How hard is it to be a writer?
I am a new and upcoming blogger about books, writing, and how to promote your work. It is a very tough industry with millions of books being self published every year.
I would love to hear from you guys the most difficult aspects of being a writer.
Love,
Queen.
It's not hard to be a writer, but it's very hard to be a good writer! You have to know your audience (once you have developed an audience), provide engaging and interesting information, develop your own voice and style and bring a unique perspective to the table. Most people want to be entertained, so if you can master the art of educating them while you entertain them, you're a step ahead of a lot of 'writers'. Ultimately, to be a good writer, first means you have to be a good reader, listener and observer.
Thank you very much. I believe I have all these things but the problem is that I cannot attract people to my blog, and when I do they mostly do not subscribe and I feel like giving up already.
How long have you been blogging?
I created the blog last year around December but I started posting in this around February.
The hardest part for me is to be able to write consistently.
But the more articles you put out, the higher chance that one might go viral, semi-viral, or ranks on the first page of Google.
Keyword research is also extremely important and a lot of people miss out on this.
Always do research on the competition/traffic etc. of the keyword you’re targeting before writing.
Otherwise, your chances on ranking on the first page of Google are slim.
The reality is that 70%+ of clicks comes from the top three results on Google.
If you’re not ranking on the first page, you’re not going to get substantial traffic, or at all.
What resources would you recommend to learn about keywords? It's kind of all over the place plus recent Google search algo changes. So I'm not quite sure where to start learning it.
Are you working on a book or just a blog? For nonfiction books, the most important thing which people overlook is to treat the book as a problem-solving product which delivers a clear outcome for the people who read it.
A book like "here's my story" doesn't have a sharp value proposition, so people only buy it if they happen to already follow the author. Whereas a book like "how to stay alive in the woods" has a very clear value proposition, so people can know if it's for them and can recommend it to others.
In the former case (vague offerings), your only real marketing options are either a list (which it sounds like you're doing) and Amazon ads. Whereas if you have a clear value proposition and reader segment, you can treat it like a little product business and you have a lot more options.
There's still plenty of money in writing useful nonfiction. My older book (7 years old) does about 120k profit / year and the newer one (1 year old) does about 30k/year. Happy to chat more about the business of nonfiction if anyone is interested -- just shoot me an email.
Thank you for the information, I will try that as well.
Can I ask what your books are about?
The Mom Test is about running more useful customer conversations (aimed toward techie founders).
The Workshop Survival Guide is about designing and facilitating better educational workshops and courses (aimed toward amateur facilitators with rates below than $5k / day).
I'm currently finishing up another (still unnamed) about about the product design and business of nonfiction, hence my interest above in talking to folks working on a book.
I don't really blog with profit in mind but I do admin work for a site that does. It's definitely a medium to long-term kind of thing, you need a lot of patience and resilience. Social Media at first seems like an excellent way to build an audience but they optimize their services to keep users on their site, not yours.
Ultimately though, I think being consistent and building your community are the keys for success.
Thank you so much. I have been struggling with making people notice my site. I have tried what other blog post suggest but they are all the same and not really helpful. If you can give .e any advice it would be appreciated.
I don't know much about SEO hacks etc. All I can say is, try as much as possible to interact with the people who do actually visit your site. Whether it's surveys, feedback forms, maintaining a chat, facebook group whatever. It's more important to understand why they are actually there than to figure out why others are not coming. Build a community and serve it.
Over time they will tell their friends about what you do and your audience will grow.
That is amazing advice thank you.