New For Your Favorites

For the past month, I’ve been posting something each day about The Writing Life. It’s been an interesting and on-going learning experience for me.  Please don’t worry that I’m writing my closing remarks. I’m not because this journey is continuing.

As a writer, I am constantly looking for ways to adapt and move my writing toward the largest possible audience.  I’ve been reading other people’s blogs from time to time to see what I can learn. I discovered Tracey Bateman has a blog called Leave It To Tracey! Looking around her links page, I found  Rachel Hauck’s site. Rachel is the current president of an excellent fiction writer’s group called the American Christian Fiction Writers. (I know if you follow the link, they haven’t changed their site information yet but the name has been change.). OK, let’s return to my visit to Rachel’s site. Immediately I could see it was her blog and I spotted the little notice, I Power Blogger. Yet her location didn’t have the word blogspot in it.  I wondered how she did it. To me, it looked like a smart marketing decision. When you have a simple name, it’s easy to tell people where your material is located. 

I confess I’m unsure how Rachel set up her excellent site. It looks in one sense that she’s pointed it to her own hosting place. How would I know? Her Alexa number is much higher than the lower Blogger location. If you don’t know how I could know this information, then check this page where you can test the web traffic for any site. Also you can download Alexa for your own use. It’s a free tool with the parent company, Amazon.com.

This experience sent me on my own marketing journey. How could I create a simple place to tell people about The Writing Life? My answer was using a simple URL or website name. Yesterday I took another step in my on-going learning and purchased a domain name:

www.thewritinglife.ws 

Immediately after purchasing the domain, I tried it. The name rolled from my name immediately to some weird get-rich-quick internet marketing piece. I was concerned that possibly I had purchased a URL which someone else already owned. Typically on the internet, it can take up to 48 hours for a domain to begin working. Thankfully after a few hours, my website began to function properly.

Please add this URL to your list of favorites. If you have The Writing Life in your list of links, don’t be concerned because I haven’t moved the location. It still is available through the former location. Why did I make this change? I intend to make The Writing Life easier to find in the millions of blogs. According to Jay Rosen at PressThink, there are six million blogs, 35,000 new blogs per day and 700,000 posts a day. He says these numbers are doubling every five months. The numbers are staggering but I believe it’s possible to stand out and have a growing audience for my life of a writer and editor.

I’m constantly learning as a writer and editor. In an earlier post, I mentioned BlogJet. It’s been a valuable tool to capture ideas and thoughts, then to save them and finally put them into The Writing Life. If you aren’t using such a tool, I highly recommend it. Also this week, I added the email envelope to the end of each of my posts. It’s another tool to allow readers to easily share the information with others. If you haven’t spotted it, I highly recommend you use this tool.

Throughout the final days of this week, I’ve been rewriting my book manuscript. I’m eager to write more about my writing and editing life. At the same time, I need to keep pushing the rock up the hill toward completion of my manuscript. I plan to return soon for another entry.