Many authors, especially those who write for the Web, use various techniques and practices that help them get the maximum number of readers possible. While I’ve successfully used some of them myself, there are others that I just refuse to do. I have listed five of them below.
1) Write about the most popular subjects. Sorry, but I can’t write about stuff like hairstyles and crafts and I don’t do reviews, even though I’ve noticed that people who focus on such topics get tons more readers than I. The problem is that I’m not interested in things like that – certainly not enough to write about them, no matter what the potential reward. I can only write about the stuff that interests me. If that means fewer readers and diminished chances to make money and gain notoriety, so be it. I’ll succeed on my own terms or I won’t succeed at all.
2) Write on demand. I can’t do that any more than I can poop on demand. I apologize if that’s a little too much information, but I couldn’t think of a better way to express myself on this issue. I’ve tried writing for sites that offer pay and/or extraordinarily high readership in exchange for writing about very narrow subjects of their or their clients’ choosing. In many cases, they want articles of 500 words or more. For some of that stuff, I can hardly think of one sentence.
3) Tailor articles and their titles toward popular keywords. I don’t think so. Pardon the expression, but I have no desire to become a keyword whore. I don’t feel comfortable twisting my words like that in order to create contrived articles. It seems like such an unnatural way to write. I have to write the way I think and I don’t always think in terms of keywords. Anyway, if I tried to cram an article with keywords, I would almost certainly put in too many, which would result in the search engines flagging my articles as spam.
4) Network. I’ve never been able to do the networking thing, whether on the Internet or in person. Sites like Facebook and Myspace are definitely not for me. I know that kind of thing helps build popularity for a writer and his or her work, but I’ve always been a nonconformist and a kind of lone wolf. It just seems to me that there’s a little too much kissing up and brown-nosing involved in the whole process. I hate that kind of politics.
5) Promote. Excuse me, but I’m a writer, not a promoter. I barely have enough time for writing. My goal is to write the stuff and let someone else do the promotion. The way figure it, if my writing is good enough, I shouldn’t have trouble finding people who would gladly promote it for me. Therefore, I’m going to spend my time being the best the writer I can possibly be, not trying to artificially inflate the numbers for mediocre work.
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