Content Marketing Motivation & Literature Blogging

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I started out similar... for me it was not poetry, but rather short stories. Like you. people would stop by, read my stories, then leave. I didn't gain much following at first.

I started it in 1996.

Ten years later in 2006, I still struggled to get 100 views a month... In April 2007 something changed, and bb November 2007 I was getting 3,000 views a month.

Now 22 years later, in 2018, I average 14,000 to 25,000 views a month and have 300,000 subscribers.

What changed? I'll tell you...

So, I had a few subs/followers, but, it was only a few and it was pretty discouraging, to be writing stories and not a lot of people reading them.

I started out on freewebs, then moved the site to BlogSpot, then in 2003 imported it to WordPress where it stayed until 2013.

One day, I get an email from one of my readers. They explained they were looking to get started writing short stories, and at the time, there were no websites to tell people how to write short stories. This person was a fan of my work, liked my writing style and asked, if I could write a series of posts on how I got started, what my writing process was, etc.

I was, like, that's not a bad idea.

So April 2007, the first non-fiction article type posts were written. My traffic changed almost immediately. It picked up slowly at first, but within 6 months I had posted more hen 100 "how to write short stories" topic articles, and my traffic went from 100 views a month to 3,000 views per month.

In 2010 I crossed 6,000 posts and WordPress' servers struggled to keep my massive site online, down time was a problem, the site was offline more then online. In June 2013, a major server crash, wiped a massive 1,000+ posts from my blog and was barely able to stay online for 2 days in a row, as my traffic begane crippling WordPress servers...

In 2013, I moved to the Rolls Royce of web hosts, SBI (a business server capable of high speed hosting mega giant 100,000+ page websites) and changed the url to: https://www.eelkat.com and now today I post at minimum 2 posts daily and sometimes as many as 10 posts a day. And we are talking long posts - my articles average 2,000 words each, with many of them over 10,000 words and my longest one over 60,000 words.

In September 2013, with my site now stable, no longer crashing servers and busting bandwidth limits, thanks to SBI's host service, my traffic started snowballing, now getting 1,000+ hits PER DAY on my high traffic seasons of the year. And never getting fewer them 300 visites a day on my low traffic days.

And what started out as me posting FanFiction short stories online, has become my full time career.

I now have several topics:

• Short Story Writing Tips
• Novel Writing Tips
• Writing Dialogue
• Character Creation
• WorldBuilding
• The Business Side of Authorship
• Getting Published
• Self Publishing
• Writing Fantasy
• Writing Dark Fantasy
• Writing Yaoi
• Writing Absurdism/Bizarro/Monster Porn
• Kindle Publishing
• Book Marketing
• Web Building For Authors
• Editing Your Manuscript
• Formatting Your Manuscrtipt
• Writing Gypsies Accuratly
• Writing LGBTQA+ Characters Accuratly
• Creating a Magic System In High Fantasy World
• How To Build An Elf Society
• Being a Yaoi Author In The Convention Circut
• Writing Maine Life Accurately
• Make Writing Your Full Time Career
• Health For Authors
• A Look Inside The Everyday Life of a Career Author

Every day I write 2 or 3 or more new articles. AND I still publish 2 or 3 new short stories a week as well.

While my site now gets very steady, high traffic, the bulk of my traffic goes to the how-to-guide type non-fiction articles teaching newbie writers how to write, edit, format, create characters, build world, etc. Even today, very little traffic goes to the fiction works on my site. The fiction works, still continue to get fewer then 1,000 visits per month...

BUT....

I am now living off the full time income coming in from the 10,200+ non-fiction articles I now have on my site, which allows me to focus on writing more short stories even though they bring in very little traffic on their own.

If you go look at my blog (link above) you will see that I do nothing with pop-ups and things that tend to drive away traffic. I do not use templates (believe me, once you see my site, you'll NEVER forget it either... it stands out THAT MUCH, the whole thing is fully hand coded and doesn't suffer from bland template syndrome, which often causes people to leave. And every page of my site, contains no fewer then 100 links to other pages of my site. Yes, one hundred links on EVERY page, sending readers to other pages.

Because of those 100 links on every page, THESE are my traffic stats:

• The average visitor stays on each page for 12 minutes, and clicks through to 7 additional pages after leaving the first page they entered from.
• The average visitor: each person visits 7 pages per day and each person returns 3 days per week.
• I have a bounce rate of 73% visitors clicking additional pages after arriving and 27% leaving the site without clicking to another page (So a Bounce rate of 27% which is INSANELY low!)

I mention this because the AVERAGE stats for AVERAGE blogs is viewers staying 30secs per page, 83% LEAVE without clicking to a second page. That's STANDARDS the average blogger can EXPECT and be considered SUCCESSFUL. As you can see, my stats are leaps and bounds above and beyond the average.

In 2016 I quit my day job to do my blog full-time. This is now my full time job, I spend 40 to 80 hours a week writing, editing, and publishing articles.

• 8 hours a day writing
• 4 hours a day editing/formatting/publishing
• 2 hours a day marketing (social media announcements, etc)
• 7 days a week
• my typing speed is 91 words per minute (that's 5,000 words an hour)
• I average 17,000 words a day; the most in one day was 37,000 words.
• I publish on average 3 million words a year.
• since 1978 I have also published 130 novels, 2,000 short stories, 30 non-fiction books, a few dozen stage plays, and a few comic book scripts for Disney's Uncle Scrooge and Donald Duck via Disney's Egmont division
• I am trained in secretarial typing and my fastest clocked speed was 175 words per minute with an 80% accuracy.
• I was a magazine editor for several years before blogging became my full time career
• I was a door to door sales representative for 16 years before blogging
• and I worked in retail merchandising as well
• I've been doing SEO marketing since 2007
• my blog ranks #1 on page 1 of Google for 51 keywords, and in the top ten on page 1 for 300+ more keywords, with more 3,000 additional keywords ranking on pages 2 and 3.
• Most articles are 2,000 to 5,000 words, though my long ones are in the 10k to 20k range, and my biggest article has 60,000 words. It is also my most trafficed article with 10million views since it was first published on April 17, 2007

So, my suggestion to you, with a poetry blog... start writing daily articles geared towards helping other poets. Write how to write poem articles. Write how to publish poetry chapbook articles... you'll get far more traffic from teaching others how to write poems, then you will from publishing poetry... this in turn will bring more eyes on your poems.

And who knows where you'll be able to expand it from there. When I started mine 22 years ago, I was just sharing a few short stories here and there. I never dreamed it would evolve the way it did or that it would become my full time career. That wasn't what I set out to do. But it was the natural evolution over time. The reason my site got bigger while others didn't, is because when I saw the opportunity to expand topics, I grabbed it and ran with it. I could have continued posting short stories and not expanded to help others, and had I stayed there back then, and NOT started writing the non-fiction articles, I'd still be struggling to gain views.

I started out writing for the sake of sharing my work, now I write to help people learn how to write their own works. And THAT is the difference right there. My early blogging efforts were me self-expressing, my later/current blogging efforts are me helping others better themselves.

While people like being entertained with fiction, they'd rather learn useful non-fiction information instead.

Put your readers first.

Find out what they WANT and NEED to improve their lives.

Find the thing you do best and teach others how to do it too. Share the knowledge, your readers will love you for it.

Me? I knew how to write short stories. It was info other writers wanted. They didn't want to read my stories, because they wanted to write their own stories. By helping them learn how to write short stories, I ended up gaining a following I never could have gotten through just sharing my short stories alone.

Don't be selfish either... DO NOT focus on making money with your blog!! That's the fastest way to chase readers away. If EVERY article on your site is a review linking to a book for sale on Amazon, readers know you are just a self-serving gubber for affiliate clicks.

They don't care about you.

They don't care about helping you make money.

They care about THEMSELVES.

They want to know what they CAN GET FROM YOU.

You become the giver. Give, give, give...share your knowledge, and don't charge them a penny for it.

Help others to help themselves and you'll start getting more traffic then you know what to do with.

Hope that helps.

>>About a year ago I tried to spin up a blog for reviewing political books. Essentially the business model was to review a new book, then give people the option to purchase it on Amazon. I'd make a commission on any sales.

This doesn't work and I'll tell you why...

Let's face it. People are greedy and self serving.

They grab up anything they can get their hands on. And the second they think you are out for yourself, they cut ties and run. To keep people coming back, you have to let them think they can continually return to fulfill their own needs. You don't ever leave them thinking they are helping you, you ONLY let them think you are helping them. Be seen as the selfless giver.

Like I already said in my other post:

If EVERY article on your site is a review linking to a book for sale on Amazon, readers know you are just a self-serving gubber for affiliate clicks. Don't let readers think that!

They don't care about you.

They don't care about helping you make money.

They care about THEMSELVES.

They want to know what they CAN GET FROM YOU.

You become the giver. Give, give, give...share your knowledge, and don't charge them a penny for it.

Be seen as the selfless giver.

The moment readers think you are trying to get money out of them, they are gonna high tail it out of there and you'll never see them again.

I know every one recommends to pick a "hot topic niche" one that has "lots of great keywords" so you'll get lots of traffic, blah, blah, blah... but for me, I'm a very hyper person. I have Schizoaffective Personality Disorder... if you've never known anyone with it, basically it means I', like a person with ADHD that went into overdrive and just keeps getting more and more hyper every day. People joke about the squirrel with ADHD saying: "I have ADHD, I can never.... oh look a squirrel..." Schizoaffective Personality Disorder is more like this: "I have... OMG squirrel... hey glittle... wow carrots! I wonder if I could put glitter on that squirrel...OMG I'm craving a donut...wow look at that car..."

So, yeah, try to be me and only have one niche topic on my blog. It ain't gonna happen. If I tried to stick with one topic on my blog, I'd lose motivation so fast. I know because I did. I tried to have a one topic blog. And do you know what happened? By the end of the month I has 32 blogs each on a different topic. I tried to manage all 32 blogs, updating daily for 3 years... that's didn't go well. I'd update one every day for a week, neglect the other 31, then find a new topic completely that didn't fit any of them. After 3 years of that, I realized the only thing to do, before I ended up with 100 different blogs (which was the direction I was headed at that point), was to start a new blog, them take ALL my 1 topic niche blogs, and import all the posts to my new blog.

See, I was posting daily, no problem, but I wasn't posting daily on any one blog, which was a major problem.

So, this new blog, which I started in 2003, was now a "Me and my life and whatever I feel like yapping about today" topic. And it worked. It's now 15 years old, and has 10,200+ blog posts on it. Who know what topic I'll write on from from one day to the next. One day it's comic books and the next day it's car repairs, then it'll be a book review, then it'll be a Trump rant, you never know what you are gonna get when you read my blog and I never know what I'm gonna write from one day to the next either.

But the thing is, I'm always motivated to write daily now, because I'm no longer feeling like I have to try to stick to any one topic. My brain is just too all over the place and scatterbrained to stick with any one topic for more than a couple of days. And for me, trying to stick to one topic was a major motivation killer. Now I can write whatever I feel like writing that day, and because of this, I'm always motivated to write. By taking down the wall of sticking to one niche topic, I freed myself up of roadblocks and gave myself motivation to write whatever I'm thinking about that day.

May not work for everybody, but it worked for me.

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