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Review: One Of The Best SEO Tools
NOVEMBER 7, 2020 by LORENE M.
Where Can A Writer Find Readers?
Yesterday I wrote about why every writer needs readers. And since readers don’t grow on trees, I believe we need to understand how and where to find our readers, especially if we have little to no money to invest.
For those writers that have money, it’s easy to find readers. They just put up a bunch of ads and bam! The readers will come. But what about the rest of us? How can we find our readers?
Well, we need to think as readers, which you and I both are. How do we get to become readers, and moreover, fans of a particular writer? The first step is to stumble across that writer on social media (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and so on), on the search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo and so on) or through a recommendation from someone else. But, to find that writer, she/he needs to do something to get on social media, search engines or other people’s radar. Therefore, our focus as writers needs to be split between writing and spreading the word.
The thing is that you have little to no budget, you need to focus more on organic reach and less on paid advertising, because with paid advertising most of the attention will go away once the ads stop. As writers, we need people and a community, not single views.
To create a community, you need to keep writing so the people have something to gather around. Imagine a holiday dinner or a birthday party. A bunch of people gather for a reason and, in this case, the reason needs to be your writing. So you need to write so people have a reason to come to you.
Social Media
I don’t know if you’ve heard the saying: “if you’re not on Facebook, you don’t exist!”, but there is some truth in it. You don’t exist as in nobody can find you, so to create a community you firstly need to create a Facebook page and/or a Facebook group and share things daily. It doesn’t have to be something significant, but something that will make the day better for those that see it (e.g. a small empowering quote or an image). And of course, it needs to have a connection with your content, otherwise you will gather the wrong “crowd”. The same applies for the other social media platforms (if you are too lazy to manually post it, you can try software like ContentStudio, Hootsuite, Ifft, Postling and so on that will allow you to publish on multiple social media accounts at once).
Search Engines
Few writers think about search engines as a way of traffic because the outcome is slow compared to social media. However, nothing can beat a website well optimized for search engines. This is done with SEO (Search Engine Optimization). The best part here is that readers will come to you. On social media you need to put up posts as much as possible so the readers remember you, but for search engine you don’t have to necessarily do that. Once a well optimized post is up, the search engine will do that for you and interested readers will come to you.
Another great thing about search engines is that they connect people interested about something with the websites that provide that something. For example, if you have a website about relationships and someone searches relationships on Google, the better SEO you’ll have, the higher your website will rank and that someone will enter your website and become a reader because he/she is interested in the topic.
Swan Island in the Kennebec -- 