Writing for Your Readers

by Connor Rickett

You've been writing for yourself and perhaps friends and classes for awhile now, and you're pretty good, but now you're trying to make the big jump into writing for profit.

Well, now you're Writing for your Readers, and things are going to change. If you're reading this close to its date of posting, it means you've gotten yourself grandfathered in on the ground floor of an up-and-coming writing site, which is not a bad start, congrats!

Maybe you're wondering where to go from here, though? Well, you're looking to do two things now:

1) Bring in new readership, as much as possible.

2) Keep people coming back for more.

How do you do this? Well, you need to write about things an audience will care about. It doesn't matter which audience you pick as long as it's big enough for you to draw significant traffic from, and they will find your article interesting and useful.

Even if you are getting paid for advertising sold (as you are on SIA) rather than per click, advertisers are still looking for the articles that will get the most advertising bang for their buck, which is to say, the articles with the highest readership.

Just as important, you want to make sure your visitors have easy access to your other articles through whichever one they happen to access.

Don't be shy about linking your articles to each other whenever you can think of a reason to do so. Maybe you really want to increase readership of your poetry, or you've just posted a story and would really like other people to share their own opinions and stories, or spotlight someone else's excellent work you think they might enjoy (you have nothing to lose by helping others), but in general you should stick to other articles you think your audience will find useful or relevant!

Obviously, you should be somewhat careful, as excessive links can be distracting. . .

Just always remember that your fundamental goal has changed; you don't care about what you like, you care about what they like. You enjoy writing, and you should keep enjoying writing, but if the writing you enjoy isn't what your market enjoys reading, you may have to find another way to stay in the black.

Life is full of tough choices. Sometimes choosing between art and profit can be hard, but you've come this far, so don't give up just yet.

Trial and Error: You aren't going to hit the target every time, especially at first, so you're going to need to write a lot of different articles, over the widest possible range of subjects, in most cases.

Some people do find a niche as a very focused expert. This has the benefit of generally being a topic of great interest to the writer, and makes it really easy to bounce between their articles.

On the other hand, the shotgun approach holds more potential for the discovery of new interests, and you won't have to worry about getting tired of any one subject because you've written hundreds of in depth articles about it.

Advertising: Shamelessly promote yourself. DON'T BE ANNOYING ABOUT IT OR MAKE YOUR TITLE ALL CAPS.

It's annoying, and lots of people assume you're a hack and skip over it looking for an article with a more professional seeming author.

Similarly, use proper grammar and punctuation, within reason, and proofread before you post. Appearance is everything. Well, appearance and keywords.

You should take the time to figure out what keywords people tend to search for, and market towards it. Google Trends is a good tool for that.

Some final tips: Make sure people can understand what your article is about in the first few sentences, lay it out and make obvious so they know if they're in the right place!

Make your paragraphs relatively short and page-to-page navigation easy, so that people don't feel like they have to wade into the information. Get their feet wet, then suck them down like a whirlpool.

At the end of the day, it's a big Internet out there, and a sufficiently creative and determined person will find a way to make their mark. Good luck!