1. Hone your craft.: The best way to improve your writing is to write, right? A blog gives you an outlet for writing regularly.
2. Instant feedback: One thing blog readers are not is timid; if you mess up, they’ll let you know! They’ll also let you know when you’re doing a good job. It might be years before you get any feedback on the novel you just finished; a blog post can start getting commented on within minutes.
3. Develop relationships with readers: A blog lets you reach out to your readers and build enduring relationships. The people who read your blog every day are going to be people you can count on to buy your books, spread word of mouth about your work, even review works-in-progress.
4. Give your most loyal readers a “free prize”: Blogging gives you a chance to offer your biggest fans a little something extra.
5. Build awareness of your work: Blogs have a potentially unlimited audience — more than one person has discovered their new favorite writer by doing a search on Google.
6. Show your ability to write often and consistently: If you do work for clients, blogging shows that you’re able to write regularly and to a schedule — which is good news for potential clients!
7. Network with other writers: Your blog offers a platform for connecting with other writers, by linking back and forth to each other, providing a place to comment on each other’s work, and giving each other positive word-of-mouth.
8. Sell copies of your books: If you have book out, by all means plug it on your blog. A lot. Join the Amazon Associates program so you get a referral fee every time someone buys your book by clicking the link on your site. The referral fees are often as much as or even more than your royalties!
9. Attract clients: New readers can find out about you when your site turns up on Google — so can new clients! Plus, you can sell them on your work before they ever even contact you.

Of course, there’s another reason writers should blog — it’s fun! And there’s nothing wrong with that!

Resource posts build traffic and they also help you establish yourself as an expert in your niche, whatever that is. What’s more, they establish goodwill between you and your readership, since resource posts represent at least a little bit of work that you’re offering up to your site’s visitors.

You can expect to put a little more time into a resource post than a usual post,though that depends a little on how careful you are in your blog writing, If you obsess over every line of a short story you’re posting, it could in fact be much easier and quicker to write up a resource post.

So what kind of posts can you consider resource posts? A strong tutorial is a good one, or a list of all the websites you know of that deal with your particular topic, or a list of 40 (or 80, or 107) books in your niche with capsule reviews — anything that gives people a reason to come back and check it out again and again. Here are some more specific ideas:

• Science fiction writers could do a list of 50 trilogies, or 100 books set in the present, or every steampunk novel they know of.
• Children’s book writers could do a list of children’s illustrators who have websites, or 60 books that aren’t racist, or books about rabbits, or a guide to writing dialogue for young readers.
• Travel writers could write 20 tips for taking great vacation photos, a howto on packing light, a list of off-the-beaten-path vacation spots, or a guide to a great museum.
• Literary novelists could do a list of lesser-known novels by Booker finalists, or a post about getting a literary novel published, or a list of 100 French novelists whose work is available in English translation.
• Freelancers could write a series of posts on time tracking, instructions for creating a perfect home office, or a list of 90 free online resources for self-employed workers.
• Fantasy novelists could write a Borgesian list of 50 fantastic creatures in contemporary fasntasy, a guide to another author’s imagined world, or 37 Charles de Lint fansites, or a howto about world-building.
• Poets could compile a list of 100 spoken word albums of poetry read by the original authors, every possible stanza form, or all living poet laureates.
• Textbook writers could create a tutorial for parents and teachers on how to teach a child some topic, list 60 important events that didn’t make it into the history books, or show readers how to do 20 great science experiments.
• Nature writers could introduce every species of American turtle, tell families how to hike safely with their children, or describe 100 sites to see before you die.
• Technology writers can list the best site to get reviews on each of 75 categories of electronics, how to set up a new computer, or review every tech manufacturer’s customer service record.
• Any author could write a list of 100 authors in their field that didn’t deserve their obscurity (or that do deserve obscurity, for that matter — I’m looking at you, Ayn Rand!), 50 writers who are famous for the wrong thing, or their 32 favorite writers’ blogs.

And so on. The idea is to be big, bold, and most of all, truly useful. And opinionated, if necessary — there’s nothing wrong with a little controversy! It will bring new traffic, and people will respect you for taking a position (though it pays to have a tough skin — online anonymity can provoke some pretty hateful responses).

Several sites have emerged to capitalize on your frustrations, offering a place for you to publish your work with the chance of payment down the line. Sites like Associated Content and Helium seem promising on the surface: they offer exposure, a publishing credit, and even payment if your content is popular enough.

That’s a big “if”, though. On all three counts, actually. Chances are, this is the first you’ve heard of these sites — or if you have heard of them, you’ve only heard of them because the promote themselves to writers as a place to get published, and you’re a writer looking to get published. You most likely haven’t heard of them because you found a great resource there while doing a web search, or because someone linked to a great article there. Which means that the only real exposure writers get on content directories is from other writers looking at the site thinking about posting their own content there.

As for publishing credits, the same thing that makes these sites attractive for unpublished writers makes them unattractive as credits — they’re without any editorial oversight. Literally anyone can post to these sites — and they do. Being “published” in a content directory shows a potential editor or client only that you can use basic web technology to post an article — you’d be better off posting to your blog and directing an editor there. If the writing’s good enough, it will speak for itself regardless of whether it was published to a content directory or not.

But what about the promise of payment? Surely that’s nothing to sneeze at, right? Well, sure — if it ever comes. Helium promises a share of their ad revenue, based on how many people look at your articles. They use a voting system, in which readers vote your content up or down, which also affects your payout. Associated content offers a “Performance Payout” of $1.50 for every thousand people who view a page with one of your articles on it — that’s not very much!

I posted a couple of articles on Helium last year, to check it out. I thought they were pretty good articles, but you can check for yourself: How to make the most of Google Documents and Google search tricks for beginners. Both of them were quickly voted to the top, and then just as quickly voted to the middle or bottom — the “search tricks” piece is listed as 12 of 12. As I said, I think they’re pretty good — and certainly better than a lot of stuff that’s voted up higher than them. I checked in the Helium forums, and there were a lot of people complaining about people gaming the system, using teams of friends and colleagues to vote up their content.

But who cares what the standing is, right — what about the money? My total payout in the over 7 months the two articles have been on the site is… (wait for it!) … 62 cents. That’s 62 cents for 1,880 words, or just under 1/3 of a cent per word.

Still dreaming of the big bucks rolling in?

Granted, that’s only a couple of articles — if I had posted dozens of articles, and actively worked the system to get votes and traffic, maybe I’d have made $5, or even $50, bringing me up to a “respectable” 3 or 4 cents a word, maybe. Minus, of course, the time I’d spent promoting my work and researching new topics and…

Bottom line: I don’t see any upside to this. I could have posted these articles on my own site and included a referral link to the Google Pack (a collection of free software including Firefox with the Google Toolbar, Picasa, and Adobe Reader; here’s a link, if you want to check it out:
) or a link to my book at Amazon (Anthropology at the Dawn of the Cold War, a book about anthropologists in the 1950s and ’60s) and a single download or purchase would have made me more than I’ve made at Helium.

So avoid the content directories, and focus instead on building up your own audience. Sell your book, post ads, write e-books, do client work — use your site to make money for yourself instead of for some third-party content directory.