For months I've been working on creating an image of myself online. I haven't really been successful so far. I am a fairly established tweeter (almost 800 followers) and have an okay Facebook page (almost 200 Likes), but my internet presence has been lacking the thing I desired in the first place: readers to my writing.
I am making this post as a sort of support thread; I plan on posting here every so often to tell you guys how I'm doing on my little marketing adventure, and from that you can take tips, and see what not to do.
Before I begin with what I have done so far, I would ask you to check out my website http://joeduncko.com/ . This is where I am focusing my efforts. Feel free to look around ^-^. And if you are in the doing good things for other people, it would be great it you follow me on Twitter, like me on Facebook, and share the page with your friends!
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I am a blogger by default. I own dotgamerclan.com, and have owned it since I was in sixth grade. It is currently viewed by 30,000 different people a month. Originally, it was a forum for a bunch of people that played a browser game together, but when I moved on from that game, I changed the focus of the site to a free to play and indie gaming blog. I am in tenth grade now.
With this said, I am not unfamiliar with the web, blogging, creating traffic, writing blog-type posts, and managing a website. I have years of experienced under my belt already. But I just recently purchased and created joeduncko.com. It has few visitors (only about 300 per month average at the moment), and few posts. This is my starting point.
With dotgamerclan.com, I gained visitors by making posts targeting certain keywords. For example, we (my friends and I) usually post on the game League of Legends, usually abbreviated "LoL". So, instead of doing what the other websites do and post about "League of Legends", we post about "LoL". This gets us many more views than it would if we went with the much more used "League of Legends" keyword, even though it doesn't get as many searches.
Targeting a website about your own writing is much different than targeting one about other people's games. This is because when people search for information on games, they know what they are looking for, and you just have to give them what they want. But a writing website... the best keywords you have are you and "short stories", "Poetry", "fanfiction" (which I don't do; just giving examples), etc. Just google them and see how many websites already dominate those keywords. Good luck placing on the first page there.
So, that's one thing on my to-do list: come up with keywords that people look for, but have little competition. Genres are a good example of this. Search "adventure". Then search "cool adventure". You will get less search results for "cool adventure" than "adventure". This means, the more specific your aim keywords, the more of a chance your post will be at the top. So, I must tag and classify my posts and stories so that their genre is properly reflected in searches. *Just had that realization*
Now, here are some other things that people may search for:
- Your name
- Your work's title
- A line in your works
But the problem is... None of these really apply until you are an established writer! So these are pretty much ruled out for gaining traffic, but are good for getting returning traffic.
So, my next problem is, since the online writing market is so saturated, how do I get myself noticed. I decided to take two paths at the same time, neither of which I tried before:
- Ads: I am currently running Google Adwords ads, and am planning on displaying Facebook ads. I'll tell you how they go later!
- Social marketing: this one is a little tricky. Since I am a Twitter user, and a little bit of a Facebook user, I already had a place to start. I started with changing my Twitter name to my real name to keep a consistency, then I started a Facebook page so I could better control what appeared on it, verses managing my Facebook presence via my account. I added follow and like me buttons to my site, so that if they like my stuff they can communicate with me and get alerts when I post new stuff. I also added separate share buttons on each one of my posts,and I encourage sharing by saying that if I get ___ follows or ____ likes I will post my next piece. Again, another experiment I will tell you about in the future.
- Cross-blog marketing: I have begun guest posting on various blogs as a tech writer. I always have a little bio at the end of my posts, going back to my site.
And, lastly, I decided to include the option of purchasing my works from Scribd.com, with the special bonus that if you buy it for a few dollars you will be able to download the story on your ereader and other devices. This keeps my options open for making a little profit (which I probably won't), as well as the possibility of self publishing. Most dedicated readers don't like it if you suddenly spring a store up on them.
Hope you didn't mind the long winded post, and I hope it helps some people.
~Joe Duncko
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