Internet Writing :: Inklit.com

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I’ve made my living for many years as a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) specialist with myself and the people who work for me as my sole “client”. Now with Inklit.com I have an opportunity to explore the broader world of Internet writing. Like most people, new things interest me only if I can relate them to what I already know. Because of this, I’m fascinated by how Internet writing in general relates to SEO writing.

How Are Writing and SEO Related? It Depends Who You Ask

The answer you get about the relationship between writing and SEO varies quite a bit depending on who you ask.

Pro bloggers often tend to minimize SEO. Authors like Andy Beard and John Chow show a certain disdain for Google-only business models. Professional bloggers often point out that relying on Google is inherently fragile, since you can’t guarantee that the algorithm that favors you today will continue to bring you good fortune tomorrow. Furthermore, these authors argue that great writing makes SEO unnecessary, because great writing in itself will lead you to be widely known and recognized, making the search engines superfluous. In this respect, some authors stress that there’s something we can identify as first class writing, and this first class writing is somehow a thing apart from “mere SEO”.

Other authors — often those who are blogging trainers and hosting providers — stress that SEO is little more than constant writing. According to the blog salesmen, if you just blog consistently and often and well, you will rise to the top of the search engines. Do enough writing and you will inevitably rise to the top, so you don’t need an SEO specialist — what you need is to start blogging.

To the pro blogger, SEO has nothing to do with great writing, and to the blog salesman, SEO is nothing but great writing.

Adequate Writing is Good SEO

My own position is that I can’t envision Search Engine Optimization without writing, especially today. Many people still cherish the common misconception that meta tags or other secret shortcuts will rocket them to the top somehow, and this misconception doesn’t hurt the professional SEO consultant one bit. (In fairness I should point out that in the the “title” tag and the “description” meta tag are the exceptions to the misconception). Were his clients to learn the truth, that good SEO is 90% about writing, I’m sure many SEO fees would go down.

This riddle captures the essence of the problem, from an SEO consultant’s point of view:

Q. What’s the difference between an Internet Writer and a Search Engine Optimization specialist?
A. About forty dollars per hour.

Jokes aside, if it’s 90% true that you can write your way to the top, the SEO specialist makes a legitimate stand on the remaining 10%. Along these lines, there’s one blog salesman who uses one of my blogs as a “case study” of someone who blogged his way to the top of the search engines. He’s correct that blogging is a big part of my strategy. Where his analysis fails is that I did several other things that had nothing to do with blogging. To that extent, I understand and am sympathetic to the SEO specialists emphasis on their “secret sauce”. (Of course I’m talking about legitimate SEO specialists here, not the “rocket your web site to the top in 24 hours guaranteed” people who show up daily in your mailbox.)

Good Writing is Also Good SEO

Although I believe adequate writing will get your web site to 90% of where it needs to be all by itself, I believe that some of the 10% gap we’ve been discussing can also be filled in by writing, especially if your writing is exceptionally good. One of the things that happens to good writers over time is that they build a human readership. Depending on your niche, this may be valuable in itself, but from an SEO perspective, it’s always valuable as a source of potential incoming links.

As the Barbara Streisand SEO song goes,

“People…
People who need (one way links from high page rank sites that are thematically similar to their own)
Are the luckiest people in the world.”

Beyond incoming links, the other thing that good writing on your blog will buy you are opportunities to go be a good writer on someone else’s blog. Hey presto: more incoming links.

Is Adequate Good Enough?

I believe that if you’re looking to optimize your site, you should either start writing or hire someone to start writing. This is the most important thing you can do. Search engines have gotten much smarter over the years, so that more and more, they’re focused on indexing sites with lots of good, fresh content. Once once you’re writing on a consistent basis, your next step is to see if you can improve the quality of your material. Can you learn how to make it more link worthy, and can you find venues off of your main site that can help you to build your link reputation? Guest blogging and article submission are two great ways to place your writing strategically so you’ll get a search engine boost.

I’m into the last 10-day leg of my 101 Subscribers in 30 Days promotion.  I’m not as optimistic this time as I was last time, and my numbers have leveled off, at least in the short term. I picked up 34 subscribers in the first ten days, but from that point to today have added only nine more subscribers.   As of today we’re at 51 Subscribers.

I’m still pretty happy overall with the growth of the blog.  After all, it’s brand new, and just celebrated its one month birthday on April Fool’s Day.  All in all, an average of 202 visitors per day is good at this point.

By far the biggest contribution to the site’s traffic to date is StumbleUpon, so again, thanks go out to Bob Younce for first submitting me there.  Looks like he’s going to win the ad without too much trouble at all unless some superstar blogger visitor steps up.  Oh sorry, was that in bold?

This traffic has slowed to a trickle in recent days, partly because I don’t want to overdo stumbling myself. 

Here’s where most of the referrals are coming from:

http://www.stumbleupon.com 1,615
http://entrecard.com 157
http://www.google.com 90
http://realestatetomato.typepad.com 79
http://www.mybloglog.com 28
http://www.particlewave.com 26
http://blogsearch.google.com 21
http://activerain.com 21
http://articlespecialist.blogspot.com 16
http://www.problogger.net 14

About half of those Google referrals are from subsbcribers using the reader, the other half are from organic search and blog search.  Like StumbleUpon, Entrecard has also slowed to a trickle since I’m not over there mindlessly clicking around.  The problogger visits are just from a few comments — pretty amazing.

I’m content to let the numbers grow organically from here on, even though I could probably make a concerted effort to land another tasty guest blogging spot and perhaps pull the numbers in by the skin of my teeth.  To be honest, at this stage of the game I’m more interested in focusing in on some topics so I’ll know what I’ll do with those next fifty subscribers when I get them!

To all my current subscribers, thanks so much, and again, I’ll try to keep some worthwhile stuff coming!

A few years back I read a story about successful podcasters and one of the podcasts that got a great review was Grammar Girl’s Quick and Dirty Grammar Tips. To tell the truth I’d forgotten all about this site until recently, when I happened to stumble upon it using, as you may have already guessed, StumbleUpon.

I don’t subscribe to podcasts, but fortunately Grammar Girl’s (aka Mignon Fogarty’s) work is also available in blog format. This blog has only been in my reader a short time, but already it’s one of the favorites, because it has good, simple grammar advice.

Time spent studying the rules of grammar, rhetoric, and style is time well spent. To be sure, most writers hit the mark on these rules a large portion of the time, but I’ve found that my writing improves enormously to the extent I spend a couple of hours per week on the nuts and bolts of the craft.

But when it comes to Grammar Girl, I’m not just motivated by self-inflicted self-improvement. On the contrary, Fogarty has a way of making the subject very engaging and an easy read.

Hey, isn’t this blog supposed to be about writing? How did these design elements get here?

I like the second one better. It looks better if you click it to see it full size.

My wife likes the current look and feel better than that one, though. There’s something about the whole black and white that must be a guy thing.

Readers, what do you think?

If you’re interested in places where you can submit your articles, check out the guest post I wrote this week, Freelance Faceoff:  EZineArticles Versus Associated Content.   Thank you to Jesse Hines at Vigorous Writing for asking me to send that over and for his kind words about the article.

I’ve been doing an article for EZineArtices every few days.  I mention in the Vigorous Writing article, it’s working out quite well.  Here’s my EZineArticles Author Page.  Based on one of the mistakes I made, I can offer you the following tip so you can avoid doing the same thing.  If you’re going to publish an article somewhere else, be careful if you go back into the EZineArticles editor once your article has been saved and approved.  There’s an auto-save feature on the editor.  If you’re not careful, you can do what I did, which is accidentally mark an already-approved article as "changed" and thereby send it through the approval process again.

I made that mistake in the context of trying out another article submission site this week:  Article City.  ArticleCity.com looked really great at first glance, and there were many articles there that had been widely re-circulated.  I tried submitting an article there, however, and after a few days it seems pretty likely that nobody’s home.  It’s not so unusual that my submission hasn’t received a response yet, but at the same time the site hasn’t changed at all in the past few days.  The same article on "Measuring Lubricant Quality" has been on the top of page one during this time, so it doesn’t appear they’ve been approving anyone else’s new articles, either.

Related Articles:

Forthcoming Guest Post on Article Submissions

As an Internet writer, I love hearing about the death of print.  All your newspapers and magazines are going to fold any minute, and then everyone will be online all the time looking for rising young pundits like me.  Well, "pundits like me", anyway.  The main thing is that we won’t have to deal with those inconvenient literary agents and editors whose poor jobs Andrew Keen is so concerned about.   Then we can just hoist up our content and claim our AdSense Money.  I want my MTV.

My Favorite Death of Print Picture

Here is my favorite picture showing how print is dying, a chart of the stock for McClatchy Company over the last few years.  McClatchy is the company that owns several newspapers including my home town paper.

This chart shows print dying on schedule.  If you read what some of the McClatchy papers have to say about their troubled fortunes, however, they’re more likely to put most of the blame on the declining ad revenue caused by the troubled real estate market.

I think they’re just blowing smoke.  Print is dying, I tell you.  Didn’t they hear the rumor?

Other Numbers Tell A Different Tale

I don’t know if print is dying fast enough for my taste, however.  Every time I go to Borders, I find three two-sided shelves, fully loaded with print magazines.  You’d think they’d be down to two shelves or something if print were really in its death throes, but so far they’re still hanging on quite nicely.  There must be at least two dozen magazines dedicated to women’s abdomens alone.  Fortunately they only cover the top 1/10th of 1% of women’s abdomens, too, or they could fill up the entire store.

As if all these magazines weren’t problem enough for the death of print rumor, along comes the web site of the MPA, or Magazine Publishers of America.   This site publishes all sorts of magazine circulation statistics, for both single issue sales and subscriptions.  For example, here are the 2006 subscription figures for the top 100 ABC magazines.  Let’s see how fast print is dying.  The two top magazines are AARP magazines at about 22 million subscribers each.  Of course, AARP circulation has a captive audience of AARP members, so this number is artificially high.  Let’s check out the number three magazine, Reader’s Digest.  About 9.7 million people subscribe to that.   (I guess it really DOES pay to increase your word power). 

Now let’s see how the blogs are doing.  Technorati’s top blog as of today is Engadget, with no subscription numbers available.  Fair enough.  Tech Crunch, the number two blog, boasts some 734,000 subscribers.

As you can see, the number three ABC magazine has twelve times as many subscribers as the number two blog.  Of course, the real readership in each case is harder to measure.  How many of those Readers Digests are sitting in a dentist’s office somewhere?   We don’t know.  Based on my own subscriber and traffic numbers, I would expect TechCrunch’s daily visitor count to be somewhere in the neighborhood of 4.5 million to 6 million, so Reader’s Digest still wins has a pretty handy lead based on circulation numbers alone.

I’ll leave the rest of the discussion / spin for the comments.

I hope you enjoyed this essay content, and invite you to subscribe for more.  I need big subscription numbers for when I release my blog to Kindle.  Hey, wait a minute, wasn’t Amazon.com the company that was selling us all Segue’s a few years back?  Whatever happened to those…

If you were lured to this post by the title, you shouldn’t feel bad. I didn’t really write this title to trick you, though I did write it to make a point. I’m actually going to show you how to do it by the end of the article, too, so I don’t think it’s fair to accuse me of trickery.

I’m going to assume you don’t already have a web site, and you’re starting from scratch. Six figure retirement means our goal is simply to get to $100,000 in AdSense income per year. This shouldn’t be hard. Just this morning, I stumbled on this article with the unambitious little title, Becoming the Next Advertising Millionaire.

This is going to be so easy. The “next” advertising millionaire. Wow, there must be thousands of them!

I’m Just Like You

I like to think that I’m too intelligent to fall for the siren song of Internet riches, but I’m not. I want to be an Internet advertising rock star just as much as the next guy.

As a result, lately I’ve been spending a lot of time with AdSense and other ad networks. This is how I happened to stumble on the “Becoming the Next Advertising Millionaire” article. I found it during a search for “interstitial ads”. I visited one of my main blogs today, and found that suddenly there was another web site there, and it was making Firefox crash. As it turns out, an interstitial ad is an ad where a whole new web site comes up instead of yours, with a link or two that says “Sponsored by <Your Website Name>”. An ad network I was trying out, AdBrite, leaves these “full page ads” on by default, though you can turn it off. When I searched for “AdBrite” and the company that was there in place of my site, I learned about “interstitial ads”.

Now you know about them, too. Wow, you’re going to be so filthy rich.

Back to Our Six Figure Goal

In my case I didn’t start on the road to AdSense wealth from scratch. I have about 3,400 pages of web content under my belt, so I get to play around.

One site of mine has 610 pages of blog, and about another 400 pages or so on top of that. We’re going to use the blog number of 610 pages since that’s where I’m running AdSense. Over the past ten days AdSense reports 2,461 page impressions, and I’m making $2.38 per 1,000 impressions. My average for all my sites is $2.80 per 1,000 impressions, so we’ll use that for now.

Having 2,461 impressions in 10 days means I’m serving up 246.1 impressions per day. There are 610 pages on the blog overall, so that means that each page gets displayed 610 / 246.1 times per day. Dividing, each page gets displayed 2.48 times per day.

We’re going to be rich in no time. Stay with me.

We get $2.80 per 1,000 page views. A page of content gets displayed 2.48 times per day. Our goal is to reach $100,000 per year.

OK, $100,000 per year divided by the $2.80 we get per thousand page views means we need to have 35,714 x 1,000 page views per year to make $100,000. That works out to 35,714,000 page views per year.

In order to make this work, let’s assume you can write four pages per day, five days per week, on average, and you’re going to start when you’re twenty-one years old. Fifty-two weeks in a year times twenty posts per week is 1,040 pages per year. Each page gets viewed 2.48 times per day, so that means you can generate 2,579.2 page views in a year. Our goal to get to $100,000 in yearly AdSense income is 35,714,000 page views, so let’s see how old we’ll be when we retire. 35,714,000 divided by 2,579.2 is 13,847, so starting out when you’re twenty-one, you’ll be in a position to earn your six figure AdSense retirement when you’re only 13,868 years old.

If I were you I’d start typing.

The past few years have witnessed an explosion in the number of sites promising Freelancers they can make money writing online.  Even in small niches, competition abounds.  The number of sites competing to match authors of paid reviews with paying sponsors has risen to three (that I know of — there may be more).   Every day another freelance writing job board pokes through the Internet like a dandelion on an already ruined lawn, with Copyblogger’s new job board being a famous recent example. 

<bad_attitude_guy>

You, too, can get $10 for each 500 word article you submit.  Unless you write a lot faster than me, that works out to about $11.67. per hour for contract work.  Did you ever start a blog and then say to yourself, why didn’t I pick something profitable, like a blog about working at McDonalds?

</bad_attitude_guy>

With all the interest in transforming online writing from a hobby into a profit center, it’s not surprising that article submission boards have risen in popularity.  Bob Younce recently surveyed five such sites and still had nine left over.

I’ve been asked to do a guest article comparing two such sites, Associated Content and EZineArticles.  It should be out in a day or two.  I will let you know.

It may be time for bad_attitude_guy to go find a mentor or two.

How are we to write well, and consistently?   There are days when writing is simplicity itself, when ideas and connections seem to grow in natural abundance, when we feel the only limitation of human eloquence is our typing speed.  Then there are days when we must write through the dense stickiness of our own stupidity.

This is writing’s horror and its beauty:  only your mind sits between your contribution to the world and the void from which it springs.

Can we trick our minds into performing better?  I believe we can.

I blundered into this Monday knowing I wasn’t wearing my big brain.  It’s the week I finally finish up my taxes and get them to my accountant.  It’s the week I pay my insurance bill.  It’s a week so full of dullness that wearing my small brain is a form of prosaic justice.  It’s a week that would put my big brain to sleep.

Small brain or not, though, I still have to write.

So this week I’m trying on a new trick to keep my small brain from hurting itself while running with sharpened pencils.  The trick is the stack of twenty.   Here’s the trick if you want to try it out yourself.  Take out twenty file cards, and plan your week into twenty tasks.  In my case this worked out to be nineteen cards with either a blog post or online article per card, plus a card for the remaining tax work.  Planning out the week took about fifteen minutes.

The idea is that as you complete a task or article, you put a big checkbox on the card and move it to the done stack.  If something unforeseen comes up and you handle it, write a quick card for it with a big check mark and put it in the done pile.  If you have any cards left over, you can always recycle them into next week, and if you get through the whole stack, your small brain will delight in its accomplishment.

All of this is a way to make your small brain feel good about itself.   You need this if you’re having a small brain week.

Your big brain doesn’t need such a simple trick as this, but if you’re anything like me, you can’t always wear your big brain to work.

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AdSense and I have a checkered past. I had an account several years ago, but never made much from it. Last week I decided that really ought to take another look at ad networks like AdSense, since I believe that Pro Blogger / Online Publisher is a legitimate career path for an Internet writer (albeit one with a long start-up curve and a crowded field).

So last week I put up some AdSense on a popular real estate blog I own, and again the results were not all that spectacular — a couple of bucks per day. But things got interesting soon.

Ask any kid with a chemistry set. Nothing interesting happens until you mix two things together.

Enter Associated Content

You wouldn’t think that Associated Content would have much to do with AdSense on the face of it. AdSense lets you generate ad revenue from your web site, and Associated Content is a place where you can sell writing online if you don’t mind not getting paid much.

What tipped me off to the idea that those to things are actually not all that different was a single unifying statistic, CPM. That’s an ad term that you probably know, which means “Cost per Thousand (Impressions)”. Of course as a publisher I’m not interested in cost so much as revenue. Some people call this RPM (Revenue Per Thousand). Google uses the weird expression eCPM, or “Effective Cost Per Thousand”, but effective or not, we’re talking about revenue here.

When I signed up for Associated Content, I knew the rates would probably be lower than they would be for direct writing sales. I tried them out because I thought it would be an easy way to make a quick writing sale or two, and I wanted to see what they offered.

I don’t have a report on the rates yet, because the first article I tried was submitted for up front payment review, which can take up to two weeks. I can tell you that others have reported numbers that don’t impress me much, such as $7.00 per article. Based on that, I doubt I’ll be writing up a storm for them, but we’ll see how it goes.

What really got me interested, however, was when I saw their performance payments, which is based on what they call (wait for it…) PPM, or “Payment Per Thousand”.

PPM, CPM, RPM, eCPM — How Much Money Are We Talking Here?

What got my attention immediately about Associated Content’s PPM was that it was $1.50. My AdSense account hovers around $9.00 per day.

This got me thinking. If AdSense pays about $9.00 per thousand page views, six times as much as Associated Content, maybe Associated Content would turn out to be the victor over AdSense in the Worst-Way-To-Make-Money-Online Throw Down. Are you ready to rumble?

It also got me wondering about how many page views my web sites had, and what that would look like divided by 1,000 and then multiplied by $9.00! It turns out that I may be able to make several hundred per month off of Adsense for a month’s work or so, since I have a fair sized inventory of unperforming content.

“Inventory of unperforming content”. See, I’m talking like a publisher already!

What Kind of CPM do Real Estate Brokers Make?

As soon as I started thinking in terms of CPM, I got curious about how much money I made last year as a real estate broker from my real estate web sites. So I did some really rough-draft calculations, and came up with a figure of somewhere between $20 to $30 per 1,000. That’s not bad considering where we are in the “real estate meltdown” (also known as “the credit crunch” or “the end of carbon based life as we know it”, depending on who you ask). I could probably do $60 per 1,000 if I wanted to hop in the car more and do more sales, but of course that would be cheating.

My Publishing Epiphany

Some time yesterday I had a publishing epiphany, where everything I’d ever written online turned into a viewable page, a 1/1000th fraction of an M that could produce some revenue value for me, some “R”.

The nice thing about thinking about RPM is that it teaches us that we as publishers can increase either our RPM (look for better publishing or ad opportunities) or our M (write more, or promote it better), and either way we’ll get more R, more Revenue.

Perhaps in a future post we’ll talk about the results of my attempting to increase RPM and continue to increase it over time using an open source Ad Server, OpenX.