How to be successful once your writing has been published

If you’ve been successful at getting published, here’s where the real work begins...

Stay a step ahead:

In my professional life as a business consultant, I write business plans and coach professionals. Through my practice at Retail Consulting Solutions, I have found the clients who stay a step ahead are far more successful then those who scatter-shoot from day-to-day.

You can apply this to writing by staying a step-ahead of deadlines (whether for your own blog or for another publication) by writing your piece(s) a day or two before being submitted or published to your blog. Moreover, you’ll have more time to do research and be able to proofread your work before sending it on its way.

Look for trends that fit your writing style and subject matter:

Google Trends and Yahoo Buzz are a great place to find what people are searching for, but they, along with headlines found on news sites can also identify trends that fit your writing style and subject matter. If you’re writing about spousal relationships, the economy certainly plays a role in that area. Your writing ought to reflect current events and help readers to find information.

It will also keep you relevant, even though you’re writing about the same material. Publishers like to see such consistency with an up-to-date edge.

Continue to network and promote yourself:

Take a look around next time your in the checkout line at the grocery store. Magazines galore encircle the line: fashion, gossip, health, entertainment, and news and politics – they all have a website and they all need content!

Once you’ve been published by an established, heavily trafficked website or widely circulated magazine, use your credentials to land the next publishing. Don’t be afraid to use each outlet at your disposal to promote yourself and your writing.

Determine your writing’s marketability and expand your audience:

Though I had been published prior, while writing Cyclopedia Music Theory, I networked not only among my music peers but lay people as well – how better else to determine the book’s marketability? If a lay person can read and understand it, then it would be far more attractive to a publisher.

What’s more, it showed me that lay people who were turned off by the complexity of music theory would be willing to take the plunge if they were given an alternative explanation. For this reason, I wrote-in the musicology of five contemporary genres to attract even more readers.

Use past writings for future publication:

Depending on the rights you gave for your first publication, you can use past writings to sell to future potential publishers if you’re willing to update the piece and give a bit of a makeover. While you don’t want to change the overall meaning, you want the piece to appear fresh and relevant to the audience.

Writing for money, what to do and what not to do

All writers have to start somewhere, and where you start isn’t necessarily where you’ll stay. But all new writers should know and follow the basics. Avoiding mistakes already made by others will only behoove you, while observing the fundamentals will help you to establish yourself.

Write what you know and stay there:

Professionally I am a business consultant, personally I am husband and father, and my hobby is playing and teaching music. I have also done informal work strategy writing for a locally based consultancy group and I am political analyst/columnist for three different bi-monthly publications.

What this means is I have the credibility to write over related subjects: the first lends me the credibility to write about business, employee/employer relationships and roles, the economy. The second gives me the credibility to write about husband and dad issues. The third is a bit different than the average bear because I wrote a textbook, Cyclopedia Music Theory. Lastly, my unofficial work in politics lends me the credibility to write political and economic analysis.

I write over these subjects because they are not only what I know, but know well and have experience in. I won’t win a Nobel Prize for science like Messrs. Elinor Ostrom or Oliver E. Williamson, but they’re not likely to write a music theory book like I did either.

Find your niche, cultivate your own style and develop continuity:

Opinions are like bad jokes, everyone has one to tell, but no one really wants to hear them. As in the above examples, look to your professional and personal life experiences and write on those subjects. You’ll find you’ll have more passion and fluidity then trying to break into the hot topic of the day or latest trend.

Diversify but be consistent:

Publish your own pieces on your own blogs. If you’re an investment adviser, write about that and have a blog title that encapsulates your professional life.

I subscribe to a particular writer’s posts on one of the sites for which I regularly publish. This author will publish a piece about relationship commitments, SEO writing and national economic policy all in the same day on the same website. While this author may have some credentials to write about these subjects, they are missing the diversity of cross publication.

Take your subject matter and divide them among the websites and/or publications for which you write. Your personal blog should focus on your personal life. Writing for a site like eHow or HubPages should be reserved for “how-to” articles, which lend themselves more to professional and hobby readership.

You’ll also have to be consistent in your writing, not letting weeks or months pass by without publishing on your blog or user-based website. The minimum should be two or three articles a week, spread over the same amount of publications.

Promote yourself:

Even if you’re a part-timer, you’ll have to be consistent, with approximately 231.5 million as of April 2009, you’ll have to stand out – somehow – and here’s a couple of ways how…

Keep up with the trends and hot search terms in your writings by using Google Trends or Yahoo Buzz. Work some of the day’s biggest searches into your pieces without hammering a square peg into a round hole.

Network with other writers and websites/publications looking for content are both a good source not only of potential readership but editorial advice.

Don’t write a piece just to get paid:

If you find it tempting, resist. This is a mistake that may well catch-up with you in the future. Writing pieces only for money that you truly have no or little interest in will show through the published piece. It will also spread you a bit more thin in trying to be authentic and trying to complete more suitable tasks at-hand.

Don’t forget the basics:

Be sure to include who, what, when, where, why

Support your writing with facts, statistics, polling, hard numbers; anyone can spout their opinion, make yours count

Make sure to proofread and spell check

-- Owen E. Richason IV

How to make money with your blog and what it costs

Blogging for money and reputation

In their short existence, blogs have come a long way. Blogs (a contraction for “web logs”) began simply as an individual’s online journal and have grown into a more mainstream form of web culture and then into journalism; consequently, professional syndicated writers, journalists, entertainers maintain blogs.

Blogs were responsible for capturing and making public former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott’s (R-TN) comments at a party held in honor of Senator Strom Thurmond. Bloggers were likewise responsible for identifying forged documents used in a 60 Minutes piece.

Blogs have also risen to notoriety because of their ability to attract visitors, readers and the web traffic that come with it.

Because of their popularity, blogs have also become revenue streams for vendors, search engines advertisers, and in turn, blogger themselves. In a matter of minutes, an individual can set-up a blog, customize its layout, monetize it and begin blogging.

Establishment media journalists, pundits and talking heads have cautioned the public (particularly their audiences) that bloggers aren’t subject to the same standards and as such, should not be given credibility. They assert bloggers don’t have a professional team in place and are therefore bush-league.

And that brings us to segue – if you’re looking to blog for money, you’re going to have to be cut-above. As a blogger you must decide on the marketplace(s) you intend to be a part of (e.g. parenting, lifestyles, sports, finance, tech, gaming, entertainment, fashion, politics, DIY, law, real estate, religion).

This juncture brings us to how to make money blogging…

The best advice is to write what you know, subject material you can draw on personally or professionally. Visit other blogs and look over print and electronic publications that cover the same thing(s) to better focus and to help you polish your writing.

Next, begin posting your blog, but don’t go off half-cocked: the above point about not having a professional team to publish your work is true, which means it’s not only your style, but your integrity that’s subject to scrutiny.

A blogger doesn’t have copy writers, copy editors, fact checkers, photographers, researchers and the like at their disposal. So the blogger is responsible not only to write the content, but must credit their sources, quotes, and research. It’s also up to the blogger to pick the subject material, proofread and edit their copy, format it, and perhaps code HTML. A blogger’s additional work is to take, crop, and upload photos; plus, it is up to the blogger to promote and drive traffic to their blog.

All of these tasks matter, that is, if you want to make money with your blog. Your blog should be seen as a means to an end, even a loss-leader in that you may not make any money with it but still contribute time and effort/sweat equity.

The goal is to build traffic and credibility in order to generate a steady stream of revenue. Granted the revenue won’t be that much, but all these things are building blocks for bigger and better things.

–Owen E. Richason IV

Contact:

owenedward4@aol.com