Writing-Resource

Writing Skills 3 - Building a list of regular readers

If you are serious about writing for profit, you will need to build an audience. Okay, as your objective will be to move your readers on to your product or affiliate link, why should you worry about building a loyal readership? Why not concentrate on getting thousands of fresh clicks every day from search engines?

Because regular readers build trust; trust in you and in the products you recommend.

Have you ever visited an advertising blog which appeared to be selling a reasonable product, but moved on fairly quickly? You may have moved on because the blog design was ’spammy’ or simply unprofessional, but I bet many times you moved on because you felt that, however good the product was, you couldn’t trust the advertiser. What if a click on that link took you to a site full of spyware or viruses? No one else appeared to be around. You simply could not take that risk.

“Fair enough”, you may say, “I’ll register my blog with Feedburner and get sign ups for my RSS feed. I’ll also remind people to bookmark my site (or add my site to their favourites - in IE), by telling them what I have in store for them in future posts.”

A good start. Highly recommended in fact. But …

How many bookmarks do you have right now? How many RSS feeds do you have in your feed reader? How many email subscriptions land in your inbox every day? And how many of these do you actually read?

If you are a busy person, as most of us are, your answers will probably be along the same lines as mine. “I have many, many RSS feeds, email subscriptions and bookmarks. There are very few, if any, I even glance at on a regular basis. I just haven’t got the time. It’s nice to have them though, because now and again I find something really useful from them.”

Okay, so the first step is to make your content stand out and on an RSS feed this means an eye-catching but relevant title.

The second step is to ensure that the reader actually reads your feed once it’s open and clicks on the link to your site for more.

The same applies to bookmarks or favourites.

I have hundreds (probably thousands) of bookmarks on my Firefox Toolbar and quite a few in IE as well (I use IE mainly to see what my blogs look like in the IE browser before I publicise them - the difference to how they look in Firefox can be alarming at times).

I have bookmarks saved in Firefox where the links are probably dead by now, but I will never find out, as I never visit the sites anyway. Why did I bookmark them in the first place? There was something which attracted me to the site at the time. But as I cannot remember what it was, it probably wasn’t that important to begin with …

Do you recognise this pattern? Well, I would say that I am a pretty average surfer. How about you? Perhaps you are better organised than me and have relevant folders for each set of bookmarks. Do you still remember why you gave each folder its name? Do you know all the site links contained within those folders? I bet you don’t.

What I’m saying here is that getting people to bookmark you or subscribe to your RSS feed is a good start, but in today’s fickle internet market, it is never enough.

You need to develop an internet presence.

You need to get people to remember you, not just like you (they have hundreds of people they liked for whatever reason in their bookmarks already). In fact, I would suggest that they do not have to like you at all (although this helps in many cases). They may disagree with your point of view on many things, but enjoy reading your arguments. They may not have the courage to have your attitude to life, but they are still intrigued by it. They may disagree with some of your points, but still enjoy your writing style.

But they remember you because of these factors and, because they return for more, they are showing you that they respect your point of view, even when they do not share it. In other words, they are getting to know you and respect you .

In other words, it’s all about getting people to remember you, building their respect for you and thus gaining their trust. And with that trust comes a ‘trustworthy appearance’ which people see when they arrive at your site for the first time.

Sounds easy doesn’t it? Or perhaps not?

It will all become clearer in the next lesson.