Writers' Blogs and the Mighty PR 30/07/2005 I have never made a secret of the purpose of this blog. It is intended primarily as a way of showcasing my writing, of becoming well enough known that an agent or publisher might become interested.There are several flaws in this theory, perhaps the most obvious being that publishers and agents don't read blogs. They are far too busy wading through the piles of waste paper submitted to them every day to ever surf the blogs. Even so, the blog has had its small successes, being the means to a weekly column in a local paper and selection for the abortive television documentary on blogs.Realistically, however, I have to face the fact that such lucky accidents do not happen every day. If the blog is ever to achieve its aim, I am going to have to find ways of making it much more noticeable than it is.By blog standards, it has done very well so far and now receives about 4,000 hits a day (and 600 sessions - a much better indicator of visitors). But this is small change compared to the blogs on the A-list, the heavyweights of the blogosphere. They number their links in the thousands, never mind their hits and sessions.I have come to realize that it's incoming links that make the blog; the more you have, the higher your Google Page Rank (PR) and the higher you will appear in any search result. And, if you can achieve a link from a blog on the A-list, then your PR will really begin to rise. It's quality as well as quantity that counts.Unfortunately, writer's blogs will never achieve links from the A-list bloggers. Why? Take a look at a few of them and you will find that they deal in news and oddities; they either mimic the newspapers or consist of links to weird and wonderful things on the net. They can have no interest in literary blogs whose stock in trade has rather more shelf life than the ephemera they subsist upon. Understand, I am not deriding such blogs; they have a job to do and they do it very well, hence their popularity. But writers need to face the fact that there is no hope of salvation from that quarter. If we are ever to become serious contenders in the PR race, another strategy must be found.A few days ago it occurred to me that writers need a few heavyweight blogs of their own; blogs with enough incoming links to be regarded as quality by Google. If such a blog were then to link to the blogs of writers, each blog so linked would increase in importance too. We would, in fact, be creating our own little corner of the blogosphere where our rules dominated, rather than those of the A-list.Not having the time to set up such a blog on my own, I looked around to see if there were any that we could use as a starting point. And I chose Deborah Woehr's blog, The Writer's Buzz (TWB), as the most likely candidate. Deborah has already established several blogs and TWB has a sizeable membership. She also posts very useful and informative articles and, by chance, had posted recently regarding the future direction of TWB. I wrote a comment, outlining my ideas. If you are interested, I strongly recommend that you have a read of her article entitled The Future of The Writers Buzz, together with its comments.If you're still interested after reading that, have a look at the later articles We Need Our Own Corner of the Blogosphere and Writers' Blog Alliance Poll.An important part of the strategy we're beginning to evolve is that it must be a united effort. The more writers and readers we can get involved and linking to the blog, the higher we will push the PR and the more benefit it will be to all of us. There are hundreds of writers' blogs out there and each one has its readers. If we can get together and create the central point I envisage, the chances of each one of us being noticed increase dramatically.I say let's do it!
Clive
Gone Away Good ole Nigeria - where would we be without it? :D Date Added: 30/07/2005
Josh Ever think about striking a blow and deleting such spam, Gone? All that happens is the PR googlejuice gets shifted to those spamblogs. The Writer's Alliance sounds like a good idea. You guys'll probably go far---as collaboration, done in ernest, always seems beneficial. Something about the principle of hybrid vigor in there somewhere. Just make sure you're not the Ché Guevara in this particular revolutionary council. :P Date Added: 30/07/2005
John (SYNTAGMA) Clive, sometimes I think we're like twins. We're going through the same learning curve. I've been wrestling with identical problems and coming up with similar solutions for the past year. The fact is that we're all getting used to reading online now. Until recently, everyone hated reading from a screen, now print media is under real pressure as all the latest stuff is online way ahead of it.Addressing your main point about writers needing to access mainstream media in order to make a living and/or get published in book form, there are ways to do it, but the author has to be his/her own publicist. And blogs are a great way to do it. The Long Tail is out there waiting to be dazzled.My own plan is to set up a highly profitable blog network that offers content free, but cleans up on ancillary activities, like affilate trading and AdSense (Darren Rowse of Problogger made $14,500 in May on AdSense alone). One's serious books then become part of the e-commerce of the site, probably subsidized by other earnings. Using on-demand printing, the costs are minimal : $500 outlay for a book, provided you do your own typesetting in PDF. Once a book is "out there" it may attract real interest from a trade publisher. Even then you are your own boss, because you can dictate terms and control events.So, yes your idea of writers collaborating on schemes like this is a sound one. I too have followed Debbie's blogs on writing and blogging. But it's an uphill task to take on the mainstream media on their own terms. Creating links between writing blogs is a good start, and much may develop between them. Count me in if you're going ahead with anything like this. Date Added: 30/07/2005
Deborah Thank you for the compliment and spreading the word, Clive. :) It's very much appreciated. Date Added: 30/07/2005
Martian Anthropologist Clive, very interesting thoughts. It's very appealing to have our 'own corner' of the blogosphere. I'll be back later today to read that article, and to add you to my bloglinks. Date Added: 30/07/2005
Gone Away Unfortunately, I can't delete it, Josh. That's one of the powers still retained by Mad. Bit I've no doubt he'll see to it as soon as he realizes it's there. And I have no intention of being shot in the wilds of Bolivia! ;) Date Added: 30/07/2005
Gone Away Absolutely, John - collaboration is where we have to go if we're going to make an impact. And the more routes and schemes we try, the more likely we are to come up with something that works. Debbie is working on a new site for implementation of the idea and I'll let you know as soon as it's working. Date Added: 30/07/2005
Gone Away Entirely my pleasure, Deborah - and you deserve every bit of publicity you get. I'm still amazed at how quickly you've set to work on this! Date Added: 30/07/2005
Gone Away Interesting blog, Martian, although somewhat embarassing for humans! I'll keep posting on this as and when we get the thing up and running. Date Added: 30/07/2005
Madmin Madmin has spoken (oh and some spam you guys never even see before I catch it and atomise it)... Date Added: 31/07/2005
Gone Away Thanks, Mad. :) Date Added: 31/07/2005
Phil Dillon Clive First, thnaks for your very kind comments over the last few days. Coming from a really good writer like you I feel honored. Like you, I'm looking for avenues to read good writing and to get some exposure for mine. I've been principally working through writer's workshops (will be attending one in Glorietta, NM in October) and chance. Even though I'm retired I don't have the time to market what I write. On good days I spend as much as 6 to 8 hours putting together a 2500 word piece. Inspiration,I'm told is 2/3 persperation. I'd love to work with you and others to get something like this rolling. Let me know what I can do. Date Added: 31/07/2005
Josh .o0(I wish Joshmin sounded as cool.) Date Added: 31/07/2005
Gone Away I am always impressed with the quality and flow of your writing, Phil. And what you have to say needs to be heard. I, too, have the problem of balancing writing with marketing but am fortunate in that I have a book "ready to go". Even the short stories take time, however, and I try to build up credits in the traffic exchanges in preparation for when I know I'll be writing. I think I chose the right lady to speak to about this idea for increasing traffic - Deborah is really running with it. As soon as it's ready, I'll let you know and then we can really make things begin to happen. Today, the traffic exchanges; tomorrow, the world! :D Date Added: 31/07/2005
Gone Away How about Joshtech...? ;) Date Added: 31/07/2005
Josh Hah! It just doesn't pack the oomph somehow. ;) Date Added: 31/07/2005
Gone Away I must admit that when I named my son Mad so many years ago, I had no idea that it would prove so important to his later career. ;) Date Added: 31/07/2005
Meagamolly Sounds a great idea but who is going to hold the hand of us technophobes and technodyslexics for whom most of what you just posted makes absolutely no sense at all. Date Added: 31/07/2005
Deborah Hi, Meagamolly, I'll post some tutorials either via PDF format or on the forum once I have the site set up properly. Date Added: 01/08/2005
Gone Away I'm learning too, Meagamolly, but it's funny you should mention the technospeak - only today I have been thinking that one subject we could deal with on the site Deborah is setting up is how to understand all the ins and outs of this blogging and traffic business. I would be happy to contribute what I know and I'm sure others would too. And thanks for chipping in, Deborah. :) Date Added: 01/08/2005
Deborah My pleasure. ;) Date Added: 01/08/2005
John (SYNTAGMA) In the meantime, there's a post about traffic on SYNTAGMA, which comes from hard experience over the past week. It's titled : Blog Tips For August. Date Added: 01/08/2005
Gone Away Now, if we were to pool our knowledge, is there anything we wouldn't know? ;) Date Added: 01/08/2005
John (SYNTAGMA) That's the strength of blogging, isn't it? It's organic and cooperative. The whole is more than the sum of its parts. Date Added: 01/08/2005
Gary 4000 hits!! 600 sessions!! (Whatever sessions are.) I would consider 300 hits an amazing day. (I feel like such a failure...) What is your secret to traffic, Clive? You don't even link that much to other blogs. Date Added: 01/08/2005
Gone Away Hit counters are misleading, Gary; every time a visitor "hits" a page of a blog, that page will also access things like image files, links to other sites, files containing extra info, etc. Each one of these counts as a hit. What we really need to be interested in is how many visitors we get. Every time a new visitor hits your site, a new "session" is started. If that visitor looks at several pages in the site, it will still count as one session but the hit rate will start to mount. So I consider the session count as a fair indicator of the number of visitors, even though it cannot be completely accurate (some visitors will re-visit that day). Hit counts look impressive (and can also be depressing - they tend to be extremely volatile, giving stats that encourage one day only to disappoint the next). My figures (PR: 5) are small beer compared to some; and I have had to slave to get them as high as they are (which is why I am always looking for new ways to increase them - preferably a method that does not increase the effort I have to put into the blog). Hence this article. And this suggested strategy depends entirely on how many are prepared to get involved. I'll keep you informed of progress and hope that you can join the united effort! I will be writing more posts, both here and in the projected writers' blog to be set up by Deborah, in which I share what knowledge I have gained so far. But your point about my links to other blogs is very relevant so I'll explain my philosophy on that right now: Some bloggers will link with whoever gives them a link. The result is that they end up with long lists in their blogrolls, lists so long that it is doubtful that many bother with clicking on more than the first few in the list. I presume that the theory is that this adds to the importance of a site as far as the search engines are concerned, yet I have not noticed any huge PR numbers in blogs with such long lists. And the purpose of the blogroll (to share good links with visitors) is defeated by the inclusion of all and sundry. If there are any good links in those lists, they are lost in the cacophony of the many awful ones. So I decided very early on that I would go for quality in my recommended links. It's my reputation that's on the line too, after all. Hopefully, people will come to understand that, if I include a link, it will be one that I consider well worth looking at. Search engines are only interested in incoming links anyway. And quality counts in such links. If your blog can achieve a link from a highly rated site (PR of 7 or 8), the search engines will regard you as important too and your PR will increase accordingly. That's really what I'm talking about in this article - how to arrange things so that writers have a chance of getting links from sites with a high PR. If we work together on it, I think we can "engineer" something to the benefit of us all. Certainly, if we sit around hoping that a heavyweight blog will link to us, we'll have a long wait. ;) Date Added: 01/08/2005
Dana Very good idea. I am still taking baby steps on my writing blog, and have a long way to go, but I found your post very interesting. Great blog! Date Added: 01/08/2005
Gone Away Thanks, Dana. Consider becoming involved with the Writers' Blog Alliance when Deborah gets it up and running! I'll keep you posted. :) Date Added: 01/08/2005
Gary Ranking sites can be misleading as well. That's why I abandoned Truth Laid Bear. For a long time he had me ranked as two different blogs, both at around 3000-4000th in his rankings. When he finally combined them my ranking went down to almost 8000th! Does that make any sense? No. So I just gave up on it. Have you noticed a sag in visits over the summer? I have. Thanks for pioneering this stuff, Clive. I barely have time to write for my blog these days. Date Added: 01/08/2005
Gone Away Yes, there has been a slump in traffic, Gary, most likely because of the summer arriving. But that's the kind of thing that gets me really agitated and looking for ways to compensate for the decreased traffic! I never used Truth Laid Bear but Technorati gives me the same kind of pain - my ranking there is gradually slipping and I can't figure out why... Date Added: 01/08/2005
Josh Technorati is a boondoggle, near as I can tell. I put in at least 4 hours scripting up a 'channel' to that site, and it hasn't meant much, if anything, over the 2 months its been active. Of course, after I voice such a sentiment, I try and reflect on how its all just inside baseball, and how little, therefore, it really means to most people. :) Date Added: 01/08/2005
Gone Away I agree that Technorati ranking is hardly worth losing any sleep over, Josh. I'd give more credence to it if they found a few more of my links - Google reckons 185, Technorati 29... Date Added: 01/08/2005
Deborah Summers are usually slower all the way around. Once school starts, you can expect a traffic surge, which will heighten as Christmas approaches. I'm aiming to launch the Alliance by the end of this month or early in September. Date Added: 01/08/2005
Gone Away That's great, Deborah. I'm really looking forward to it! Date Added: 01/08/2005
Wil Clive, you are proposing what I have been implementing for over a year now... which is to establish a global network of real bloggers. Wil's Domain to which you have recently submitted your blog, was founded on the very concept of affording one the opportunity to voice his or her opinion and reach a wide audience who share his or her beliefs. I have always welcome any fellow blogger to submit their blog to the directory. I love helping blogers getting the FREE exposure and blog visitors they deserve. I am very annoyed by the so-called A-List bloggers, who are stealing and manipulating the majority of the blogosphere traffic. Clive, the blogosphere is getting increasingly tougher to compete against so-called A-List bloggers, who are secretly backed by the elite media opertives. As a disabled American veteran (USMC), I began blogging anonymously for veteran's rights. Because I wanted to share my blog traffic with other bloggers, I founded Wil's Domain. My blog directory is not a major leaguer, but it is a power hitter in the search engines. I wish you success in your endeavors. I will visit often to read your blog entries for updates. If you ever need an experienced helping hand, visit my site to send me a message. I am willing to assist you pro bono in any way I can. Once we have eliminated the A-List bloggers' grasp of the blogosphere, we true blogger can reclaim our domain. Wil Wil's Domain Date Added: 02/08/2005
Gone Away Hi Wil. In fact, what I am proposing is something rather more limited than a blog directory. I am being quite selfish in wanting writers to establish their own territory within the blogosphere which might ultimately become a central point for writers and readers to refer to. If enough writers participate, it could become large enough to generate its own traffic. My initial thought was for a magazine blog contributed to by many writers; since then Deborah has added several ideas to that so that it may well end up as much more than a blog. The important thing is that it be living and constantly updating so that it attains importance in the search engine rankings. Once it achieves that, benefits will flow to the blogs of the participating writers. I do not see such a site as competing with either the A-list bloggers or the directories; it is intended to provide a service for a very specific type of blogger: the writers whose blogs at present are buried under the mass of other blogs out there. Essentially, we want to be able to have a site that is known clearly as the center of literary endeavor in the blogosphere, thus attracting our intended market: readers, publishers and agents. The directories do a great job for all blogs; hopefully, the Writers' Blog Alliance will provide as good a service for the more specialized clientele envisaged. Date Added: 02/08/2005
raul Ok. Clive, what about your purpose? Did you find interested publishers? I dont know if the purpose is important when you do something you feel good with yourself, as a blog. It's like to make a love, you love without intention; you do not say I make a love to losse weight or reduce my stress. The main thing is a pleasure or not pleasure, is a comunication or not comunication, is a misterious force that take your hand and force to write without transactional intention. Writing is a misterious thing, you know; its vudu. Date Added: 05/12/2005
Gone Away What about my purpose indeed, Raul? Essentially it remains the same - to attract enough attention to be noticed by an agent or publisher. But it is true that the blog itself has become a purpose. The contact it gives me with readers, the feedback I get and the knowledge that at least some of my writing is being read makes a big difference to writing. Yes, we would write even if there were no readers; but the point is really to communicate and without readers we're not doing that. Ultimately I need to have my books published and so I will use the blog, traditional approaches and everything else I can think of to achieve that goal. If none of it works, at least I've had a little fun in the process, mainly through the blog. ;) Date Added: 05/12/2005
raul Clive would it be possible to read one chapter about your book? Date Added: 05/12/2005
Mad I'll get this one Dad. Raul an excerpt is posted here. Date Added: 05/12/2005
Gone Away You can read Chapter Two by clicking on this link, Raul. Hope you enjoy it! An explanation of why I posted Chapter Two rather than Chapter One is here. Date Added: 05/12/2005
Mad Do try to keep up Dad ;) Date Added: 05/12/2005
Gone Away It seems we were both answering at once, Mad. ;) Date Added: 05/12/2005
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