WorkshopsClick Here—Promote Your WorkBy Elaina Loveland, WIW Member Times have changed. Paper, pens and typewriters aren't the only tools of the trade for writers anymore—nor is having a computer enough. Web sites help promote the work of new writers and enhance the careers of established writers. Joe Flood, who is both a screenwriter and Web writer and editor, launched his site in 1996. "I realized I could share my work with the world 365 days a year. My Web site started off as a space to share my writing with my friends. I soon realized that I could reach new audiences—not just domestically, but also internationally with the Web." Flood also notes that having a Web site can be a professional opportunity to impress prospective clients and employers. To promote his screenplays, Flood includes excerpts of his work on his Web site. As a result, Flood has managed to attract the attention of new contacts in the screenwriting world that he would not have easily obtained otherwise. "I don't consider myself a techie," says Flood. "I consider myself a writer who learned a lot about technology." Essentials of Web Content and Design "You're opening up a door to your life," said Flood. "You don't want to put everything out there. You only want to display what is appropriate." Web content should be professional and reflect the kind of writer you are and who you strive to be. Many writers want to display samples of their writing online like a clip gallery. But posting published clips online can be a "gray area" in terms of copyright issues said Flood. It's preferable to have a URL on your site that a site visitor can click to from your site—only a person who has a link you provide them could click to your archived published clips. This strategy provides potential employers with the ability to review your writing while preventing the content from being open to the public. It's equivalent to sending a potential employer an e-mail message with published clips as attachments without deluging his or her inbox. In terms of the structure of the design, Flood advises keeping the content easy to navigate and posting the newest items near the top of the site so readers find the most current information quickly. Also, keeping the site up-to-date or designing it so it's always evergreen is crucial. "If you're going to have a site, it should be current," said Flood. Cost-effective Web site Options Creating a Web site is a lot easier today than it was 10 years ago when Flood first launched www.joeflood.com. He taught himself HTML, the basic code used to design sites. "There are a lot of tools out there these days. You don't necessarily have to learn Dreamweaver or HTML," said Gail Werner, vice president of marketing and founder of Connecting Links, a Bethesda-based Internet strategy firm. Of course, hiring a Web designer to build your site from start to finish is an option but there are more cost-effective options. One possibility is working with a designer to create a template for you to update, as you need it. Templates can be developed without having the site owner use HTML to update it. A common format has template pages with text boxes with cut and paste features so the site owner can make changes as needed. Another option is using a template that is already designed through a service that provides templates to customize your site. Organizations like the Authors Guild and Mediabistro.com offer such services for writers, which can be a lower-cost alternative to developing your own site. To get a unique domain name, you'll need to register your site and purchase a domain name. Like the cost of creating a site, registering a domain name is now considerably less expensive. You'll also have to host your site but there are a lot of options out there that are reasonable. "But never pay more than $30 a month for hosting," Werner advises. Driving Traffic to Your Site One of the easiest ways to drive traffic to your site is to link it to other relevant sites so people can find your site while searching on other similar sites. Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process by which you can make your Web site more likely to be found by search engines on the Web. SEO is a process of arranging a Web site's content to obtain high rankings in various search engines and includes choosing the proper keywords to ensure that the site will be found easily when Internet users type keywords into search engines. To find out more about SEO, Werner recommended www.searchenginewatch.com. "It's a good place to start. You can learn to do it yourself but you have to be willing to spend a lot of time doing the SEO yourself." The alternative is hiring an Internet firm to do the SEO for your site to improve its capability of reaching your audience. When writing your Web site copy, choose a few keywords that appear a couple of times throughout the copy so search engines pick it up. Gayley Knight, vice president of development and technology and founder of Connecting Links, tells writers to choose keywords that other people would use to search for your site—not necessarily how you as a writer would describe your work or your site "Marketing on the Web must be persistent, just like it is in the print world," Werner. "Also, people shouldn't forget to market their site in print, this includes having your Web site on all of your stationery and correspondence." Blogosphere Nearly everyone has heard of blogs. Essentially, "Web logs," blogs are online diaries of people who are self-publishing online. Blogs usually fall into one of two categories: personal or niche. Personal blogs are just about anything the blogger wants to write about while niche blogs usually focus on a specific topic. Blog software makes it easy for almost anyone to have one. People can sign up for a service to enable them to create a blog (like www.blogger.com or www.blogspot.com) or they can integrate a blog into their Web site. Reasons to have a blog:
Ana Marie Cox started Wonkette.com, a political blog that earned her enough notoriety for a six-figure book contract. Blog readers often find out about other blogs by reading blogs. That's because bloggers write about what others say. If you write about something on your blog, another blog "could pick it up" and you could find yourself more readers of your work in no time. And sometimes, the readers can attract media attention. "For one word I mentioned on my blog, I got calls from papers like USA Today," said Knight. However, having a blog takes a considerable amount of time. Flood stopped writing his blog because "it took over his life." Blog entries typically are made daily but writers can get away with writing less frequently, like weekly for example, if they train their readers to expect that frequency," notes Werner. To blog or not to, is a question writers need to take seriously. Is it the right thing to do, is it the right time to do it and would the writer's career be advanced faster by spending the time writing other material? The decision depends on the career stage of the writer, and their personal feelings about committing time to writing a blog. Hot Online Tool for Writers: The RSS Feed Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds allow Internet users to subscribe to Web sites that includes summaries of news stories or blog posts. If you do research on a particular topic frequently, you can subscribe to RSS feeds on that topic, which would be sent directly to you via e-mail, rather than having to do your own Internet search each time you have to research a specific topic. Resources for Tech-Savvy Writers www.adsense.com Elaina Loveland is author of Creative Colleges: A Guide for Student Actors, Artists, Dancers, Musicians, and Writers and has also written for several magazines. For more information, visit www.creativecollegesbook.com or www.elainaloveland.com.
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