Crucial Advice For Young, Promising Authors: Pitfalls And Options

To any talented, promising, and brimming with ideas individual who is feeling the pressure to contribute on LinkedIn or, for that matter, any platform managed by a perfectly financially stable company or a corporate Goliath, my unwavering advice would be to not publish on these platforms. Although the idea of reaching like-minded people is quite enticing, however, it rarely happens on LinkedIn or Medium. Since the start of 2021, when I became active on LinkedIn, I have mostly seen clickbait type of posts getting shared and reshared, which is now the normal behavior on almost all of the major writing platforms. I remained active on Medium for 3 years, and I saw the same trend: clickbait type of material getting shared and reshared and real works of authorship getting buried under the avalanche of such provocative posts that almost trigger an emotional response and force a person to open the post. When it comes to disregarding and forsaking the writing competitions that demand an entry fee, read the following article on “Spectacularly easy yet unethical way to make money.”

When it comes to almost all of the famous platforms that allow authors to publish for free and connect with like-minded people, these platforms are replete with posts promising to introduce the readers to methods that would allow them to make millions of dollars in 6 months or create a readership of tens of thousands of readers willing to pay to read your content within 3 to 6 months. These conman type of authors provide no hard numbers and the infographics they include in their posts can be created within a matter of 30 to 45 minutes in applications like Adobe Photoshop or Canva. They exceedingly rarely provide any real-life stories, and even if they are, by some miracle, able to find a couple of such stories, then, as a long-time contributor on multiple platforms, I can tell you with absolute certainty that almost all of the platforms allow their users to reset the publication dates, hence, the timelines presented to the users cannot be trusted at all. Did the user in that case study truly succeed in the last 6 months or were those dates manipulated to create an impression that all of those numbers were amassed in the last 6 months? Considering that all of the platforms allow changing of dates, hence, how on earth are you going to figure that out? It would be an extremely difficult task to establish the veracity of such claims. Hence, my advice would be to steer clear of almost all of such advice where the authors tell you that they would show you the path to make at least a few million dollars within 3 to 6 months.

On almost all of these free-to-publish large platforms, the real works of authorship that provide you with thoroughly researched insights into critical situations or tried and tested ways of progressing through the ranks where it takes a couple to few years to get to a higher position are getting buried under such clickbait type of stories. Most of the time, you will encounter material written to agitate the readers, elicit a strong emotional response, and use those raw emotions to entice the readers into leaving controversial or polarizing comments that would then generate more comments. The aforementioned reasons aside, here are my other reasons:

1. LinkedIn exceedingly rarely rewards its contributors monetarily. Authors of insightful, thoroughly edited, properly corroborated articles should be rewarded for their efforts decently and immediately, yet LinkedIn scarcely rewards these efforts. These extremely successful companies now have NLP-based algorithms to ascertain which articles are better than the rest and which have been written to agitate users, yet they are not using any such technologies to prioritize content.

   LinkedIn makes billions of dollars yearly, hence, I can only deem their conduct spectacularly indecent that instead of compensating the experienced, insightful authors, they want those authors to first become subscribers and then learn to promote their articles by purchasing advertisements on LinkedIn. I consider it remarkably shameful conduct on their part that despite benefitting from the content of highly informed contributors, they want them to spend.

2. LinkedIn rarely promotes articles that do not fall into that clickbait category. Most of these platforms are busy promoting content that has a great potential to hit some sort of a raw nerve with the reader and can almost coerce the reader into leaving a controversial comment that would invite more comments and the chain would continue, and that almost useless content would explode in popularity on the network.
3. LinkedIn uses an extremely poor typeface to present content. Presentation matters, so learn to present your content properly.
4. Instead of rewarding authors for their efforts, LinkedIn demands that authors should become subscribers to promote their articles and reach a wider audience.
5. LinkedIn does not even let authors generate some revenue by selling advertising space within their articles.

What Should A Novice Do? Circumnavigate The System.

To avoid this trap of writing for free without any source of generating any revenue, follow the following steps.

1. Create your blog on Blogger, Blogspot, or a similar easy-to-use platform, and use AdWords to generate some revenue. Study the blogging platform’s TOS carefully to find out if they allow you to sell some advertising space within your posts, as well, to sell more ads. To address the fear of missing out, commonly known as FOMO, on being active on such a huge platform like LinkedIn, share the first or a critical paragraph on LinkedIn and then provide a link to your blog to make the interested parties visit your blog and create some visitor numbers for your AdWords campaign.

2. If you eventually decide to start a blog, never, ever write for search engines’, Google or Bing’s, algorithms; in the next step, I will discuss the correct way to promote your content. It is a horrendous advice asking people to inflate content just for the sake of getting the ranking. Always write for the reader. If you feel that a certain type of content can be written for two different types of audiences — intermediate with some knowledge who do not need to know the basics and novices who would appreciate all of the information — then write two different articles, one for novices and one for intermediate users.

   Having spent more than a decade and a half on the Internet reading reams upon reams of content and once fallen prey to the aforementioned horrible advice as a new author, I have decided to disclose the terrible technique being used to rank well. I have termed this technique or phenomenon, “The Curse Of Google.” You can read the details regarding how authors are ruining it for the readers by reading the details in The Curse of Google: Hyper Inflated Text Just For Rankings.

3. To promote your content without writing for the algorithms, try to find a good enough marketer on UpWork, Freelancer, or even LinkedIn and offer them an adequate percentage of potential earnings if they can successfully promote your blog to people who are truly vested in reading, especially to those who are interested in your niche topics. As a novice, try not to offer upfront payments. Instead, interlock the reward with the financial success of your work. Force the marketer to perform an initial analysis to ascertain whether he or she would be able to deliver the results as their own reward would be dependent on your financial success. If you are wondering that how exactly is a marketer supposed to know where to find such people, then that precisely is their job, eliminating the wholly uninterested parties and isolating that group of people who would be truly interested in your work. With the plethora of modern tools that gather hundreds of megabytes of data on just one person, it has become even easier to identify the right pool of people.
4. The Money Problem: How much to offer to a good enough marketer with a good-to-very-good record? As a person just starting out and with no hard money to offer, when it comes to making the offer, I would suggest a 20 to 30 percent share of the potential earnings as a good enough number. If the marketer has an extremely good record and reputation, then consider increasing that number to even 35 percent of the potential earnings. However, when getting into an agreement with a marketer that you have finally narrowed down as a good enough party meeting all of your criteria, include a clause in your agreement that states that if the potential earnings exceed a certain number, let’s say $500,000 or a million dollars, then you would reduce the percentage on offer for the earnings beyond that initial million dollars to maybe 15 or 12.5 percent of the additional earnings. When it comes to the world of finance, the decades or centuries-old adage states that making your first one million dollars is the hardest part. Once you have made your first million, then it would not be just the marketer alone doing all of the work for you; depending on the quality of your work, you would have your loyal customers talking about your work or books, as well. Therefore, always include a clause that stipulates that you would reduce the share of the profits beyond your first million to maybe 15 percent of the earnings.
5. When looking for marketers, be extremely cautious, instead, be over cautious. The world of marketing is an extremely dirty world replete with very bad to horrific players who violate all of the rules of marketing to generate immediate sales and results but in the long run, may cause your reputation irreparable damage. Hence, when hiring a marketer, exercise extreme caution and thoroughly scrutinize your applicants and their applications. If you can, set aside a month or two to find a decent enough marketer to promote your work. Even when faced with extremely dire circumstances, do not let the severity of your circumsance get the better of you. Always try to set aside a month or two to find the right marketers. I am including a few articles to corroborate the aforementioned statement that how spectacularly dirty is this business of marketing products.
   
   
   • Millions of Amazon Reviews Fake   —  Cybernews
   • Fake Online Reviews   —  ScienceDirect
   • Amazon’s War On Fake Rewiens   —  Intelligencer

   

   Percentage of fake reviews on Amazon, according to Bing using various resources.

6. Eventually, if you have written enough articles that you feel can potentially be turned into a good book on a single topic or a book of essays, then try to turn your blog into a book, and start marketing that book, as well, to generate some additional revenue.

As a person who has been reading on the Internet for the past 20 years but has yet to succeed as an author, after many failed attempts to find the right or sound financial advice in one place, I have finally narrowed down the information gleaned from various resources into the aforementioned two sections, and the percentage part is my personal addition to the list. Although I am planning to publish a couple of books in the next 12 to 18 months, however, I may or may not succeed. Nevertheless, I still consider the aforementioned points extremely good foundational points upon which to build your career as a novice author.

Wishing at least satisfactory starts to all of the talented and diligent newcomers not afraid of investing the much-needed time and effort to thoroughly research their topics to improve the quality of their work. I sincerely hope that most such authors meeting the aforementioned criteria of diligence and talent would be able to make at least adequate amounts of money within the first year or two of your writing career. I am definitely not in the business of telling people that they can make at least a couple of million dollars within the first 6 months, so you will have to accept the fact that I can only express my desire that you would be able to make at least adequate amounts of money to live somewhat comfortably.