For the past few weeks we've been discussing tips, techniques and writing trends in children's books. But a writer's job doesn't end with the completion of the novel. Oh no. There is so much promotional writing that authors do -- especially on the internet. There's blogging, Facebook, My Space, twittering, and so many other ways to connect with your readers and other authors on the Net. This week we are going to focus on a few of these. But before we jump into the world of internet opportunities, let's discuss how to write for the web.
Now many of you may already know this, but for the internet newbies, we should discuss the importance of keywords. These are the terms people use when searching the internet. (They are also what spyders use when categorizing pages on the internet.) They are incredibly important. So, you want to write text that is "rich" in keywords. An example of a keyword would be the term "children's book."
Of course, writing rich keyword text is good, but also using the right keywords is better. Some keywords are searched more often than others. For example, the term "children's literature" was searched on Google 110,000 times last month. Not bad. But the term "children's books" was searched 450,000 times. So, in the very first sentence of this post I had a choice of using the term children's literature or children's books. Both made sense in the context of the sentence. You can see which one I chose.
Now how do you know which terms are searched the most? The easiest (and free-est) tool is Google's Adwords Keyword Tool. Type in a potential keyword, and the tool will give you the number of times it was searched as well as the rankings of other similiar terms.
And that leads us to the writing prompt for this week:
One of the great places to place rich keywords is in the biography that you fill out for all those different profile pages. So, write a 25 word and a 50 word keyword rich biography. Remember to write it in 3rd person and to make sure you mention the title of your novel if it has been published or soon to be published. Otherwise, try to pack it as full of keywords as possible. You want your name to come up on search engines even when people don't specifically search for you.
If you would like feedback on your bio, post it at Get Me Out of the Slushpile!.
