Category Archives: Writers and Writing

Books, writers, and the art of writing by Wayne K. Spear

I’m tired of being a crappy blogger, and here’s what I’m doing about it

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If you are a blogger, the odds are you have been going through the same experience as me. If that’s the case, keep reading. There is good news and hope at the end

IF YOU’RE A REGULAR VISITOR, you’ll have noticed my site has changed a lot these past months.

Here’s why.

But first: Thank-you for giving me your time—for reading my posts, for contributing your thoughts, for your company. A few of you even share my posts on social media. I want you to know I try to return the compliment, by reading your work and posting it on my Twitter feed. This website is meant to foster a community.

Now, back to this change business. There’s a lot to cover, but I’ll be as brief as I can.

My five-year blogging anniversary arrives in ten days. In other words, I started waynekspear.com on January 21, 2010. At that time I was averaging 16 visitors a day. It was a fun time.

I paid no attention to traffic in the early days. That changed. I posted regularly, as much as four essays a week. After two years, I got curious. How much traffic was I getting? What did my audience look like?

The short answer is that I did a bunch of research, and I started collecting and analyzing data, and I concluded that I had no more than a few readers. I figured no more than ten people actually read a post, and that included my friends and family. After five years of blogging, the numbers are telling the same story.

So why is that a problem?

Here’s why.

Having ten readers is great. If you’ve got this far, you are one of ten. You are great.

According to the data, 92% of the people who arrive at this site leave in under ten seconds. And another few percent leave in under a minute. Nothing I write can be read in under a minute. So I think of my readers as part of an elite group.

The writing i did between 2010 and 2014—those hundreds of essays—represents a lot of my time. I could have been doing a lot of other things. Each article took about an hour, so over four years that’s 600 hours.

My intention has been to build an audience and to earn income selling books and articles and whatnot. So to reach more folks, I started writing for the National Post. Some months later, in 2012, I was writing for the Huffington Post. I didn’t get paid for this work: it was done for exposure. And it didn’t work. Sure, more people saw my name, but my traffic flatlined.

Fast-forward three years, to 2015, and my daily average traffic is now 106 hits a day. Each of my posts gets, on average, about 18 hits. Keep in mind only five percent of these hits represent a reader.

In 95 out of 100 instances, a person enters words into a search engine, arrives at my site, decides in under five seconds it’s not what they are looking for, and bounces. (That’s the technical term for the non-engaged portion of your traffic.)

Okay, I could go down the rabbit hole now, and talk all about WordPress stats and what I’ve learned about the blogosphere, but again I’m going to give you the crisp summary. It’s worth repeating why I’ve written this post: you’ve given me your precious time, and I want to show my respect for this by explaining the changes on my site—and by telling you that more changes are on the way.

Also, if you are a fellow blogger, the odds are you have been going through the same experience. If that’s the case, keep reading. There is good news and hope at the end.

You see, I spent 2014 doing a lot of thinking and research and soul-searching. Not making money from writing wasn’t really my problem. It was the realization that my work was not connecting, that people couldn’t care less about it, that it just wasn’t good enough. I looked around the Internet and I found bloggers who, after a few months of writing, had thousands of readers. People took time to leave comments and to tell their friends about this amazing writer they’d found. Well, there was no denying that I was not this kind of writer. Why not? What magical thing did they have that I didn’t?

I also discovered that most bloggers were exactly where I was, pouring their heart and soul into writing that maybe a few people would read.

Trust me, that is the crisp version. The long version was a lot of studying, and a lot of messy and unpleasant introspection. In November I wrote a draft blog post that thanked my readers and announced I would be writing no more.

But then I got thinking. What if instead of quitting, I changed how I write? Make it more fun and accessible. I noticed that popular bloggers often have lots of pictures in their posts, and that they break paragraphs into bite-sized chunks with sub-heads and call-outs and CTAs. They write in a relaxed and even jargony style. So I started to do that.

Around this time I came across a fellow named Jon Morrow. I read a bunch of his blog posts, but here’s the one that blew everything I was thinking and doing out of the water: 20 Ways to Be Just Another Mediocre Blogger Nobody Gives a Crap About.

Yep, that was me: the crappy blogger no one gives a shit about. I’d managed to do every one of the twenty stupid things in this post. This pretty much sealed it: I was a failure.

Except I wasn’t. I was just a guy who didn’t know what he was doing. And once upon a time so was Jon. He knew what all the mistakes were because he’d made them. And now? He makes boat loads of money blogging.

So the good news is I can do better. I signed up for Jon’s course Serious Bloggers Only. Jon says you shouldn’t even bother writing anything on your blog until you have 10,000 subscribers. Instead put your effort into connecting with the influencers in your blogging niche, build a network, and write guest posts. He says you should put a note on your website, directing your readers to the guest posts you’ll be doing on those popular blogs.

I’m going to follow his advice, because maybe I’m delusional but I really do believe in my work. I just need to be smarter and more effective. So I’m studying marketing and business and other things most writers avoid like spoiled milk.

My partner doesn’t agree at all with the posts I’ve been doing since about last November. She says I’m dumbing it down, and that I’m smarter than that. I see her point. What I realized is that it’s not actually about my writing, it’s about cutting through the noise and clutter of the Internet.

When I’m finished this course I hope to have a few things sorted out:

• what is my niche in the blogging marketplace?
• who do I want to write for?
• what is my strategy for writing compelling prose that connects with readers?
• how do I turn this blog from a hobby (let’s be honest) into an income generator?
• in short: how do I stop being Just Another Mediocre Blogger Nobody Gives a Crap About.

I’m not going to stop blogging at waynekspear, but I am going to do less of it until I have completed the course-work and the strategies given to me by Jon.

I’d also love to hear your thoughts. I mean, if you’ve stayed with me this far, wow. Your thoughts are extremely important to me. I’m kind of dying to know them, to be honest.

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Now, here’s why this matters to you. If you are also a blogger—I know some of my readers are—and anything I’ve written above is speaking to you, I recommend you visit Jon’s site. You deserve to have a community. I believe we should all be blogging to make a meaningful difference. You don’t have to settle for anything less. It took me five years to realize I was doing everything wrong. If I can help even one person to not waste five years making mistakes, this post will have been worth writing.

Cheers.

Find me on Twitter. Check out my latest book.

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Dear Mister Captain—please let me on the life boat

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NOTE—This piece is based on a writing assignment in the book 642 Things to Write About, published by the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto:

“Only ten people will fit in the life raft. Convince the Captain that you should be one of them.”

MR SMITH? Hi!—sorry about the mister. I realize I should have said captain. I know it’s not the best time, with the boat sinking and all, but I’ve been meaning to say that’s a nice uniform. The contrast of black and gold is masculine, audacious even, and conveys authority—while also being stylish. So often these days dress is nothing but function. Or you have uniforms like on the Love Boat, which have no gravitas whatsoever. I mean, short-sleeves? Really? Captain Stubing was no Mr. Smith, if you ask me. Sure, he was pleasant, but is pleasant really what you want when the ship is going down? Which brings me to what I was hoping to discuss with you, and I know you’re a busy man. All I’m asking for is a minute of your time and that you’ll consider letting me on the life boat. This is my story.

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An open letter to Stephen King

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I‘VE JUST FINISHED On Writing. It’s been years since I’ve read one of your books, and I enjoyed this one enough that I’ll be reading another soon.

We have some things in common. Like you, I started a satirical magazine in high school. Mine was better received by staff than yours, owing I suspect to the principle that satire is a mirror in which we see the reflection of all faces but our own. I stopped writing satire for this reason, which from your perspective will appear as an irony. The point is that satire will either provoke your targets or it won’t, and whatever the outcome you’ll wonder if the buck was worth the bang, or lack of it.

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Reasons you should start a blog. And me destroying them.

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I GOT CURIOUS about my odds. The biggest lottery in Canada? I have about a one-in-15-million shot at that. Weirdly enough, there are smaller lotteries in this country where my odds are only half that, or one-in-twenty-eight-million. It’s far more likely that I’ll be abducted by extra-terrestrial thespian sharks. I’m glad that’s the case, because there’s nothing more terrifying in this universe than the menace of shark power combined with the narcissistic bitterness of actors.

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5 tell-tale warning signs that you may be a writer

Warning: you may be a writer!

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WHAT IS A WRITER? The screen shot above has some suggestions: writers are crazy, forgetful and always selling someone out.

Now, I’m a writer and I must object to this libel. I am not “always” selling someone out. Tuesday to Friday I write, Saturday I do laundry, and Sunday morning I take a long walk in the park. That leaves, at most, Sunday afternoon and all of Monday for selling people out.

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5 common mistakes made by writers

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IF YOU READ this little website of mine, you probably know I’m a fan of science and that I talk about sciency and logically things all the time. My partner Nicole follows IFLScience, where they have some science gift ideas that are cool and that you should definitely check out, for that special science nerd in your life.

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RTRPARD at 20: Yes, I have a book that’s old enough to buy booze

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LATER THIS MONTH, I’ll be releasing a special 20th anniversary edition of my 1994 hit collection of stories entitled Real Things Real People Are Really Doing. Available as a download at waynekspear.com—for a limited time only!—this 20th anniversary edition will include a new story and my reflections on the making of RTRPARD. What a time it was. My only regret is that my book can’t actually drink beer. Look for it July 30, 2014.

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Jeremy Paxman and Poetry’s Bad Rap

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A GUARDIAN UK article, written by Alison Flood and published over the weekend, quotes the Forward prize judge and TV presenter Jeremy Paxman as wishing aloud that “poetry ‘would raise its game a little bit, raise its sights’, and ‘aim to engage with ordinary people much more.’” Every so often you encounter this lament, often uttered by poets, that poetry has become irrelevant to the great mass of plain old folk.

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