Growing up I often watched in wonderment as my mother, a Chinese journalist writing for a newspaper in Taiwan, filled in pages and pages of brackets with her Chinese articles. These specialized paper were pre-printed with light green brackets, and standard issue among her colleagues. Designed so that words can be counted quickly, and given to those blessed with the unique talent of using a computer, where it would be fed into the printing press for tomorrow’s story. Her job, she often described as “crawling brackets”. Each box had a monetary value, so you write with dual purpose. Fancy, wordy sentences were rewarded.
the dreaded grid paper
Later in her career she was forced to learn computer input methods in Chinese, no easy task for someone in their 40s. Many of her peers couldn’t adapt and retired. A half dozen books later, she still calls what she does “crawling brackets”, and the word count feature in text editors is her new best friend.
In her effort to keep up with the times, something my family’s extremely proud to see, she has adapted her popular New York food column to a popular blog. In a recent book launch party, she mentioned to the crowd that despite the shift to electronic media in the digital age, one thing she remains thankful for, is how her column still gives her the opportunity to “crawl brackets”.
As a SEO obsessed blogger, I’ve never used the word count feature since my days of paper writing on campus. Blogging was suppose to liberate the creative minds from the limited print real estate, however it also completely disrupted the incentive system that for years churned out some of the best literary works.
For a traditional writer, the paper acted as the middleman between the literary pieces, and the commercial aspect of advertising. The paper found you advertisers, and your role as a writer is to write pieces that’d attract eyeballs to that particular section. Writing better, for the most part, doesn’t impact your income. Controversial pieces might cause a stir, but again, will not light up your pocket books.
Bloggers on the other hand, are responsible for tying the words to the dollars. Without the security blanket of a “sales” team hunting down potential advertisers, most resort to ad networks that pay on a CPM system. So your role is to not to create long articles that fill up the word counter, but rather how to attract the most eyeballs. Remember, each 1000 eyeballs trigger that magical CPM, M as in thousand.
a thousand of these, or rather 500 right eyes, gets you your $CPM.
My mother often said most literary folks choose their career for stability and laid back lifestyle. Life is just the pen (or the keyboard), a topic, and a paycheck. What perhaps she’s trying to say, is that writers are not what most would describe as “business people”. That’s why you many of the greatest writers with financial success hire agents.
Blogging forces the writer to up his or her business sense, creating a group of SEO obsessed writers that would do anything for people to visit their site. I’m one of them. (if you’re reading this, thank you)
Is this beneficial for the future of writing? I am worried. Perhaps when the iPad revolutionizes the book business, the balance between literary creations and monetary incentives will be shaken up once again. Until then, I’m hoping bloggers take a step back, write with passion, not for metrics. We should write for the achievement of words, not the advancement of search optimization.
CS
The fact I’m blogging this entry is quite ironic, but I’m going relatively SEO light with this entry.
It’s been 3 years since I last ventured onto the blogosphere. Like most people, I stumbled onto blogging years ago when I found all my friends on Xanga. Things were certainly different back then, there was no facebook to speak of. Everybody pretty much had to work with what they got.
I used the blog to share my life with others, sometimes excessively. Then one day I thought that it was somewhat pointless, then abandoned my account for good.
Years later, after a few years in the financial and IT industry, I started to realize the power of a blog. Just what you can gain from SEO is stunning. Plus I think with 5 years of working experience, perhaps now it’s time to share some of my business insight.
