Your online writing stories can usually only be found if appropriate keywords are used to accurately describe your short story or other work of fiction.
In my article about earning online writing revenues yesterday, I talked about how fame is just as important for success in online writing as it is in traditional writing and publishing.
Today I’m moving on to talk about how to start the long journey towards achieving fame for the ordinary writer using online publishing techniques.
I assume you’ve obtained your blog and your advertisements are proudly displayed around your welcoming message saying something like:
This blog is to enable me to reach out to all my readers and to provide examples of my work and I hope you come back often.
The next step is to write something really interesting for your readers.
As a writer, you may well have a short story or flash fiction burning away in your mind and this is a good opportunity to give it an airing by posting it onto your blog for all to read and enjoy.
Once you have entered your short story, microfiction or flash fiction and are ready to press the ‘publish’ button, stop and ask yourself how are people going to find your short mystery, murder mystery or science fiction monologue?
The answer is, of course, that they will type keywords or keyword phrases into the search facility in their browsers; keywords like short story, flash fiction, science fiction (sc-fi?) or story with a twist in the tale.
Your story may be the best short story, romance or travel tale on the Internet but, unless it contains words and phrases that give it a description search engines can use, searchers will not be able to find it. The search engines are very clever these days but even they cannot read and understand a story as we humans can and interpret whether it is a murder mystery, travelogue or whatever. Currently your fiction story is probably unlikely to contain the word story, short story, postcard fiction or many of the other phrases that people might use to try to find it. For your fiction short story or short stories to be found, you need to spend some time adding keywords to your blog post that correctly describe what you are offering.
The best place to start putting words that describe your story is in the ‘Title’ part of your blog post. This can often be quite difficult because you would probably prefer to use your title as a hook to get people interested in your story. Unfortunately, your hook is more likely to be about your story than about the accurate categorisation of your story needed to bring readers to your blog. Furthermore, ideally, your categorisation should probably be included in the first few words of your title.
However, here’s an example of a title that might work:
Short story ‘Constantly Kissed’ by A N Online-Author is a flash fiction about teenage romance
People who are searching for a ’short story’, ‘flash fiction’, ‘fiction’ or ‘teenage romance’ are much more likely to find your blog story with this sort of title than if it just said ‘Constantly Kissed by A N Online-Author.
The next place to describe your story is in the ‘Body’ of your blog post. You could talk about your story in an introductory paragraph or perhaps at the end where you could put a statement about copyright and about the characters being fictional with your story description. (For an example of description at the end of a post, see my Christmas flash fiction story for Christmas 2008.)
The positioning of the description of your story offers similar dilemmas as with the title. Naturally, you would prefer to hook the reader into the story with a dramatic opening. Less exciting is a series of words or phrases people might use to try to find your story. However, with a little bit of ingenuity and some good writing, this approach can be made to work.
Writing your story description at the end of your short story might be preferable because the reader is permitted uninterrupted reading of your story however the disadvantage is that your description might not be given the same level of importance by the search engines as it would have received higher up your page copy, just after the title.
Of course, the best approach to making your story search engine friendly would be to include both a description of your story at the beginning just after the title and a summary of your keyword included description at the end. However, always write for your readers and never just for search engines. Ultimately, the best way a search engine can evaluate the quality of your stories is to note how long visitors stay on your site happily reading. Once you have attracted some readers to your story blog, keep them happy and there is a good chance the search engines will be happy too and continue sending you even more readers.
Whatever your approach, by now, you should have a pretty good idea of what your story is about. The next step is to break down your description into a short list of keywords or key search phrases. These can be placed in the ‘Tags’ part of your blog post and will further help people find your story through the search engines. It’s a good idea to ensure that any words or phrases you use in your tags are definitely included in the body of your post.
If your blog system permits the allocation of a ‘Category’, find the keyword or keywords in your description that best describes your story in one or two words and use that.
Now you’ve written your short story, flash fiction, murder story, science fiction short or sudden romance, entered a compelling blog title that hooks the reader, added your keywords into the blog body of your post and into the collection of blog tags for your post, what’s next?
The answer is that you need to write another one, and another one after that until you have a collection of short stories, flash fictions or whatever that would grace any bookshelf and which people will recommend to each other. Spread your posts over a period of time, perhaps daily, to help encourage the search engines to re-index your latest story quickly.
Over time, hopefully, your readers too will get into the habit of coming back regularly for more. As your fame grows, so should the traffic to your blog and your advertising revenues that will, one day, perhaps enable you to call yourself a successful published writer.
That’s the theory but I must acknowledge it is a hard road and many online fiction writers fall by the wayside. However, it is a road to follow and publishing online means your writing gets read instead of just gathering dust at the bottom of a drawer with a pile of rejection slips. Getting read is a great feeling and, in some ways arguably, the advertising revenues are a bonus!
More tips about how to get readers for your short fiction stories and articles soon 
Good luck
Bye for now.
Rob
Rob Hopcott – online writer
