Establishing a Solid Content Base for the Future with Triond

In the three months that I’ve been writing for Triond, I’ve published over one hundred pieces.  Now, I’ve always loved following numbers (like memorizing pi) and statistics (e.g., data on the back of baseball cards, right Bojack?).  Based on the numbers that I’ve seen for my work on Triond, I have some observations to make that might provide food for thought for some of the other new writers out there as well.

I should state up front what my goals are at Triond: I want to write; I want to improve my writing; and I want to build up a content base that will eventually bring in some residual cash.

We’ve heard a lot about the social networking tools we can use to gain exposure for our writing; we’ve heard how our articles can reference — and link to — other stuff we’ve written; and we’ve heard how we need to build up a base of published work and that hits will start coming in.

I agree that all of those things are important, but I contend that if you want page hits down the road for content being published today, you’ve got to determine what kind of content is going to get you there, and you’ve got to determine if your content quality is high enough so that people will keep coming back to your work.

What’s My Content?

When I first started writing for Triond, I thought the game in town was to focus on putting as much content out there as you can — it didn’t matter what the content was, just get something out there.   The mantra I was chanting was, “If you write it, page hits will come.”

With that in mind, a lot of my early work on Triond was poetry.  I knew I could write a twenty or thirty line poem more quickly than I could write an article that required research.  I would always get supportive comments and “I Like It” clicks from my Triond friends.   

Observation #1:  Two or three days after the publishing of each of my poems, the hits would stop coming in.  And, a month or two later, still no more hits would be coming in for the poems.  A typical page hit count for a poem of mine was perhaps thirty, with only one of my poems making it to one hundred hits. 

Why is that?  Two reasons are obvious.  First of all, I’m not a great poet.  Oh, I can pass for a poet at home, but stand my work up against some of the Triond poet masters, people whose works I think are amazing, e.g., Fegger, Melinda McQueen, Kate Smedley, Joni Keith, Sarah Elizabeth Hume, Rutherfranc, or Seashell66, to name just a few of my favorites.  I’ve seen life and beauty pass through their pens at a level of quality I can never hope to achieve. 

The second reason my poems aren’t getting a lot of what I call “down the road” hits is because people tend to google for facts, for tangibles.  No one is going to google for the genie who was a meanie in a yellow bikini.  

The problem with content that produces no “down the road” hits, of course, is that it doesn’t help provide that content base I desire for income down the road.  I need content out there that will still get page hits even after I stop writing.

After my first month here, I tried writing a few travel articles.  Those were well received, with a couple of the articles making it up into the three or four hundred hit range. 

Observation #2: Weeks or months after a travel article was published, that article was still accumulating hits.  People will google for Biltmore or Connemara; people will google for any place they may visit. 

This motivated me to start chanting a different mantra: “Write answers for the questions people will be asking.”

Besides travel, I started writing about our gardening endeavors, our chickens, and our honeybees.  I wrote about hosting foreign exchange students; I wrote about my tuba; and I wrote about parenting.

Besides getting more initial page hits, those kinds of articles are generating more “down the road” hits as well.

Observation #3: When I  started adding a touch of personal experience to the articles, the page hits increased even more.  And this past weekend, in two stories about events from young adulthood, those stories quickly shattered my personal best for page hit counts.

The second mantra was modified to: “Write answers to people’s questions, and write about what you know.”

What hobbies do you have?  If it’s your hobby, it’s someone else’s hobby too.  Where have you traveled?  If you’ve traveled somewhere, other people are going to plan to travel there too.  If you have a favorite recipe, someone else is going to want to cook it too.  Where are you in the world right now?  Is there anything around you that could be an interesting article topic?

Two of my very favorite Triond writers are Alina Beck and Rask Balavoine, who not only write brilliantly and beautifully, but they also choose fascinating content.  Their work will be generating page hits for years to come.

I don’t have enough data to know how well personal stories will do with bringing in down the road hits; I would suspect that it will still be the travel articles that provide me what I need.  But we shall see.

Quality, Quality, Quality

Content is paramount, but poor quality will destroy wonderful content in a heartbeat.  Use the spell checker!  Proofread each piece several times before submitting.  And if you find a post production error in your work, you can go in and submit a fix for it.

It’s always tough to hear criticism; I would prefer that my work was perfect and that it receives only the highest accolades.  That’s not how it works, though.  

I will forever be indebted to Brian Stankich and Glynis Smy, the first to offer constructive suggestions on how to improve my stories.  They were gentle and supportive, and I took their suggestions to heart.  I can honestly say now that my writing has improved as a direct consequence of their willingness to speak up.

If you receive critique, don’t be put off by it; it probably will make you a better writer.  And if you dish out constructive criticism, do it in a courteous and professional manner.  Thank you, Brian and Glynis!

Similarly, if you’re reading someone else’s work and you notice an error, send the author a note.  He or she will most likely be grateful for your help in pointing out a problem.

And finally, if you’re unsure on some area of grammar, or if you’re worried about how you’ve phrased a particular sentence, I would suggest bringing it to the forum and asking for assistance. 

So all that being said, I still have a lot of work to do in these areas.  And I’m not giving up on poetry — it’s just not my major emphasis, at least for the time being.  I’m finding that people are responding to travel articles and childhood stories, so I’ll focus on that stuff for a while.

If you are seeking to increase your “down the road” page hits,  you should determine what content of yours is bringing in page hits now.  In addition, look at the quality of your work.  Are you convinced that it’s generally of exceptional quality?  If not, take action.

And most of all, keep writing!