I’m reminded as I write this I have two long term projects I need to dedicate a day each to – work on my website (cross links, keywords, re-title some articles, click to tweet on others, strengthen and reword articles), and an admin day of Evernote – tagging and moving articles to more appropriate stacks and notebooks.
Does it really matter?
If you have your own website or use Evernote, you’ll understand. In Evernote, I recently spent some time trying to find an article, and couldn’t, because I was in research phase and not really paying attention to the notebook the web clipper was saving it to. If I’d had an admin day, I could have cut the wasted time to almost nothing.
If you look through Evernote and see more than ten tags with zero uses, it means you need either a research day or an admin day, or both.
Research is wonderful, and useful. However, it does have a weakness.
You have to sooner or later read it.
Weekend mornings very often are the times I spend in office tasks. Writing my tweets for the week. Writing my LinkedIn posts. Writing my blog articles for the coming week.
Those are the easy parts. I sometimes wish I had a clerk or someone to upload all of that for me – it often feels like it takes FAR too long to upload everything to the Internet.
Another thing I spend weekend mornings on is going through Evernote and reading research I’ve collected. Going through past notes I’d written. Bits of dialog and such. Plans and ideas for novels.
This is crucial. This is the time I rediscover things I was thinking last year and didn’t have time for. Indeed, thinking over the last two years.
This is how I recapture my way in that novel I walked away from because I couldn’t figure where to go next. The answer is in my train of thought, and I can pick that up again by looking back at my research of that time.
Imagine. You’ve come up with a great idea for a book. 35,000 words in – halfway – you’ve boxed yourself in. Lost the train of thought. Nothing’s coming out. The flow stopped.
So you open Evernote, type in the tag of that novel’s title, and…
There’s all your research.
“Why was I researching Spanish Galleons?” Then you remember why. It’s the plot direction you forgot to write down, and never went in that direction.
And you open Scrivener, and right in the gap, you plug in that story line.
Book saved.
But if you don’t put in a quarterly admin day of drudgery, tagging and moving to the right notebooks, and setting them in stacks…
You’ll never find it. And that novel will sit there unfinished for years.
It’s the same thing for your website. It’s the first, most crucial part of the writer’s platform. SEO optimization is crucial for search engines to find you. No SEO, no ranking. Nobody can find your website.
I also know I have at least thirty articles on editing. Without key words, you may find the one that gives additional information, but not the master article on the editing process.
This is why you provide links at the end of the article (or in the body itself) to all the other articles on this.
If my readers find information they can use, they’ll keep reading. I share what I learn, for the admittedly selfish reason that I sometimes have to read my own website to remember how to edit, or tricks for prepping a novel, etc.
If I can’t find it and I wrote it, what chance do you have?
Over time, you sometimes re-read your blog and think, “That was a clumsy way to explain that.” So you re-edit the content. It becomes more relevant.
And apparently, you have to use strong, emotional words and phrases in your blog articles! I keep meaning to do that, but right now I’ve got a dozen novels in the works, some non-fiction, and I’ve been putting off my Master’s Degree for far too long. So I procrastinated on it. I can’t do that any more, since I’ve been editing my novels with the plan of getting them published and on the book shelves! This would be the time to go back through and add those emotion-laden words (like “tremendous” and “limited”). You have to find what words in your articles you can replace with these emotionally charged words.
For those who’ve got blogging down to a science… I have to go through and re-title my blog entries. “Fifteen things Genghis Khan can teach you about writing novels” apparently is more fun to read than “Structuring your novel part three”.
I’ll admit it. I absolutely hate spending ten minutes trying to write a headline. I want to get to the sharing of information. Every time I teach others, I get better at it. But apparently having proper blog titles draws more return readers, and inspires engagement. I’m not trying to speak to the air, I’m trying to teach others, and if people don’t interact, it becomes a soliloquy and a monologue.
Conclusion
Pretty boring article, on pretty boring stuff. If SEO optimization was fun, everyone would be doing it. Tagging in Evernote rates on the enjoyment scale just above amputating one of my own limbs. These tasks are dull and drudgery. But the payoff is so important.
Don’t procrastinate on these essential tasks!
