On Tuesday I had a little Twitter conversation with @ElectricMidnite who was quite frustrated that his writing had not found a lot of readers yet.
And don’t we all know that feeling so well?
I do! When I started blogging no one was interested at all. Well, a few lovely friends have always had a look but it is not the same like having over 20 followers. Yes “over 20″ was my first goal 
. Still can’t believe that phoenixrisesagain has over 100 now. That makes me really happy.
What changed my “success”? Well, for one I read up on SEO which means search engine optimization. Well, still not good at it but I followed a few steps and it seemed to help. I also read up on “how to get more readers for your blog”. The main ideas are: add links to other blogs or pages to your entries, comment on other blogs, and give the readers the possibility to “spread the word” with buttons to post them on social networking. That and my “Thank you project” seemed to have done the trick. It is a question of good organisation though.
Of course we would love to spent all our time sitting on the beach writing our stories and poems but alas earning money with our writing is a business and therefore we have to tackle it like a business. Me myself and I have decided to stay an amateur writer being happy with my blogs and self-publish what I want to publish with Blurb. And taking part in competitions just for the fun of it really.
But I suppose you have to decide at one point how far you want to go with your writing and where you want to go with it. And then teach yourself or do courses. It is not easy to earn a living with writing because there is so much competition and the market is changing dramatically in the internet age.
But the internet is also our best “companion” in getting where we want to be as it offers us the information we need mostly for free. I have always followed my intuition and it usually lead me to where I needed to be at that stage. There are many more or less expensive courses out there nowadays and if you play around with keywords on google or the other search engines you will find what you need. Just get out and do it and do not forget to write. Write, write and write that is the only thing to get you going and get you better.
It has also helped me enormously to register that most famous writers had to do a lot of “day jobs” until they were able to get a living out of their writing. And I suppose most writers today do both. That took away an awful lot of pressure and I started to concentrate on what counted. The writing itself.
I collected some links to give you some ideas of how writers made ends meet and to motivate you not to give up:
@ElectricMidnite’s texts on Insanitysuperman’s Blog are quite raw and genuine. That is what makes them interesting. So please pay him a visit and raise his spirits with some feedback! Thank guys!
Related articles
- Blogging: Why bother to write when we can recycle content? (sandeepbhalla.com)
- Why Do We Blog? (goplayintraffic.wordpress.com)
- Criticizing others’ writing (sillyverse.com)
- Simple Living Idea: How to Stay Motivated? (prefs.zemanta.com)
- Social Media for Authors, by Natalie Cannon (charlotteblackwood.wordpress.com)
- The Poetry of SEO (iacquire.com)
- How to make blog writing style better? (bloggingmatters.net)
