: Re: Putting together an effective writing blog I'm a part-time freelance writer, and I'd like to put together a blog to showcase my writing through posts and to link visitors to my work on other

@Fox6458700

Vote Up Vote Down

You can use something like Squarespace which is dot-com website platform that is optimized for non-technical creative people to make their own Web presence. It has pages (timeless writings) and also has a blog (journal writings) and also redirects (which are great for marketing) built-in. You would create pages for your writing, use the blog to document your ongoing writing career adventure, and use redirects to link out to things you are doing elsewhere on the Web.

As an example, if Ernest Hemingway was working right now, he would make story pages at:
ernesthemingway.com/the-sun-also-rises http://ernesthemingway.com/a-farewell-to-arms ernesthemingway.com/the-old-man-and-the-sea

… and then his journal would be at:
ernesthemingway.com/blog/

… and would have entries about how hard it is to write, various hunting trips and what he learned from them, musings on masculinity, etc.

The entires get date links as you create them, like so:
ernesthemingway.com/blog/2016/02/25/hunting-accident

And then he would use redirects so that this kind of link:
ernesthemingway.com/facebook

… takes the reader to:
facebook.com/blah/de/blah/user/hemingway5339

… so it is easy to remember and never changes. If the Facebook link were to change, he would just put the updated Facebook link into his /facebook redirect.

Blogs have categories. Hemingway would make categories like writing, hunting, masculinity. The reader can tap on writing to see just the entries on writing. Ideally, you probably keep it to a handful of categories, but there are exceptions to that. Depends on your interests.

The blog sort of acts like keywords that draw people into your storybook through Google Search, and enables them to get to know you. To promote your blog in the old days you would have wanted to be high up in Google results and that was it, because the Google Search engine was like a sun around which the Web orbited. Today, the Web is more like a galaxy, and the additional stars are Twitter, Facebook, Medium, and others. So once you post a new story page or a new blog post, you want to link to it from Twitter and Facebook.

With Medium, you actually put the whole story or blog posts on there, but it is still a good idea to have your own dot-com where you have your own copy of your work, because at some point Medium will change and/or be sold and/or be shutdown. If you control your own dot-com, you can create permalinks that readers can rely on to always act as a gateway to whatever you are doing. It doesn’t matter if you switch your T-shirt sales from CafePress to Spreadshirt if your T-shirt link is this:
ernesthemingway.com/t-shirts

So your dot-com website/blog is very much about acting as a nervous system for your entire Web presence. Everything else on the Web may change, but your dot-com is all the permanent stuff. That enables you to grow and grow your Web presence but still enable a reader or prospective employer to find all the stuff you’ve made.

(0)

Login to post a comment!