How to Promote Your Online Writing

Whether you are writing a blog, a website with lots of content, or articles for sites that share revenue or pay by the page impression promoting your work is important. The more traffic you have the better, and getting web traffic isn't always easy. Having a few good methods and a better understanding of how to promote your work will always make it easier to get the job done.  

There are a lot of people out there who throw together pages in the hopes of making money. This fills the Internet with lots of worthless pages. While this may seem to be a good money making strategy (after all you can produce a lot more poor quality pages then good quality pages in less time), it is really a strategy that will make it hard for natural promotion to take place.

On the other hand if you have good quality material and are willing to put the work into your articles will be read, but they will also be promoted by those who read them. This can get you a lot of traffic and make it easier for you to make money with the articles you do have out there!  

You can interest a lot of people by talking about your writing. Because of this it is a good idea to talk about it whenever possible. Share what you are up to with others who are out there. It isn't a bad idea to have a business card with your web address or a site that directs people to all of your different works (if you have a lot of different things happening).  

Most of us have a wide range of resources available to use for free advertising. Some don't even realize it!

• Add links to the bottom of your e-mail. Most e-mail servers will let you create a signature which will then add the links automatically and send them out with each e-mail. This is a great way to advertise without being rude or overly promotional.  
• Include links in all of your profiles. Most of us have tons of profiles or about me pages on the Internet. It could be at Facebook, MySpace, as well as message boards and sites we write for or with. With all of these places about, we should be using them to advertise out other sites!
• Add links in your blog or website (if you have one). You can include links to each profile and highlight some of your best articles. You can also include links at the bottom of posts or articles found on your site. This is viewed better if the links actually pertain to the piece. 
• Make sure you are letting your friends or family in on the news. A lot of times friends and family will e-mail links and help promote your work for you (and for free!).  

Social bookmarking is a good way to start to get traffic. It should be noted that most social bookmarking sites don't care if you link to your own stuff, however they want you to use their service for linking to other stuff as well. Most of them consider it spamming if you link to only you pages. It is best to bookmark one of your articles to one of someone elses articles. Be sure to follow the specific rules of the site though.  

If you are like me, you tend to write a lot of pieces that work well together or are different aspects of the same topic or a topic that is likely to interest people who are reading the article. It is a good idea to link articles that work well together so that your readers can find more resources, read more of your stuff, have the opportunity to click or buy more items, and have more of your work that they can promote for you if they like it. Make sure the links work with the article, after all it is annoying when someone uses space to try and get you to go somewhere you would never want to go.

For example, this article goes well with the following titles:

• Sites That Will Pay for Articles is a good option because you might just want to know where all you can use your writing and these techniques to make money.  
• How to Make at Least $1000 a Month Online might also be of interest to you since most people looking to promote their online writing wish to do so to make money from it.  
• On the other hand, the majority of the readers of this article aren't going to want to read about The Ashera Cat, the $22,000 House Pet though it is an interesting article or about Using Stretchy Cord for Bracelets though it is very informative. 

*Hubpages also lets you link your hubs together in groups. This will put a previous article and a next article link at the bottom of the page and can make it easier for your readers to find more that you wrote about the subject that interests them most.  

There are really a lot of different places for you to link to your various articles and most of us use a wide range of them in our daily lives. Some have been mentioned earlier, but are worth adding to this list.

• E-mails. This is such an easy way to go. It isn't as hard to determine from spam as some of the other ones. It is best if you add links to your signature and send out a list of your best work once in awhile.  
• Profiles and About Me pages. If you are serious about making money with your writing online then you will have to build thousands of articles for others to read. You don't want to include a link to every article on any one site. That would be crazy! Instead include a link to your profile or about me on the site where your articles are. If you are like me with a thousand different profiles on a thousand different writing sites (just a bit of an exaggeration), then it is worth investing in a "hub" site that will link all of what you are doing in one place. It isn't that expensive and even if you have limited design abilities you can find good hosts with easy to use web building tools (yahoo is one good option and is fairly inexpensive). Then you can leave the address to your site.  
• You can also post links on message boards, forums, and blogs for good ways to get good links. However, these are methods that are often used for spam, which is always a bad idea and will give you a negative look. Check out Linking for the Best Results for good tips on where, when, and how to leave links on all sorts of sites!  

With most of the popular sites such as Hubpages, Helium, and Associated Content your articles get linked to the major search engines fairly quick. You can help speed the process up, but adding your URL by hand. To do this go to the search engine of choice, find a link that says add URL, and add the URL. It usually takes up to 48 hours or so to get their bots there to check out your article, but they will do it and are likely to add your URL and make it easier to find your article.  

Building your online presence is important and usually a slow process. You will want to use the same name or screen name on all your sites. Add new information to your profiles and work at increasing the amount of content you have online. This will work your way into an online presence and over time you will get people who recognize your name from one site to another (which of course is a good thing).  

If you are wanting to make money with your writing, promoting is important. However, if you get caught up in promoting then your writing will lack. Another good way to get more readers to your articles is to have more articles for them to choose from. The more you write the better you will do. Have fun with it and don't get stressed out over all of it. Take it one day at a time and you can make it happen!

If you are feeling over whelmed then it is a good idea to bookmark this page and come back often. Work on building up how you promote yourself and your articles. Each day (or week or month) do a little more to build up your exposure.