Thanks for this great topic. I don’t feel comfortable with marketing. At all. At this point I just put information out there when it’s relevant and then just keep communicating about regular stuff the rest of the time.

I have definitely avoided a certain author’s books because of her “brand” on Twitter. Unfollowed her as well. Too many rants and way too much negativity. Who needs that?

I explain these in Writer-ese in my book, but basically those are things we do to help search engine algorithms FIND our content. Think of tagging like labeling a box “Christmas Ornaments” on the outside to make them easier to find. Keywords are often the same as the tags and used in the first paragraphs of the blog. So if you open a box labeled (tagged0 CHRISTMAS ORNAMENTS) you would expect to see christmas ornaments inside. Maybe even lights, tinsel, a star. It’s how search engines keep us safe from porn bots. They see if the outside matches the inside so we don’t click, “Cuban Recipes” and end up with make women. Make sense? And no, you are far from dumb. It’s why I am here to help take the panic factor out 😀 .

Also, I’m blogging between two and four times a week, have been for months, and the response is just about what it’s always been. A few stalwart readers of my writing read and occasionally comment. Nobody else cares. I ask questions and nobody answers. My sales hover around ten in a good month, my Facebook page gets a couple new likes who then dutifully ignore everything I post, and I lose as many Twitter followers as I gain in the average week.

Let me guess. I’m driving people away by being, I don’t know, a human being who is frustrated because her free fiction gets thousands of readers and her best-selling original book has sold maybe two hundred copies at the outside after nearly two years?

I’m tagging, but — three times a *week*? [cringes] I’m lucky if I blog two or three times a *month*. I do post on Facebook several times a day, but that’s more just random observations, and certainly not more than a couple of sentences. An essay three times a *week*???

Okay. Well, then. I guess I’m just not putting the requisite amount of work in. There’s only so much of what feels like a really awful homework assignment to me that I’m willing to do, and apparently that amount is not enough.

So I guess the operative phrase is “never mind.” Sorry to have bothered you.

You might need to just make slight adjustments. Are you tagging? Using keywords? Asking questions at the end to encourage engagement? Titles are important. Also it takes time and content. How many days a week are you blogging? I blogged once a week for a year and a half and no one knew me. I upped to three days a week and soon hit a tipping point. Went from crickets to my visits exploding. From 40 or so visits a day to 500 and it has only increased since then. And it isn’t scattershot. Your voice is the uniting feature. I blog on writing, social media, bullying, Star Wars, humor, body image, and on and on.

Hence the disclaimer on my blog: “Writing, history, museum work, the Pacific Northwest, traveling, national parks, geyser gazing, reading, quilting, gardening, meteorology, and the occasional cat.”

And the reason I refer to myself as a “professional dilettante.”

Unfortunately, this scattershot approach has not gained me any readers that I know of, and the blogs I enjoy as a reader *do* have a focused approach. But my brain just doesn’t work that way.

Which is why I’ve written three time travel novels and a travel memoir, and am about to release a contemporary romance. I guess I’m doomed.