Five Cornerstones of a Successful Web Presence: Revenue

This article is part four in a series titled “The Five Cornerstones of a Successful Web Site.” This series is geared specifically toward writers who want to build a better web site for their freelance business, book promotion, publishing, or other projects.

Part I: Introduction
Part II: Domain Name
Part III: Design
Part IV: Ten Rules for Content
Part IV: Community

Today I bring you the final part in this series on web sites for writers. Let’s look at some ways that a writer can leverage the Internet to generate revenue.

Book Sales

You can either sell your book directly from your web site (note that doing so requires e-commerce capability on your site), or you can partner with a major online retailer such as Amazon. Include a linked image showing the book’s cover, which clicks through to a shopping cart. When you sign up via Amazon (as an associate), you can earn a kickback for every book sale that originated from your site.

Portfolio

Nothing will sell your work quite like a portfolio. Select five to eight of your strongest pieces to display on your site, and try to choose work that demonstrates your range in voice, style, and genre. This will make it a breeze when you are sending inquiries and submissions to magazines and other publications, providing them with easy access to your samples. You may not see any dollars directly from your portfolio but it will certainly increase your chances of getting them!

Advertising

Advertising is the prime way of earning money online. Not only can you sell space on your site directly to various businesses, you can also sign up for any number of programs that do the selling for you. Ad providers like Google Adsense, Chitika eMiniMalls, and Widgetbucks will provide you with code that you insert into your HTML. Your job is to attract visitors and hope they click. Amazon, which was mentioned earlier, also has an ad system through which you can advertise any products they sell. Great for book reviews!

Sell Content and Goods

Online, you can provide content to sites and sources other than your own. There are several sites that allow you to upload your written articles, and then they share ad revenue with you. I haven’t tried these for myself yet (though it’s on my to do list) but I’ve heard that Associated Content is the fairest of them all. If you have other talents, you can sell stock photography at iStock, or create and sell products with images or text over at CafePress.

Freelance Writing and Editing

Here’s something I have tried and have been happy with so far. By offering your professional writing and editing services, you can easily earn some extra cash. You can even earn your living doing this. A few words of advice: shop around for other freelance services before setting up your own to get an idea of what kind of rates you should charge, and what other information your site should have (like a get-quote form).

Unique Writing Services

Custom poetry and greeting cards, short stories featuring YOU and YOURS, personalized books. These are just a few examples of how writers can generate revenue online. With so many online print services, it’s a snap. You solicit customers, write them a poem or story (include pictures and images whenever possible), and send it off to the printer. Have it delivered direct to the customer. Try to think of more custom writing services that you can offer and sell, sell, sell.

What are some other ways that writers can earn money online? Leave a comment and tell me about your ideas.

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Five Cornerstones of a Successful Web Presence: Community

This article is part four in a series titled “The Five Cornerstones of a Successful Web Site.” This series is geared specifically toward writers who want to build a better web site for their freelance business, book promotion, publishing, or other projects.

Part I: Introduction
Part II: Domain Name
Part III: Design
Part IV: Ten Rules for Content

In this part of the series, I’d like to talk about the importance of building a community, because you can build a web site, but that doesn’t mean anyone’s going to come.

The type of community you build will vary depending on what kind of web site you have. Suffice to say, what you want is traffic. Your traffic is your community - the people who visit your site. Every visit someone else makes to your site is called a hit. When someone hits your site, they see it, they see you, and learn about whatever it is you’re offering.

Advertising

One of the easiest ways to draw traffic is to pay for advertising. This is a fairly sure way to get hits but it can be costly. Well-targeted ads can draw the right kind of visitors. If you’re a writer who has recently published a political thriller, it would be great to publish an advertisement on any political site. Several advertising services will do the targeting for you, and ensure that a link to your site (with or without an image) appears in appropriate locations.

Building Relationships with Like Minded Individuals

The old fashioned way to build traffic is to first build relationships with others who run sites similar to yours. In the case of the political thriller, you’d want to seek out other authors, or even fandom of the genre, and strike up a conversation (e-mail would be the way to get this done). If all goes well, you can do some link swapping. That means you link to their web sites, and they link to yours. Understanding how this works may require an adjustment in thinking. Traditionally, we don’t advertise our own competition, but on the World Wide Web, things are different. It is not only expected, but good manners to reciprocate links and generate a network of similar content.

Social Networking Sites

Establish a presence on one or more social networking sites. MySpace is the biggest one, with the widest audience. It’s also super easy to use and find folks who will likely be drawn to your product. Others you might try are Facebook and Friendster.

Social Bookmarking Sites

There seems to be an unlimited number of social bookmarking sites. What are these sites? Basically, they are hubs where people share their favorite sites. Think of it as publishing your bookmarks where everyone can see them. Some social bookmarking sites operate more like directories. They allow you to submit your site for listing. Start out with the major players - Digg, del.icio.us, and if your site is a blog, Technorati. You might try StumbleUpon too and if nothing else, you’ll be exposed to some really cool web sites.

What if My Site is a Blog?

If your site is a blog, you should definitely do all the above and take it one step further. Another great way to build relationships is to leave comments on blogs all across the blogosphere. You can do this regardless of whether your own site is a blog, but if it is a blog that you’re running, commenting is absolutely necessary, unless you’re already in the big leagues - in the Technorati Top 100, getting 5000+ hits per day, or earning hundreds a day in ad revenue.

Make Yourself Available

All of this means nothing if you don’t make yourself available to visitors. When people reach out, you should respond. When someone links to you or writes a feature on your site, be sure to — at the very least — link back to them in some way. The only reason not to reciprocate a link is if the site linking to yours is offensive or incredibly horrendous. If you are blogging, be sure to leave comments open, and avoid requiring users to register in order to leave comments. If you’re receiving spam, set your comments to moderate, and if that becomes too overwhelming, get yourself a widget to help filter the junk.

I’m sure there are many more ways to build your community online, and generate traffic. Do you have an idea to add? Leave a comment and tell me about it!

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Five Cornerstones of a Successful Web Site: 10 Rules for Content

This article is part four in a series titled “The Five Cornerstones of a Successful Web Site.” This series is geared specifically toward writers who want to build a better web site for their freelance business, book promotion, publishing, or other projects.

Part I: Introduction
Part II: Domain Name
Part III: Design

An effective design captures attention and rouses curiosity but content keeps visitors interested and encourages them to return to your site again and again. Quality content will harness a reader and draw them in. It will generate subscriptions, book purchases, and clients. The name or title of your site, its design, the way you market it, all of that matters very little if you don’t deliver the goods, and in the world of the web, the goods are content.

Without further ado, I give to you ten rules for ensuring that your content delivers:

1. Make Your Mark, Then Hit It - Your site needs an objective and once you have formulated that objective, stick with it. As a writer, your job is to produce excellent composition. As a webmaster, your job is to make sure your site delivers on its promise, so whatever your site is about, try to adhere to that concept in everything you present.
2. Write for Your Audience - Every writer should know this one, their audience. That’s who you write for. Your web site may have a slightly different, often broader audience, but you still need to write and produce content for your specific target readership.
3. Clear, Compelling, and Correct - Again, this should be a no-brainer for writers. Your writing needs to make sense, it must generate interest, and of course, must adhere to the rules of grammar, punctuation, and spelling. Unless, of course, you’ve taken creative license and decided to break those rules - something that should only be done if the rules have first been mastered.
4. Benefits of Brevity - This one trips up many a writer, particularly authors of novels and other long form writing. When writing for the web, you want to keep it as short and succinct as possible. This is the Internet; cutting edge technology does not have time to sit through thousands of words of text.
5. Brand Consciousness - Your brand (logo, name, etc.) should be seamlessly woven into the fabric of your content. A professional web site exists to promote or sell products or services. By integrating your brand with the content, you increase the value of the brand itself, as well as the value of your site’s content. Be careful though - don’t overdo it to the point that you repeat your brand ad nauseam.
6. Extras: Images, Links, Ads - Web site extras can add to your site’s content and help generate hits and money. Images and links are fundamental components of any site. They give your visitors eye candy and additional resources to explore. Ads will be discussed in a later article in this series, but for now just know that they generate revenue and that means cold, hard cash.
7. Organization - If your site is disorganized, people won’t be able to find their way around and even worse, they won’t be able to locate whatever it is they came there looking for. With a very simple site, organization is not necessarily an issue, but the more content you build up, the more critical organization becomes.
8. Keep it Current - If your site’s information is outdated you’ll turn your visitors off and away. Keeping your information and links up to date lets visitors know that you take your site seriously. One of the biggest tell-tale signs of a poorly managed sites are links that don’t work. Try to sift through your links and other dated material about once a month and do a thorough housecleaning twice a year.
9. Just Say No. There are a few things you should avoid when it comes to content in addition to outdated information and broken links. Never link to a page or section within your site that is “Under Construction.” Visitors who come across the dreaded “Under Construction” surely click away, feeling like they’ve been tricked or teased. Also, avoid a lot of glitter and flashing icons, which only distract from the actual content.
10. Finally, there are a few staple must-haves for every web site. The first of these is your navigation bar, which should appear on every single page within the site. On it, be sure to link to your other must-have sections: Home, About, and Contact. Always provide visitors a way to quickly and easily return to the home page. An about section communicates your site’s purpose and even sites with an obvious intent should include a page that explains what the site is all about. Lastly, and I cannot stress this enough, you should always have some way that people can contact you, even if it’s just an email address. You never know when opportunity will come knocking so be sure you’ve given it a door to knock on!

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