Writing for Search Engines Doesn’t Mean Selling Your Soul

Part 3 of  The Business of Blogging series

read Part 1: My Story

Part 2: Figuring Out Your Internet Voice

Selling My Soul? Huh?

I’ve read quite a few blog posts written by personal bloggers who lament the fact that “no one” reads their blog (which always sounds kind of odd to me. I’m here! I’m reading! Who do you want? The king of Norway?) but the blogger isn’t going to change her style, her voice, or write for search engines. No way, no how.

And that’s okay. It’s absolutely and perfectly okay to not know or care anything about how search engines work and just write because you want to write. If you’re lucky, your writing will attract a few prominent links by established websites or on some popular message boards, and you will gain some traffic.

But. Sometimes that just doesn’t happen, no matter how good your writing is. And if lookie-loos come to your site, you’ve got to find a way to keep them coming.

It’s also perfectly okay to not desire any additional traffic. You write for you. You write for your family. That’s great—but it means you can’t complain about it!

But sometimes you want more. You want people to come even if you aren’t writing any more. You want them to come even if you aren’t the funniest, the most creative, or controversial. And that’s where search engines come in to play.

Why Do I Care About Search Engines?

You care because once you’ve spent your time writing something, you can move on. Your article lives on, and you can wander off to other things because you’ve already done the work. Searchers can find your article without any additional work on your part. I wrote The Daily 7 for a Highly Successful Household months ago, but I still get traffic from that article, without having to do anything. Searches come in for “daily chore list” and the like even though I haven’t opened that article in months. On the slow cooker site, most of my daily traffic comes from recipe searches. Although I worked awfully hard last year to make the food, the recipes live on and generate traffic without any effort on my part.

How Do I Do It?

Once you’ve figured out what your blog is about, the writing will come organically. Tightly-focused blogs will generate traffic, because you are giving searchers an answer to their question. Let’s say you’re going to write a blog about keeping a two-year-old busy. Your writing will naturally use the key words google (or other search engine) users will use when trying to find information.

Keep Your Two-Year-Old Busy with A Trip To the Zoo

Keep Your Two-Year-Old Busy by Making Paper Dolls

Keep Your Two-Year-Old Busy by Creating an Art Box

While writing the articles, keep in mind that not everyone who types in a query about 2 year olds will type it the same way. They may use the number 2. They may spell the word out. They may use hyphens, and they may not. You may choose to mix it up in your article, or you may choose to spell only one way—to make sure the searchers spelling it the way you’ve chosen end up on your site.

Try to think like a google searcher when you’re naming your articles.  If you have figured out the secret to making a perfect gluten free pizza crust that has a nice crunch and doesn’t leave a weird aftertaste, share it with the world (and with me!), but just make sure you name your article properly.  Don’t name it “look what I made!”—name it “The World’s Easiest and Best Gluten Free Pizza Crust.” And then make sure that your article has the key words in there somewhere.

Tags Aren’t Just for Organization

Tagging your posts with key words is important for your own readers to help navigate your site, but it is also important for search engines who use computer spiders to crawl your site and for other social networking bookmarking sites such as delicious and technorati. Delicious is a bookmarking site that allows users to share their bookmarked sites with others. If you have tagged your posts/articles, chances are good that delicious users will use the same tags when saving your work. This helps others find you quickly and easily.

If you haven’t done so already, claim your blog on technorati, by signing up (it’s free) and claiming your personal blog. This will help you find other blogs in your category, and it will also let you know who has linked to your site (so you can thank them. Thank yous are important).

Be Helpful

The best advice I can give you about writing for search engines is to be helpful. Write what you want to read about. What do you search for on a regular basis? If you’re searching for something, chances are someone else is, too.

Part 4: Is Self-Esteem Tied to SiteMeter?

Figuring Out Your Internet Voice

The Business (Bidness!) of Blogging, Part 2.

read Part 1: My Story

What Do You Mean, My Voice?

Your voice is how you appear to your readers when they “hear”  you in their head while they read your work. If you are self-publishing to the Internet via a blog, through comments on a blog, or through interaction on a message board, you are creating a public persona that other people will begin to recognize when they read your name, or internet handle.

Your Internet voice is not who you are.

it is how others perceive you.

You need to choose this voice, this persona, VERY (veddy? lol, I took it too far there…) carefully, because unlike a phone call or a face-to-face meeting, what you put up on the Internet will follow you around. Forever. Even if you think something has been deleted, you have no idea who has copied and pasted your words or protected your email, your tweet, or your gmail chat from being deleted on their end.

This does not mean that you can’t be genuine, and it doesn’t mean that you can’t share your opinion. But you need to be prepared for your words to come back to you someday.

Are You Telling Me to Lie? To Not Be Myself?

Oh gosh no. Instead, I’m asking you to treat your online writing as a professional would. The title of this blog series is “The Business of Blogging”–not “how to par-tay like a rock star with reckless abandon and just figure people will like you for who you are and if they don’t, well screw them.” That would be a different series of blog posts.

Let’s just pretend that you are a grown-up, and you have information that you would like to share with other grown-ups through written word. You have decided to do so on the Internet. You have an interest in becoming a professional blogger, or a traditional journalist. Or you are working on a book. Or you’re interested in starting your own company. Or you might run for politics one day. Or you are interested in teaming up with sponsors to “get free stuff”—-all good ideas, and the Internet can definitely help. BUT. There is no need to share every last detail of every single thought that passes through your brain. Don’t start a blog post with “ohmygawd, I’m so drunk, but this is so funny so I have to tell you just this one thing…” unless you’re okay with a future employer looking at it in a boardroom blownup during a powerpoint presentation. If your story is drop-dead funny, it still will be in the morning.

Make sense?

How Much is Too Much?

This is a very personal question, and one that you will have to answer for yourself, before you begin writing online. Are you going to use your real name? Your last name? Are you going to post pictures of yourself, your children, your spouse? Are you going to share intimate details about your relationships? Discuss interactions you have with “real-life” people/friends/acquaintances? Are you going to share your opinions on controversial subjects? Politics? Religion? Mommy/Parenting war topics?

I’m going again to use the slow cooker blog as an example, because 1) it’s really the only thing I know about, and 2) it was such an easy business plan model to stick to.

I decided when I scrawled out my business plan, that I was going to not post my kids’ names, or their photos. I did let them get filmed for TV, though, which many would not agree with. I promised to not use my friends’ names without their permission (most said “no” by the way…), and I would only speak about my husband in a positive way. (I really want to crack a joke about this right now, but I’m going to be good and bite my tongue. my fingers. whatever.)

Although it was election year, I made a conscious decision to not write about the election other than to mention that we ate our food watching the debates, etc. I made a rather large mistake and posted on Inauguration Day that I was an emotional basket case, and was feeling weepy. I got a dozen or so emails alerting me to my mistake—I angered people. I didn’t stick to my plan. My plan was to not talk about it, and I ventured off course. I took the post down a few hours later, although I’m sure it lives on somewhere in somebody’s RSS (another example of how things NEVER EVER FOR REALS go away on the Internet!)

Deciding to not post pictures of my kids was easy for me, but it’s not so cut-and-dry for many. It’s a very personal decision, and I do not judge anyone who decides differently—-most of my daily reading is on mommy and personal blogs, and I love looking at cute kids. Many people have opted to turn their FlikR streams private, or watermark their photos to keep people from snatching them. Recently, the Associated Press ran a story about a private family holiday photo ending up in an ad in the Czech Republic.{this link is no longer valid. you’ll have to google it yourself!}

Decide How You Will Handle Criticism

Once you get a handful or more people who click on your site to read your words, you will receive some naysayers. Some blogs attract more than others. I have been super fortunate to not have had very many, but some of my friends are plagued with nasty commenters or trolls on a daily or weekly basis. It’s not pretty.

Decide up front (before it happens) what your strategy is going to be. Are you going to leave the comment up? Delete it? Respond to the writer directly? Are you going to reprint nasty emails and respond to the reader in a post, and allow your fellow readers to “rip them a new one?”

The reason to decide beforehand what you are going to do when this situation arises is so you are calm. So you don’t do anything stupid. So you aren’t reactive. Remember, NOTHING disappears in the Internet. If you crank out a nasty reply, you will have done 3 things: you will have egged the person on, you will have put “icky words” that may come back to haunt you out there, and you will have created bad karma. Never underestimate the power of karma.

The best way, I’ve found, and through speaking with others, is to moderate comments. Delete the icky ones, the spam, and the people who are obviously just having a bad day. It is not a reflection on you, but a reflection on who that writer was at the time he/she decided to lash out. Keep your head high and move on. Vent to a friend, if need be, but my advice would be to let it go.

Some people completely disagree with me, and welcome the trolls, and the nasty commenters. They egg them on. They LOVE it when controversy occurs on their blogs, or in their comment sections because they drum up more readers who will see how they will react, and they get people “buzzing.” That is fine, if that’s what you have decided is important for your future goals and professional work, both on and offline. But you can’t do both. Stick to a plan.

Get Involved In Your Community

Blogging is about community. If you aren’t interested in talking to other people, or in hearing other thoughts, don’t start a blog. Start an old-fashioned paper journal. Even if you truly think “noone’s going to read it anyway,” someone is. Blogging is definitely an egocentric activity, but it works the best when you engage the community you’re building. Answer questions left in comments. Visit other people’s blogs. Link freely and without “rules” about whether or not that person has linked to you. If you like something, link to it. If someone takes the time out of their busy day to ask you a question or send an email, answer it.

We all understand that life is busy, that there are jobs, kids, pets, and households to run. But it still feels like a let down when you write to someone and she doesn’t write back. If you happen to be completely overwhelmed with life and are bogged down with unanswered email, put up an auto-response. Something. I hate emailing people to never ever hear back. Even Oprah has an auto-response, and I’ll tell you, it feels great to see a message from Oprah in your inbox.

coming up soon: Part 3: Writing for Search Engines Doesn’t Mean Selling Your Soul

The Business of Blogging

I actually wanted to title this post series “The Bidness of Blogging” since I’m not an expert by any stretch of the imagination on either business or blogging, and I find the word “bidness” absolutely hysterical, but that wouldn’t be a good title.

I hope this series of posts (I’m not sure yet how many there will be. I’ve got a lot of stuff floating around my head!) will explain why.

Part 1: My Story

I started the slow cooking blog last year as a 2 part challenge. I wanted to see if I could:

1. make money off a free blog

2. use my slow cooker every day for a year

The second part: using a slow cooker every day for a year was a gimick. A schtick. I needed to have something to write about on the free blog I was interested in starting. The free blog I was interested in turning profitable. It certainly helped that I have a deep and abiding love for the slow cooker, and that I am not a good cook without it.

Ever since I thought about having children of my own, I wanted to stay home with them. I wasn’t opposed to working, though, which meant that I turned a bit obsessive about work-from-home ads and websites and resources. I wanted a quick and easy and painless way to work from home in my pajamas, with my kids.

I had begun working for BlogHerads at home on a contract basis in the fall of 2007. I read blogs for them, make sure the ads are in compliance, and pick post headlines from blogs to feature under the graphic ads. The only problem? I wasn’t a blogger. [updated: I no longer work for BlogHerads. I quit to write the first cookbook].

In order to understand my job properly, I needed to start a blog.

I understood a bit about how google worked, and learned through research that the more focused the writing, the quicker google searches would find me. Although I greatly enjoy reading personal and parenting-focused blogs, I was (and continue to be) wary about sharing too much personal information with the internet. I liked food blogs—I liked the tight focus and the limited personal sharing. Once I figured out that there wasn’t a blog (that I knew of) about slow cooking, the light bulb went off.

Oprah would call it an “a-ha” moment.

And so I wrote out a business plan. Yes. A business plan. Because I’m a complete dork.

I can see how a business plan wouldn’t make sense to a lot of bloggers, but it made perfect sense for me. I had goals I wanted to achieve, a time-line for doing so, and an exit strategy.

The one year exit was very important to me, and to my family. It would not be a sane thing to do (for me) without an exit strategy.

I wrote that I would stick to the following:

–I wouldn’t buy a domain name. I wanted to prove that a free blogspot blog (something looked down upon by many seasoned bloggers–in fact at last year’s BlogHer conference I had a few marketing people tell me that I would never be considered credible with a blogspot blog) could turn a profit

–I wouldn’t spend money on the blog, other than groceries. I would use the free site counter, etc. This changed (adapted!) after the 2008 BlogHer conference, when I learned that I really needed a new camera lens and a light source in order to take pictures of food properly. I’ll write more on that later.

–I would post every single day, no matter what

–I would be honest about my failures/flops

–I would misspell the word “Crock-Pot” to snag google searches

–I would use the word “recipe” and “crockpot” in every single post title

–I would step away from the computer after a year, and not try to promote the site, but let it stay up for google searches (this is a bit of a problem, because in order to keep the ads on the site, I need to post once a week—I’m still trying to figure this part out)

I also jotted down some goals about daily web traffic, income, and a book deal. The Secret in action!

Some people jump feet first into blogging with the idea of making a ton of money. While there are definitely people who are making a ton, most (MOST!)  see a very modest and not regular income. The internet ebs and flows–my daily traffic is about 10 thousand people a day in the “off” season, and triples during the fall/winter months. While I do have quite a few RSS subscribers (65k) people mostly  come through google searches, facebook shares, and now through Pinterest.

coming up next: Figuring Out Your Internet Voice