of doing. ~ Website Editor—Lee-Anne Marie Kling]
Thoughts on Website Building
I don’t know about you but, as an acclaimed techno klutz, I found last week’s blog “Building a Website” totally fascinating, easy to follow and, I must admit, thought provoking.
I admire Elsie King’s honesty in addressing her difficulties and the downsides of her ‘adventure’. Publicly admitting to being ‘technologically challenged’ does not go down at all well with many in this day and age as I well know!
There is absolutely no doubt that computers, indeed the whole current techno world of today, has brought many advantages with it: made life easier, more efficient and, in many instances, much faster. I’m also sure we’re all well aware of the pestilential problem of hackers – a major downside of the current techno revolution.
To my mind however, this business of hackers is far from being the only downside of our brave new world. Let me explain by telling you of the revelation re computers that hit me a few years ago.
At the time I was coming to the end of a Permaculture Design Course I’d been doing for quite some time and was thoroughly enjoying. It was assessment time! This involved working with a partner or small group to develop; then present to the whole group an actual practical design based on our own real life situation that had brought us to being part of that course.
I live on a very steep, small acreage in the Adelaide Hills. Two others also lived on hills acreages so we three linked up and decided to work on a plan for the other woman’s land as her place seemed the simplest and most straight forward. We got on well together and quickly decided to present a series of maps illustrating the steps we felt would be the best way to develop her land. We also felt this would be most effectively presented as a series of overlays, one on top of the other; building up from the basic fenced-paddock-with-a-house (where she was currently living) to her dream of self-sufficiency.
We thought this was a great idea and felt very chuffed with ourselves. So we set about implementing it.
My partners were both computer literate and tech savvy so automatically began developing the required maps and sorting things out so each map, at the press of a button, would become superimposed on its predecessor.
And this was where the rot set in!!
They spent hours on the problem but all to no avail. I’ve no doubt that any kid of today with a modern laptop would do it in a flash with little or no difficulty. But this was a number of years ago and computers have come a long way since then.
At first I was simply a fascinated spectator; unable to contribute anything useful. But slowly I became more and more fed up with all the hours of unproductive discussion and experimentation. I did hold my tongue though. Eventually they had to give up; stymied and frustrated. We’d have to come up with some other way of presenting. And time was running out.
It was then I remembered we’d been told there was a wide range of equipment available for us to use including an overhead projector. As an ex-Primary school teacher I was very familiar with these things and as soon as I explained how it could solve our problem my two partners leapt on board: — using transparencies, we were able to present as we had planned. And we received enthusiastic congratulations from those running the course – I maybe wrong but I got the feeling they were a tad relieved to see something other than a computer production!
Anyway, to go back to the beginning and why I have been telling you this seemingly irrelevant tale. It seems to me that we are not looking beyond computers to solve all our problems; to run our lives; to communicate with all and sundry… We are losing many skills and techniques that used to be second nature; losing flexibility; losing touch with the real world with all its messiness.
As you are reading these blogs you are no doubt a writer so you will be very computer competent; familiar with Facebook and tweeting and emails and… Maybe even have your own website; maybe publish your work through Amazon…
But there are other ways of publishing your work. Google is not the only research tool available to us. Computer editing programmes have a place but they are, of necessity, run-of-the-mill. There is no room for creativity; original thinking; an unusual juxtapositioning of words…
By way of reinforcing the point I’m making: my computer doesn’t recognize that ‘juxta…’ word; has underlined it with squiggly red as if to insist I replace it with something more mundane. But I’m not going to – my big, two volume Oxford dictionary lists that word along with its meaning and a couple of other permutations of it.
Let’s not lose variety and richness; the things that have served us well in times past. Please.
Elsie King shares her trials and triumphs building a website
My original website, built on WordPress about four years ago, showcased my artwork. It was free, and I enjoyed creating it and adding to it. I wrote blogs giving tips on painting. The website appeared on Facebook and people regularly sent me friendly messages about my blog. Then Facebook became complicated and my website disappeared. After unsuccessful attempts to resurrect it, I just let it die a natural death. Facebook continued to send me messages with obscure recommendations, which sounded like I needed to spend money and time in order to revive my site.
This year I decided I wanted to create a new website using my pen name, Elsie King, which would put my books and artwork online.
I used WordPress thinking I had deleted my old website and I could create another one with a bonus of one year free. Big mistake. The algorithms remember everything. If you use the same e-mail address to sign up a second website, they will immediately give your freebee to the previous website and charge you $60 for the new one. Being technologically challenged, I pressed something and spent $60 on something that I didn’t sign up for. After several days of e-mails toing and froing, I convinced WordPress to give me a refund. WordPress had become a bit too complicated for this little black duck.
I researched lots of website builders and decided that WIX looked safe for the confused and unwary. The following steps helped me build a website of which I am proud as punch. I figure that if I can build a website anyone can, but it takes time and persistence. The following ideas helped me get started.
Have a look at the websites of your favourite authors or artists. This gives you a good idea of what you want to include and gives you a concept of a design.
Write up what you want to say. Have text for your home page and an about page ready to run. I put my bio photo and artworks in a file on the desktop for easy access. Prepare your first blog as well.
The WIX site allows you to play with designing a website and you can then delete what you’ve done until you get it right. Keep playing with the templates, drag-and-drop features, adding text, changing the fonts and layout, adding media and moving between pages. You can also make a menu and put information into the header and footer. The most important place to find in the edit area is the delete site button in the Site actions. You can create a trial site and delete then start again and again and again. I played with the site building for weeks.
While you are in play mode, use YouTube videos for guidance. WIX provides lots of tutorials and you can also access videos from experts. They have heaps of useful information. Be warned, some tutorials presume you know what they are talking about. I found I needed to find a tutorial presenter who didn’t talk too fast and use acronyms I didn’t understand. Also, have a paper and pen available so you can jot down the information. The pause button is a marvellous invention.
WIX suggests you pick a template and modify to your needs. I couldn’t get the hang of this and ended up selecting blank templates and designing my website to my satisfaction. I found this much easier.
Make sure you have an e-mail address ready to use and have sorted out your website address you intend using. I used www.elsiekingauthorartist.com which is long but suited what my website is about.
Once you have designed your website, you can publish. I paid for the premium plan so I don’t have adverts popping up all the time. You can pay with PayPal or a card. It’s about $200 for a year. Look out for 50% off offers to save money.
A website with an e-mail address is just the beginning for me. I will explore the ways to promote my website, link it to social media, dive into analytics and improve my SEO (search engine optimisation) and other stuff. I put this off over Christmas but I will do the research and report in the new year. Stay tuned for more on web sites in 2023.
I made it a goal to have a website by the end of this year. Achieving the goal is proving to be much more difficult and time intensive than expected.
The website builders are very keen to reassure that they can have a wonderful, professional looking website in a jiffy. That it’s an easy five, seven or ten-step process. That the website building is effortless and should take not much longer than 15 minutes, a couple of hours or a couple of days. It is all lies!
Building a website involves a stroll through an intuitive program, which guides you step by step to achieving your goal. They advise you get a template and just drag-and-drop things (from where I ask) replace their text and pictures with your own (but cannot tell you where the delete button is so you can get rid of the damned pictures.) Text boxes move, you get pushed into templates you never wanted and it’s very easy to delete hours of work for no apparent reason and it’s just hard work.
I’m halfway through building a site with WIX. I have a preconceived idea what I want my website to look like and am battling with a system that hates you having any creative innovations that don’t fit the bill. HELP.
Asking, do I really need a website makes quitting a viable option? But I want a website so I can put a web address on my business cards and attach them to my art and give them away to fellow writers and prospective readers. I want a web address on the back of my Christmas cards. I need a website for when I publish my books, organise an art exhibition or arrange a book launch. Web sites are important.
Ok, so I will persist and let you know how to find me on the web next year. Merry Christmas.
[Today I spent a few hours researching. Although I discovered some interesting facts, my experience became fraught with frustration as some topics related to family history and a hotel in Bavaria that my ancestors owned, were hijacked by sites advertising accommodation etc. It reminded me that certain computer hacks give precedence for traffic to go their way, leaving the blogs less visited languishing unseen.
With this in mind, here’s part 2 of How to Blog (without reinventing the wheel)]
Part 2 — Connecting with Others
Right, Networking — Think of your own life and how you live it. If you sit in your room and never go out and about, never go to parties or gatherings, never join clubs or interest groups, how is anyone going to know that you exist? I was out the other day with my mum and cousin. My cousin and I are both extroverts and have wide-ranging networks. At the restaurant, I bumped into a friend from art group. And at the bookshop across the road, my cousin met a friend. ‘I’m amazed,’ my mum said to my cousin and me, ‘everywhere we go, you meet people you know.’ It’s the same with blogging. It’s a worldwide community. But how is anyone going to know that your blog exists, if you don’t promote it? The simplest way to develop an online presence is to visit other bloggers’ websites and blog posts, like and comment. I have found that as I do this, Word Press (my platform of choice), sends the blogger a message to invite them to check out my blog post/website.
Right, Content — As with any publication, be respectful and avoid anything that might be offensive. A turn-off for me is rude words. Too many words of the four-letter and “F” variety, and some people won’t read or follow that blog. The Oxford English dictionary has officially 171,476 words, so surely, a writer of substance can find more effective alternatives to vent their frustration. Just my opinion. Another turn-off is the eternally looo-ng post. 500 – 1000 words has worked for me, both ways.
Right, Views — Photos, ones that grab attention and draw the reader in have worked in my experience, especially for my travel blogs. Readers love that virtual travel adventure. However, keep the photo files down around 1 MB, if posting a number of them. Otherwise, the post can take forever to load. Which can put off some readers.
Right, Guest Posts — What about inviting other bloggers to be a guest author on your website? I haven’t done this personally on mine, except for a few re-blogs of posts from other bloggers. But I have been a guest author on other bloggers’ websites and it has worked for me to increase my readership. It works both ways, though. A guest author gives fresh content and attracts more readers to the website. One website that works well for this is a website belonging to Mohamed Al Karbi.
Right Links — Facebook and Twitter have done this well in the past. There’s buttons and tick boxes in settings to set this all up so it happens automatically. Instagram, meh, hasn’t worked for me as it won’t link to my WordPress posts. The main advice here is to stick to one platform and allow the links to feed into it. It all depends on your audience and how they manage their social networks. These days I regularly get views from readers through Facebook, but most of my readers still come from WordPress.
Finally, this whole WWW thing is constantly moving and changing. Rather than give up and crawl into the foetal position under your doona, get out there, connect with others online, face to face, persevere and do your best.
Right Worldview — I like to think of the blogging community as a group, a world-wide group. Think of the local writers’ group you attend if you’re a writer. Then imagine that group spanning the globe comprising of every imaginable country and culture. That’s the breadth and beauty of blogging. But remember, each one of your potential followers are people, real people.
Right Mindset — Gathering those real people, followers takes time. Marketing likes to depersonalise the whole experience and calls those visits from readers “traffic”. They are not traffic, they are individuals who have searched for your particular topic of interest and taken the time to read it. When I first began blogging 7 years ago, one of my first international visitors was from the Bahamas. I imagined that person sitting on the beach sipping their mint julep, reading from their jewel-studded iPad, and dreaming of the Central Australian adventure I had written. Just one person but imagining that person made all the difference to me, that they had connected with my story.
Right Attitude — My first like (besides my faithful friends and mother) was a well-known Romanian blogger. He has written many posts on how to blog, so I feel, I don’t need to repeat his good advice in this article. The following is a link to Christian Mihai’s website, The Art of Blogging. My main takeaway from one article I read from there, was that if we don’t have the right attitude to blogging, if we are amateurish in our approach, we may spread our web of information wide, but we won’t touch many in a way that is meaningful or truly influential. And the reality about developing authentic relationships that change and grow us and others, is that they take time.
Right Timing — I think there’s enough on the internet about how to set up a blog and post, so, I won’t go into detail about that. Check out Wiki how for setting up a blog, or website. But what you need to do is be regular. Followers, once you get them, are creatures of habit and if you post once a week on a Tuesday, for instance, they will look for your post, once a week on a Tuesday. One of the frustrating things I found when I first entered the blogging community, was finding those bloggers who I liked. Some would seem to vanish into the vortex of the world wide web, never to be seen again. It took me a while to figure out that if I “followed” these bloggers, they would turn up in my “Reader Feed”. Other bloggers have mentioned that this is the reason they “like” posts. They then look at their “likes” to find their favourite bloggers again. Regular posting, I found, helped raise my profile in the plethora of websites and posts and make those blessed algorithms work for me. I knew that my blogs were rising like cream when I observed a reader emerging out of “Search Engine” in the stats of my post. When starting up my blog, though, I invited as many friends and family to follow my blog through email, and Facebook.
Right, Don’t Give Up — It’s three months into you’re blogging venture, and nothing; not a hump, nor a bump raising those statistics. ‘I don’t know,’ my mother said, ‘no one has visited my posts in ages. I think I’ll give up.’ And yeah, it seemed as though the WWW “gods” were doing everything in their power to squash my mother’s enthusiasm to continue. As they tried to do some years before with my blog. As they have done with a number of writer friends of mine who have set up blogsites or websites and then with a failure to thrive, they have silently let them slide into obscurity. Again, it takes time for your website or blogsite to gain traction. Just be patient.
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