Four ways to promote your work and find readers on the Web

As journalists, often we're either paid a fixed amount per story or we're on salary.

But if you self-publish, you're paid according to ad clicks and impressions, based on how many people read what you write. This can be scary without an established audience, but can also be exciting (and lucrative) if you're able to find readers. Rather than passively creating something and hoping people will find it, there are ways to put your work in places where it can't be ignored.

The Methods Reporter has a base readership of 200-400 people daily. Most of these people find the site by using Google or Yahoo search, read a few articles and take off.

Posting a story on the site guarantees a certain baseline number of readers, but if you want to get serious traffic (and $$$ from ad clicks) you need to promote your work a bit. Here are four ways to do that:

1. Social bookmarking

Next to every Methods Reporter story you'll find links to social media sites like Digg, Delicious, Reddit, Facebook and Stumbleupon. Once you've published a story, click these links and submit your story to these sites. Readers will follow your link from these sites to your story and if they like it, they'll promote it too, leading to more readers. Delicious once sent 700 readers to a Methods Reporter story because it was on the front page for only one hour.

2. Reach out to relevant bloggers and online communities

Is your story about Chicago public schools? There are at least 10 people blogging about them. Contact them and pitch your story to them in an e-mail with a link to it. Eric Zorn has linked to our stories in the past, for example, as has Chicagoist, Gapers Block and many other sites. Is your story about the Chicago Bears? Join Bears message boards and start threads about your story with a link, a blurb and a picture. You're looking to reach influential people in relevant communities. I posted blurbs in 5 White Stripes message boards after I wrote this little thing and it's lead to more than 10,000 visits in the 3 months since.
Resources: Chicago Bloggers, Chicago Blogmap, Google search.

3. Use the link dumps

There are sites out there that exist solely to publish links to cool new things online. You submit a link with a funny pitch, an editor looks at it and either runs it or not. This can lead to MONSTER traffic, depending on the site. Examples: I-am-bored.com, fazed.net, linkswarm.com, fark.com, kottke.org.

4. Leave blog comments

Run a few searches in Google Blog search for your story's topic to see who's already blogged about it or similar subjects. Leave a comment below their blog entry with a blurb and a direct link to your story. Sometimes these will stick around for a long time and send a constant stream of readers. A link I left on a Lincoln Park blog has sent me 1-2 readers a day since October 2006. That adds up.

These are just four methods to get you started. There are other methods of course, like e-mailing friends or sharing links on Facebook and MySpace.

I love thinking about this stuff. Writing stories is only half the fun for me, putting them in front of readers is just as enjoyable. If you ever have a story that you'd like some help promoting, just let me know. As a rule of thumb, I will Digg and bookmark anything posted to the site once its author gets the ball rolling.

Good luck. Now, go get some eyeballs.