Month: September 2014

8 Online Social Communities for Writers

Writer communities online
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Writing can be a solitary activity, which may be one reason why online communities are often popular with writers. They can be useful places to network, discuss industry gossip, give and receive support for work-in-progress, learn about new opportunities, celebrate, commiserate or just be distracted.

Here are seven niche writers’ communities worth a look.

1) Book in a Week
“Write, write, write. What is important is getting the words down, creating a first draft. Editing and revising comes later.” Book-in-a-week is all about members motivating one another to write. The site provides helpful tools and resources, prompts, specific goals to aim for and camaraderie.

2) Writers’ Network
“Created in 2004, Writers-Network is a large online community devoted to pointing creative writers toward success.” There’s quite a bit of poetry, but writers of all creative genres and forms are welcome and active on the site. Members are encouraged to review others’ work and comment on it.

3) Writers Online
Writers Online is the internet creative writing community from the publishers of (UK based) Writing Magazine and Writers’ News. As well all the features you might expect – news of competitions, courses, reviews, how-to guides and a writers’ directory, it also has an active writers’ forum.

4) Trigger Street Labs
“Helping writers and filmmakers help themselves – since 2002.” Calling itself a ‘platform for exposure and discovery’, Trigger Street Labs is a community for screenwriters and filmmakers. Lots of industry news and contextual material.

5) Writertopia
Writertopia is a resource for writers looking to “hone his or her professional writing skills.” The site includes listings for events, readings and workshops, as well as portfolio management tools and online workshops.

6) Writers’ Cafe
WritersCafe.org is a forum for befriending other writers and entering writing contests. Topics of discussion range from inspiration to publicity and marketing. The site includes lists of literary agents, magazines and courses.

7) NaNoWriMo
November National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo for short, has been going since 1999 and grows every year. The goal is to write a 50,000-word novel by Nov 30, a perfect challenge if you work well under pressure. There are progress tracking features, widespread support and potential for in-person meetups in your area.

The event has spawned the poetry equivalent – NoPoWriMo, which runs during the month of April each year.

8) Campus
CAMPUS is an online community run by The Poetry School. Not only does it serve as an adjunct to the Poetry School’s in-person courses (there are many online courses to sign up for), it’s also a social place where poets can “come together to learn about and discuss poetry.”

Online communities tend to increase in value (to the user) over time, and their success depends upon a critical mass of engaged members (in other words, those who fill in their profiles fully, contribute regularly to discussion, start new topics and help make newbies feel welcome.) Another factor in a community’s success is the reliability and usability of the software and user interface, which can vary.

It’s worth spending a little time exploring and experimenting with a new community before deciding whether it’s for you – don’t give up too soon if you don’t ‘get it’ right away, or if it seems clunky; it could end up being much more useful than you imagined at first.

With thanks to Matt Petronzio at Mashable whose original article inspired this post and provided some of the community descriptions.

 

A basic SEO primer for writers, part 2

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There are some simple steps you can take to help get your blog, website or profile found on the web. In part 1 we looked at what search engines do, how to find your keywords & how and where to use them.

But finding and using relevant keywords (sometimes referred to as ‘on-page SEO’) is only one part of the process. As well as relevance (as determined by keywords), search engines also look for recency and authority.

Update, update, update

The web is choked with old material. Some of this is still pertinent today. But there are long-abandoned websites, obsolete links and ancient blog posts galore. In Google’s worldview, new is best. The more recent the material the better. It’s a rather crude measure, but the principle is that anything posted on blogs five years ago will have been superseded by more up-to-date information. And certainly when it comes to online shopping, news, sport, the economy, weather and a lot of the day-to-day stuff, last week is old news.

If your blog, website or profile pages hasn’t been updated for a while, search engines will deliver more recent pages in their results, and yours may slide in the rankings. That’s one reason why a blog (rather than, or in addition to, a static website) is a good idea. As long as you post new material to it regularly (more than once a month).

Some business bloggers will tell you that it pays to post something every day, or certainly every week – that the more regularly and frequently you post, the more likely you are to see your search rankings improve, which will bring more visitors to your pages, more subscriptions/comments, the lot. This can happen – although it’s not everyone’s experience – but if writing is your primary business, rather than pro blogging, you would probably have to think very hard about making that kind of time commitment to blogging.

It’s not who you know, it’s who knows you

To stand out in some way on the web, you need an authoritative presence. Authority, as measured by search engines, is demonstrated by a number of things, but it basically boils down to who knows you. One indicator is the quality of inbound links. There are websites and bloggers with proven authority – think BBC, national newspapers, Huffington Post, Mumsnet, Richard & Judy and so forth – and if they link to you, it’s seen as an indication of your authority.

You might reasonably be thinking ‘oh sure, I’ll just go and get my book reviewed at the Guardian – how easy is that?’ OK so it may not be so simple. But there are opportunities to be had once you start looking: commenting on articles, answering calls for reader stories, taking part in online workshops or discussions, guest blogging, submitting your blog or site to a directory.

Start with the ‘low hanging fruit’ – if you’re a member of a professional association, make sure your blog or website (or Facebook Page, if that’s your primary hub) is listed (with a link) in their online directory. Then go to the media sites in your niche and pitch an article, a guest blog, a review. Check out the social sites where your readers (or potential readers) hang out and see what you can contribute there. Always ask for a link to your blog or profile page in the byline. Be aware, however, that these days many links are ‘nofollow’ – which means search engines are directed not to follow them, and therefore won’t offer you any SEO benefit. So by all means link-build, but do it for the PR and exposure rather than purely ‘link juice’.

Getting inbound links used to be a mainstay of SEO, but these days authority is established and demonstrated as much by a person’s social web presence – who are you connected to? Who follows you/links to you/retweets you? Who has you in their circles?

Being a good social web citizen does pay off in terms of SEO. Do everything you can to facilitate this. For example, make sure your various social profiles link to your hub (whether it’s your blog/website, your Amazon author page, your Facebook Page or whatever).

If you’re interested, go over to Klout.com and find out how you fare in terms of social authority. Compare yourself to other writers in your field. But don’t get too hung up on Klout – it’s only an indicator.

The bottom line is this: by all means pay attention to SEO, but a strong social web presence will do wonders for your web visibility and is more likely to open doors.

Software updates for your blog – are they important?

Add Plugin Page WP 4.0 Benny
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If you have a hosted blog at, say, Blogger.com or WordPress.com, then one thing you don’t have to worry about is updating the software – it’s all done for you behind the scenes.

But if you self-host, it’s your responsibility. I sometimes get asked “Should I be worried about all those little red numbers on my dashboard, and messages telling me there’s a new version of WordPress, or my Theme, or a plugin?” The short answer is yes – although you could carry on without updating, and everything would probably work fine, there are reasons why it’s a good idea to stay on top of updates:

1) WordPress updates generally include a whole range of amendments to the code, including security fixes and improvements to the functionality of the software. In plain English, an update should make your site more secure from hackers and make it easier to do stuff.

2) Similarly, Theme updates can offer improved security, more design options and better compatibility with plugins. If you’ve paid for a premium theme, why not take advantages of updates? They’re like free upgrades, after all. An out-of-date Theme can cause plugins to work differently, or not at all.

3) Plugin updates are worth installing, again because they tend to bring improvements, and like Theme updates if you don’t run with them you risk them not working at some point in the future.

Non-functioning elements of a blog are not only annoying for you and for your readers, they can open the door to security breaches. You may think “No-one’s going to be interested in hacking into my blog!” but that’s not the point. Hackers, scammers and spammers have automated systems at work 24 hours on the web, looking for easy ways to peddle their own particular brand of ill-will. Unsecured blogs, no matter what they’re about, are fair game for them.

Warning – before installing updates:

1) first do a back-up of your blog

2) be aware that if you (or a developer) have done any customisation of your blog or Theme, or have any bespoke plugins, updating any of your blog software may affect those customisations. This is why it’s important to back everything up first. If you’re worried, as added precaution you can also take screenshots, which will help if (in the worst-case scenario) you need to rebuild everything!

The longer you leave updating, the riskier it can be to do so. So better to stay on top of it.

Today when I logged on I was prompted to update to WordPress 4.0 ‘Benny’. (Updates are given names, rather like hurricanes and computer viruses.) This short video explains the improvements it offers.