Whether you want to earn a few bucks by writing online or simply intend to spread the word of your Poetry to as many people as possible, quality web traffic is the juice which will determine your success. There’s an emphasis on quality, which means that visitors of your writing will arrive at their destination (your text) based on an interest of a shared topic.
3 Ways to Increase Quality Web Traffic
- Use Facebook Pages & Groups that are as closely related to your text’s topic as possible. For example if you have written a poem about fishing you could search for Groups and Fan Pages about Fishing and share your link there as a non-intrusive part of the ongoing dialogue about the topic.
- If you haven’t yet done it, sign up for a Twitter-Account specifically for your poetry. Start building a network of people, by following users who have the same interest as you (poetry). Retweet (feature) other people’s poetry in your own stream. Give feedback. The idea is simple: Support others and be supported yourself. The more you are engaged with others who are passionate about poetry, the more people will click the links you post.
- This is a bit more advanced, but by using the feed of your content (as listed on triond or bukisa) you can do a lot of interesting things like giving others the option to subscribe to new items via their feed-reader or email, setting up widgets on your own blog and so on and so forth
There are many many more ways to bring quality web traffic to your material, but that’s it for today. (we want to keep it digestable 
Remember though: Always make your links or posts a) related to the topic, and b) engage in dialogue with others.
We hope this will help you to get started. We’ll post here on this blog continously about more ways to increase readership and are also always interested in your ideas and strategies. You can use the comment section to add your thoughts on this.
Both those of us who are writing on online writing portals like Triond, Helium or Bukisa and those who are maintaining their own blogs need the same: more quality traffic (see our earlier post) in order to expand the reach of their texts as well as their potential income.
One great way to do this, is using rss feeds.
If you have your own blog or are writing on e.g. Triond you have an RSS-feed (the orange little icon). 
What is an Rss-Feed?
Look at an Rss Stream like a Newspaper which updates itself. Each time you post a new text, the RSS-feed will automatically update and show on top.
How does it benefit me?
Using this very simple but highly adaptable and compatible technology we have almost limitless options to “spread the word” of your content.
- You can use the rss-feed on your facebook-pages and profiles by using e.g. the Social RSS application to display all of the new stuff in the sidebar on in a neat little box.
- If you have a twitter-account you can use services like twitterfeed to automatically push your newly written materials to your (hopefully) huge and highly active twitter-crowd.
- If you go to feedburner.com you’ll find a whole galaxy of cool things to do with your rss-feed, one of which is certainly the option to let people subscribe to your feed via email like we have here on this site on the upper right.
Unfortunately we cannot go to great lengths here to display each of the steps required to perform the above tasks, but there are great tutorials out there who will explain to you very simply, step by step, how it works. You don’t have to be computer geek to do this
sources: text: poetry a source of life, img by lumaxart via flickr
Everybody who has already published poetry or articles on the net knows that combining a text with an image makes it invaluably more attractive and inviting to the eye than just a naked skeleton of black on white characters.
Nevertheless, every serious writer has to devote a lot of time and efforts to practicing his or her craft and does not always necessarily have the time or the will to deal with visual matters, not even speaking about the copyrighting.
Today we will show you how Creative Commons has simplified the whole process.
What is Creative Commons?
CC is a non-profit organization devoted to expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share. The organization has released several copyright-licenses known as Creative Commons licenses. These licenses allow creators to communicate which rights they reserve, and which rights they waive for the benefit of recipients or other creators.
How can I Benefit?
If you’re using Firefox as a web-browser (which is highly suggested for many reasons) you can use custom search-engines in the upper right corner of your browser. There is a great variety to choose from, e.g. you can add a wikipedia or youtube, making your whole searching experience a lot easier. To those who do not know it yet, we want to recommend to you the Creative Commons Search Engine Add-On. What does it do?
Very Simply: Give it a search term and it will find images, videos and other media which you can freely use with your own work. See screenshot below:
How can I install it?
just follow this link, and click where it says “Creative Commons” under point 3. Then hit “add” in the pop-up dialogue and start searching.
note: make sure to always look under which license your desired material is published. a complete listing and guide can be found here . Don’t worry! It may look a bit complicated at the beginning but actually is very straighforward and easy to understand.
sources: tutorial by Poetry A Source Of Life, CC-definition by Wiki, img by pedrosimoes7 via flickr
