In visiting some of the other posts on PWG, I see quite a few that are journal posts: chatty, about me, what-I-did-today, what-I-am thinking kinds of posts, what my pet did, what my toaster did, how much PWG has changed since I last visited, etc. It looks like those posts are fine here, so this is not a complaint, but there is a difference between a journal post and an article, and if we are attracting readers by promoting our news, journalism, creative writing or other articles, they may quickly lose interest in Preferred Writers Group if the next post that they read is just journal-type chatter.
However, what if we prefaced any chatty posts with the word "Journal?" Like "Journal: What I Did Today," "Journal: My Thoughts" "Journal: What My Toaster Did" etc.? That way a visitor would know they were heading to a journal-type entry when they clicked on a post marked "Journal."
I would like to suggest the same for PWG Discussion posts--again, visitors are not going to be interested in our discussion posts. We, on the other hand, do want to read other people's thoughts, ideas and suggestions about this group. Maybe we could earmark our discussions to make it easy for our writers to find them, and easy for our visitors to avoid them. For instance, I used "PWG Discussion" on this post. We can also use the labels/tags "journal" and "discussion" to help earmark them.
We all want page views, but we absolutely WILL LOSE READERS if they come to read articles and hit upon group discussions and idle chatter or daily accounting posts from the other site some of you guys post about so much. If we just post for each other to read, that is a maximum 70-ish readers now--hardly enough to earn any income. We need to be attracting outside readers who will enjoy reading several articles while they are here.
Honestly, I don't want to promote my articles to my professional circles and then have them stumble on something stream-of-conscience here unless they know ahead of time they are about to read someone's journal entry. I know we are supposed to be "good connectors," but there are some posts I am just not going to share or feel obligated to comment on if they don't have a point worth passing along.
Maybe I am the only one who feels that way, which is fine. I am just testing the waters here anyway, and this may not be a good fit, but I thought I would toss my ideas out there and see what the rest of you think and at least give you something to chew on.
More Writing Tips:
- Writing Tip: Landing Pages - Good Technique or Annoying 'Bait and Switch?
- Writing Tip: How to Write a Basic Press Release to Get Articles and Blogs Noticed!
- Writing Tip: How to Write Good Articles for Content-Driven Web Sites
- Plagiarism and Copyright Infringement: Thou Shalt Not Steal
- The Dyslexic Writer - a Journalist Coping with Dyslexia
Thank you for reading and thank you for sharing the link to this article with others. This article is © Kathryn Darden, all rights reserved, and is not available to repost on websites, blogs, discussion boards, Facebook, or to translate and post elsewhere without written permission.
Post ID KD214
