Apparently yes! I’ve just started Writers Getting Paid, a blog about, well, Writers Who Get Paid.
Since quitting my day job to focus fulltime on blogging, I’ve been learning a lot from my friends and colleagues who make a living out of making sentences. We’ve been having so many informative, insightful, intelligent (and gossipy!) conversations that I’ve decided to start documenting all of the neat stuff that I’m learning.
Head on over and check it out — I’ll be posting lots more interviews as time goes on, and the plan is to eventually release an e-book with even more content. And you can even sign up for the email newsletter to get news and interviews delivered right to your inbox. Handy!
Have you seen those ads on Facebook about “weird trick to losing weight” and “weird tricks to whitening teeth” and so on? Usually discovered by a mom who JUST SO HAPPENS to live in either the same town as you, or the same town as your proxy server?
Yeah they’re pretty dumb. But they do activate some primitive part of the human brain that’s hard to resist. “WHAT IS THE WEIRD TRICK! I MUST KNOW!”
There’s something about the unexpected that piques our interest, and once it’s piqued, something irresistible about having the unexpected explained to us.
A recent acquaintance asked me this morning how I manage to eke out a living on the nets. Here’s my response. Note the links scattered throughout! Providing links is something that’s become second-nature to me, which is interesting because it relates to my advice in the email: share, share, share.
Hi Michael,
I’m lucky enough that I work full-time (and am paid! so rare in the blogosphere) to generate content, so I’m spared the usual freelancer chore of chasing gigs. (But I still do little side jobs from time to time: http://mattbaume.com/)
I agree that online audiences are browsers, not buyers! Getting people to open their wallets is a trick that many greater minds than mine are still trying to figure out. I’m more of a journalist than marketer, but there are handy tips to be found here: http://www.problogger.net/
A lot of those “Problogger” techniques seem a bit snake-oil to me; to really be a successful salesman online, it seems like you need to have a bit of the old-fashioned pitchman’s instinct. The tactics that have worked best for me (and that I am also the most comfortable with) involve building community around high-quality content: commenting on other people’s work so they comment on mine, nurturing relationships, making content as “sharable” as possible.
There are two books that I’ve found to be the most helpful for this sort of thing: one is “Made to Stick,” which is all about being memorable & viral. The other, as crazy as this sounds, is “How to Win Friends and Influence People.” Despite the super-corny title and old-timey writing, the advice in there really gets to the heart of how humans always have and always will work.
Recently I’ve found myself having to do more and more marketing for myself, and I just stared a blog to document what I’m learning. That’s here: http://magicmarket.mattbaume.com/ (See? Networking!)
Fundamentally, a lot of what I’ve learned comes down to a simple formula: “Connect with Fans + Reason to Buy = $$$$” … That is, the “secret” to success is building a community and offering something amazing. Both of which, obviously, require a lot of hard work. But if you’re doing what you love, it hardly feels like work at all.
I’ve been asked to stick Google Analytics code into a Tumblelog. This is a good learning opportunity. For example, I have now learned that the proper term for a Tumblr blog is Tumblelog, which I always kind of suspected but wanted to be untrue because I like the word Tumblog better. Oh well, too bad.
This assignment is a bit complicated! The Tumblr is a companion to another website that already exists, so I’m not 100% sure of the Best way to roll the Tumblr stats into the pre-existing domain’s stats. So I’ve done some investigating.
So! Just create a new profile. I chose “for an existing domain,” since Google helpfully informed me “invalid entry” when I chose “new domain.” This means that after I created the Profile, I had to edit it to have the Tumblr URL instead of the URL of the existing domain.Update! Nope, I did it wrong the first time. You need to create it for a new domain, not an existing one, because if you do it for an existing domain then your UA number will be the same and Analytics won’t be able to tell your Tumblr apart from some other site. I don’t know why I got the “invalid entry” error last time I tried, but I just re-attempted and it worked fine.
One other confusing part: when you’re creating a new profile, there’s a checkbox that says “Apply cost data.” WHAT DOES THAT MEAN. The help is no help at all. As it turns out, “cost data” is just information from an Adwords account. So if you’ve been buying Adwords, you can have that data included in your Tumblr analytics. I only think that would be useful if you’re buying Adwords to promote your Tumblelog, but hey you might as well apply it anyway, since it can’t hurt.
And then you just grab the code, drop it into the HTML of the Tumblelog’s description, and hey presto you’re done.
Man oh man, I wish it was just Tumblog. Typing that extra le in there is like a tongue-twister for my fingers.
Update! Discovered one additional catch: putting the Analytics code in your Tumblr Description will hide it from regular human visitors, but robots will think that it’s important metadata. Facebook in particular is a problem — if someone attaches a link to the page, the description will contain all of the javascript. The solution: put the Analytics code in the HTML of your template. This means that any time you update your theme, you’ll need to re-insert your tracking code, which is a bit of a hassle. But so is life! Ah, life.
Another Update! Yacht spammer, please stop trying to comment.
The "Magic Market" is the Internet's marketplace of ideas. It's where the currency is the same as the product: content, ideas, relationships, change.
This is a blog about finding what you want and selling what you have in that market.
About the author
I'm a San-Francisco-based writer and journalist, currently the editor at Photojojo. Over the decade-or-so that I've been writing for online audiences, I've found that the most valuable part of the writing process comes after you've finished writing: interacting with readers.
I want to learn more about how best to engage with the people who share my enthusiasm for topics like photography, DIY culture, urban planning, old sitcoms, cooking, and rat fancy.
This site is a journal for me to keep track of what I learn about building and participating in online community.
