Most writers can’t market. That used to be very important and it was probably the main reason many adept and passionate writers were unable to pursue careers as writers.

Today it is crucial. In fact, a writer who can market his or her own work today has unprecedented opportunities. But a writer who cannot or refuses to market is going to be left behind.

Marketing may sound devious, manipulative, deceptive, or even wicked to you, but it’s none of those things. It’s actually ethical, legal, moral, socially acceptable, and highly beneficial.

Marketing is nothing more than matching your products (your writing) to what people are buying. Salesmanship is the ability to close the deal; marketing is getting you into the conversation where the deal can be discussed.

Years ago, back in the 1980s before there was an Internet, I spoke to a woman who wanted to pursue a career as a freelance writer. She had come to me for some advice and tips after having published a couple of articles on early German immigration to Texas for a couple of historical society newsletters. The articles were good but the publications were the small type that don’t pay. She wanted to go on to bigger and better things.

I thought of other markets: travel magazines, Texana magazines, major newspaper looking for feature stories. Trying to stick with her recent topics, I proposed that she might want to pitch a story about Comfort, Texas (a little town in Texas that joined the Union during the Civil War!) or write about German architectural influences in Texas.

"Oh no," she said very adamantly. (Most writers assume passion is good in all situations.) "I’m only interested in writing about German immigrant to Texas in the 1830s."

Her "marketing," if you could call it that, was totally egocentric. She was saying, "I’m only going to write on exactly what I want to write about, no matter what other opportunities are out there."

A successful writer needs to be savvy about the opportunities that exist and then be aware of what he or she can do. Notice I’m not saying what the writer "wants" to do or "feels like" doing, but rather the kind of writing that person can competently do. Then you play match-maker and see where your talents match the needs of the marketplace.

To be sure, there are some opportunities that are never going to be right for you–either you don’t know a thing about the subject or you lack the credentials or there are working conditions that just do not pan out for you. But there are lots of opportunities to write all kinds of things if you’re a bit more open-minded.

That was back in the 1980s. Now with the Internet, print-on-demand, and other publishing opportunities, we writers can literally circumvent the publisher and produce our own works. You could write a non-fiction book or publish a novel yourself at minimal cost and get it on Amazon (visit CreateSpace.com). You could launch a blog and sell advertising on it. You could write an e-book, publish it, and sell or give it away online.

Never in the history of the world have writers had more opportunities to be their own bosses and steer their own careers. But marketing is now more important than ever–not less.

Here’s how to start thinking like a marketer:

1. Look for opportunity every hour of every day. Never pick up a magazine or search online or read a business report without thinking: who wrote this? Do they hire people to write things like this? How would I get this kind of gig?

2. Spend some time on the Internet to see where the action and commotion is. Check out Google Trends. Are there hot button topics? Can you start contributing to those areas, either as a guest author on a blog or as author of your own blog?

3. Put yourself in the shoes of a magazine or newspaper editor, a blog owner, or a business. What kind of writing would just dazzle them to the point that they would find it irresistible? What are they dying to buy? What kind of writer do they wish would walk in the door?

4. It’s no secret what sells. Read stories in magazines, check out the best-sellers’ lists (there are lots of these for different categories), and read the ads for the biggest movies. Writers were behind all of these things. They sold their stories. You have to learn from their success. What did they do right? What is it that they’re selling? Can you sell something in that same category?

5.Instead of trying to get what you want, figure out ways that you can position yourself as a "solution" to an editor’s or business owner’s problems. If you want to write online, find out what problems certain people have and how you can offer solutions. For instance, you may know a great deal about cooking great food on a tight budget. Do you think there are people struggling with that issue right now? Figure out how you can position yourself to be their solution.

6. Learn from the mistakes of others. Many editors have written for writers’ magazines about things that drive them crazy. Read those stories and study them. Many online marketers regularly write and blog about things that work and don’t work in the online market. Study that stuff. You don’t have time to make all the mistakes yourself!

7. Use everything you’ve got. It is no crime to make yourself look as good as you can, as long as you’re truthful. So if you have a degree in history or you coached a world champion baton twirler or you lived in Barbados for 10 years, use what is relevant to make yourself look good to the people who pay you. Don’t be shy! Just a couple of ground rules: don’t make stuff up and don’t hype it. But if you really used to work as a professional translator and it’s relevant to an article or e-book you want to write, use your background to help leverage the deal.

Thinking like a marketer is fun because it transforms the whole world from a gloomy it’s-all-about-me place (woe is I!) to a world that practically gleams with opportunities. There are millions of opportunities to writers who can market. But it does take a bit of re-thinking.

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I am at my most popular when I go to Internet marketing meetings or conferences and let it drop that I’m a writer. The eyes of site owners get that shiny hopeful look as they inquire whether or not I’d like to write their next book on male pattern baldness or how to live on 2 hours of sleep a day (I’m not making those up–those were real inquiries).

It would be a lot more fun if these guys wanted to pay a reasonable amount of money. The conversation usually goes south as soon as they reveal that they don’t want to spend more than a couple of hundred dollars on the project.

All of this has led me to two convictions: you can’t make money writing for the Internet guys and the Internet guys are desperate for content. The first observation is treated extensively in this blog in its positive formulation, i.e., you can make money if you write for businesses or self-publish. But now let’s look at the second.

People who own websites want content. They often try to figure out ways of getting content. Here are 6 Ways of Getting Content that Probably Won’t Work:

1. Get private label rights (PLR) content for some dirt-cheap price. Chances are you get weird, open-dned articles that don’t even really make sense and sometimes are plagiarized.
2. You can skip the middleman yourself and just plagiarize. That’s illegal, not to mention immoral and unethical. Not only that, you can’t really sustain that kind of content stealing. It’s like trying to furnish your house by shoplifting.
3. You can use free-source stuff like on Wikipedia but then your article on hyperthyroidism looks a whole lot like the 30,000 other articles out there on hyperthyroidism. Google robots are pretty good at picking up duplicate content.
4. You can try to get somebody to write for you. You’re going to find that writers who know what they’re doing aren’t cheap. This leaves you with the other kind of writer. There are writers who will write an e-book for $200 but you may be dealing with people who do not speak your language, have no writing credentials, or are trying to con you.
5. You can scare up some public domain stuff and hope you can recycle it, but you realize that content that is really old … sounds dated. It’s pretty hard to find something useful in that haystack.
6. You can write it yourself. Yikes. That’s the thing you wanted to avoid because not only is it not good, it’s not fast. And if you calculate the amount of frustration and munchies you have to stomach to make it happen, it’s not even all that economical.

So how do you get good content if you’re a web guy and you don’t want to pay me $10,000 to write your book? (Five-figure offers, please comment here and we can chat offline).  There are actually some ways.

1. Good writing for online purposes isn’t Shakespeare. You practically have to threaten people to make them read Shakespeare today, so why do you want to write like some boring dead guy? Good writing for the online world is nothing more than good communication. You have to be able to tell people how to do something or all about how something works. Get a microphone and record yourself talking. Don’t let yourself get freaked out, this recording is just for you and the anonymous transcriptionist you’re going to hire online. Use an online transcription service (they’re not that expensive) and get your recording transcribed (put into words). You can use it as is or … even better … go through it with a red pen and make some edits. Take out the parts that sound slow or confusing. Maybe add a sentence to clarify a point somewhere else. Hey, look at you! You’re writing!
2. If you can figure out the technical end of this, record yourself (talking to somebody. Audio is enough, but you can use video if that’s more comfortable for you. This can be a conversation, but an interview format (Q&A) works even better. Get it transcribed (if it’s video, you can get the audio portion transcribed). This time, you can use it as an interview.
3. If you’re pretty conversant in your subject, talk as long and as much as you can, and then chop up your transcribed text into several articles or chapters for an ebook. You may need to add some transitional stuff, but that’s about 100 times easier than writing new content from scratch. (Transitional stuff is the stuff that is missing, the words or sentences you need to make the finished piece read properly. If you can’t figure out what they are, ask somebody who is reasonably literate to help you.)
4. By the way, depending on what you’re doing, audio and video content, as is, is great, too. Multimedia content makes your site very appealing. And there’s no harm in double-dipping–you can easily put audio on the site and an article on the same topic.

These are decent ideas, but a lot of internet guys don’t actually know what they’re talking about when it comes to content. That is, they may want to do an infor product about opening up your own nail salon without ever having opened or even set foot inside a nail salon. This can be done, but it’s a step up on the ladder o’ difficulty.

1. Find somebody who does know the subject and do an interview. Get it transcribed. Rework your content. Make sure the person knows what you’re up to, but most of the time, that person won’t care. He or she may even be flattered, especially if you offer to mention their name or give them some kind of plug.
2. Go to a convention, conference, meeting, or otherwise figure out how to mingle with a lot of folks who know the subject. Talk to anyone and everyone. Then speak what you found out in a microphone and get it transcribed. Your finished transcription is probably going to be jumbled, so you’re going to have to sit with a pen and paper for a bit. You’ll need to weed some things out or move other things around. But that’s okay; it’s not that hard. What’s even better, you’ll wind up with all original content. (Some conferences make you sign nondisclosure agreements prohibiting doing something like this, so that’s out–but those are mainly sneaky Internet marketing types who know this trick and don’t want it used against them. Most people not in Internet marketing or some other secretive field will have no problem letting you learn from them and write about it.)

Another way to write something is to do research. Sit at your computer and Google some keywords and pull up some information. Wikipedia is great for this, but Wikipedia is what everybody looks at, so go deeper. Print stuff out. Try to find magazines on your subject or other blogs. The point is not to rip these places off but to collect snippets. Research is really just pulling a few bits from here, another thing from there, and so on, until you have enough snippets to make your own quilt.

You may end up having to write some things down or keep notes on your computer. I know this sounds a lot like school, but it’s how it’s done. For instance, let’s say you wanted to write about swine flu prevention.

• Get some statistics–that’s always good for writing. You can Google “swine flu statistics.” For anything health-related, cdc.gov usually has statistics.
• Get some definitions–Wikipedia isn’t a bad idea here, but you may find other sources that can help you define your terms (for instance, what exactly is swine flu? What is any kind of flu?)
• Get some tips, information, facts, background, controversies. Instead of trying to write what’s in your head, find what’s going on in the subject and base your writing on that. For instance, with swine flu there really isn’t a lot of concern over what it is or how it started, but there happens to be a lot of conversation going on about prevention. What can we do about it?
• Pull all of that together. If you’re halfway good at writing, you can probably write it from there, but if not, try your microphone trick and just give an oral report on the subject.

Don’t plagiarize, but you shouldn’t have to. First of all, you’re only taking bits and pieces and putting them together yourself. Whenever possible, put things in your own words. Make it sound like you. You may read that “swine flu is a potentially life-threatening disease.” Chances are, this is not what you would say. Think about what this sentence means and say it in the way you would tell your best friend. “Swine flu can kill you.” That’s good. Or you can be more subtle: “Some people who get swine flu may die.”  You could also say: “The reason everybody is so worried about swine flu is that this disease can be fatal!”

There are dozens of way to write just about any idea, so take what you find and say it with your own voice. Intensify it. Swine flu is a serious topic, but sometimes when you write, you want to make things sound goofier or funnier or easier or happier. Infuse some vitality into the facts.

By the way, here’s a tip for writing an article:

• Give it a good headline
• In the first paragraph, lead off with FACTS, FACTS, FACTS. Statistics, numbers, dates, definitions, whatever you have that is hard and indisputable goes here. Don’t be afraid to get people scared or excited or hopeful. If you don’t get them in the first sentence or two, you’ve lost them. And facts (hard facts) give you credibility.
• Make sure you offer definitions of key terms.
• If you have anything to make a list out of, do it. People love lists.
• Give tips and advice. Be practical. You’re not writing for English class, you’re writing for your peers and most of us are busy.
• In the conclusion just re-state your main ideas. Don’t belabor the conclusion, nobody cares.

One last tip: when writing about non-fiction topics, try not to make things up. Don’t say, “89 million people are going to die of swine flu” even if you found some lunkhead online who wrote it. People don’t mind emotion (in fact, they like that) but most people can tell when you’re lying. So give your story a little spin but don’t spin it off into the lands where pants combust.

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OPT stands for “other people’s traffic.” One way to get traffic is to use other people’s traffic. So how do you do that?

First, you have to know what traffic you want. If I have a pitiful website and a mailing list of 22 people, you don’t want my traffic. You want to find leading websites or people with big lists in your niche. Let’s say you’re doing a website on stock market tips for a down economy. You need to prowl around in that niche and find great websites. You should look at the “bigs” (the ones that are the largest) but also the ones that seem to be the most amazing or respectable. For instance, there may be a couple of cutting-edge websites (new ideas) that aren’t all that big but are getting some buzz. You may also find some smaller sites that are quite excellent but not huge. So you need to find sites that work.

You should also start looking for people. Maybe there is a guru in terms of stock buying or online trading that you’ve been following. Maybe you bought some info products from somebody about profiting in an ecomomic downturn. The point is you have to know your niche and be able to target people who have the kind of traffic you want.

I’m going to use a real-life example but I’m going to change a few details to protect the actual site. But this is close to a true story. A woman wrote a product about planning perfect honeymoons. This wasn’t just a bland how-to document, it had lots of unusual and great ideas, plenty of websites and other contact information, and it was a fun read. It talked about things like cruising down the Nile or watching the zebras on the Sergengetti or parasailing in Acapulco. But everything was niched for the honeymoon couple. But she needed better traffic.

She found it when she latched on to a great website that was all about planning a perfect wedding. Actually, she found multiple sites and gurus in the world of wedding planning. And everyone was a good fit for her product because:

• Her product was a logical complement to the main product
• There was no competitive relationship

So let’s say you can figure out how to find those perfect matches and you have some gurus or websites that are getting oodles of traffic. How can you cash in on their traffic flow? The same way you get writing jobs! Make yourself irresistable. In the case of the honeymoon lady, she offered to partner with some of the giant wedding sites. The plan was this: she gave the webmaster/owner of the biggest site her product. She then offered an affiliate relationship. For every one of her products the webmaster could sell, she would give them 50% (it amounted to around $25 each). All the webmaster had to do was send out an email to her list.

Now get this–the honeymoon lady wrote a few sample emails, too. In other words, she made the offer irresistable: very little work, easy profit, no competition.

Affiliate relationships can work out really well providing you and the other party are extremely clear about who does what, who gets what, and your own motives.

That’s it for the traffic series. You can buy traffic (effective but pricy), use article marketing (cheap, effective and well suited to writers), link for search engine ranking (effective but longer-term), and find ways to leverage OPT.

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I was recently part of a protracted and painful online discussion on a writers’ board on the topic of online writing. To be more specific, the writers were addressing the question as to whether or not online activity was good or bad for writing.

The subject of pay for online writing was discussed only briefly and comments were the usual. Online writing pays pretty poorly if you allow a webmaster to pay you for your services.

However, several writers shared their opinions that online writing used poor grammar. Some online texts even have typos.

The sweet irony of the discussion is that the biggest whiners about typos had typos–in their posts complaining about typos. Sometimes even in the same sentence!

If you are a real writer and by that I mean a person who writes consistently and for money (or trying for money), you know all about errors. You know it first hand because you make errors. I don’t know any person who belts out 5,000 or 10,000 words a day who doesn’t get a few letters here and there twisted up. Sometimes there is a punctuation error. And, yes, sometimes we make grammatical mistakes.

The point is this: is what you’re trying to do as a writer simply to avoid making grammatical mistakes and spelling errors? If it is, give up writing tomorrow. Never touch another pen or keyboard for the rest of your life and you will have attained that goal.

I’ve never seen any group of professionals as hung up on small mistakes as writers. For instance, do you think accountants sit around in forums on the internet and bemoan that “other accountants” might “sometimes make a mistake.” I bet there is not an accountant on earth who hasn’t transposed a digit or added a column of figures incorrectly at least once in his life. The point is, accountants recognize the difference between those sorts of errors and real errors (like running a Ponzi scheme).

Everyone makes mistakes and writers, being writers, make their mistakes in writing. But what other profession seems to shine a spotlight on these little “nothing” events? Imagine other newscasters ganging up on a colleague because he once mispronounced a word. Imagine them lynching the other newscaster because he once coughed on-air? The fact is, we know that those things happen. Maybe they shouldn’t, but they do. Drivers take wrong turns, cashiers count out change wrong, secretaries forget to sign for packages, and carpenters arrive on the job and forget one of their tools.

To come back to my point (I know it’s around here somewhere), a writer writes to communicate. It’s the sharing of ideas that is important, not the careful attention to a bunch of rules. A powerful writer is one who makes you think, who changes your mind, who impresses you with his or her thoughts …. not one who dazzes you with his or her correct use of the semicolon.

Language is organic. It changes constantly, even over the short course of a few years. What is linguistically acceptable today may not be tomorrow, and vice versa. Language evolves and it would be a sorry writer today who wrote like Shakespeare if you mean literally like Shakespeare. But a writer who can convey the ideas and insights of Shakespeare is a great treasure to all of us — even if those pages had some mistakes on them.

The main reason people hate to write is that they fall into the trap of thinking that all writing has to be technically perfect. Imagine an accountant starting out on his career and being warned by his very stern, no-nonsense boss (given to rants) that he could never, ever make a mistake or it would prove he was a “bad accountant.” Yet writers do that all the time to each other. Most of the writers writing about online opportunities only bashed those who were writing online for making grammatical and spelling mistakes.

That’s why most writers are poor!

Get past the mindset that tells you your main goal is criticizing the work of others. If other people are writing online and you think they stink, then get online and do it better … or find a new playground. If you think online writing is not for you, great, get out of the game and leave it to those who want to play. If you think that real writing is grammatically pristine, then, writer, edit thyself.

Here is what I learned:

• Writers who hang out in forums are a disgruntled lot.
• Writing is about communicating ideas, not the absence of grammatical mistakes.
• No writer should whine that others are making grammatical errors–we all make them, and writers make them more than others (because we write more than others).
• Language changes over time and writers who care about communicating (rather than obeying the grammar rules they learned 20 years ago) monitor those changes and use them judiciously.

The point is online writing is a huge opportunity for writers, but if your focus is on not making grammatical mistakes (ever, ever, ever) then you’re going to miss out.

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