Promotional Activities
Your articles and blogs on this site are automatically crawled by search engines, such as Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL, Lycos, AltaVista, Hotbot, About, Netscape, and many others. In addition, every day we syndicate our news, articles, and blogs to major news aggregators via RSS/XML. Our promotional efforts help increase your readership and exposure. You can see the number of times your articles were read by visiting the Article Manager. In addition, we feature many of our writers on the front page of each of our 21 sites with a special rotating "Spotlight" to give you still further exposure.
Beyond our marketing efforts, you are welcome to engage in further personal promotional activities to increase your readership and exposure throughout the world. The following section provides some suggestions.
Promote Yourself and Your Articles
Listed below are a few links with suggestions on how you can take advantage of the immense capabilities of the Internet to gain readership, increase your exposure, and influence or inform the masses. Once you have been assigned an Author ID, a special web address is assigned to you, such as the following:
http://www.californiachronicle.com/authors/view/168, which is the Author page for David M. Bresnahan.
http://www.californiachronicle.com/authors/view/129 is the Author page for David Swanson.
Your own unique Author ID can be found in your browser's address bar. Just visit the Author Page and click on your name. Your special web address will appear in your browser's address bar. The following section details how you can use this address to help you.
Your own RSS feed is generated by the website and a link to your feed appears on your public author's profile page in the area called "Contact Information." Submit your own RSS feed to various feed readers. For example, see David Swanson's RSS feed here. If you submit your feed to these
How to Promote Yourself, Your Articles, and Your Blogs
- First, write a great headline. See Kari Chisholm's blog, Headlines Are Critical Content , for suggestions on how to get people to read your work.
- E-mail your new, unique web address to all of your friends and family members. Tell everyone about your page so that they will regularly read your work. Invite them to comment about what you have written.
- Put your web address at the end of your e-mail signature with an invitation that asks people to "Please read my articles: http://www.californiachronicle.com/authors/view/168 ". Or, use some HTML code to tidy up the link to your author page, as in: Please visit my articles page. Here's the HTML code for this message. Just substitute the number "13" for your authorID number:
<a href="http://www.californiachronicle.com/authors/view/13">Please visit my articles page.</a>
- Register your web address with all the major and minor search engines. Note that we submit the Latest Features Page , Latest Opinion Page , and the Author Page to search engines as well, so your page is automatically crawled. However, it helps immensely if you to add your individual page, too.
- Contact other writers and websites to ask them to link to your page; offer them reciprocal links. The more people that link to your page, the higher the rating it will achieve with search engines. Consequently, more people will read your work.
- Use your own custom syndication feed. We recommend MyRSScreator, which is a simple, easy-to-use method to automatically publish your RSS (really simple syndication) feed. The site also helps you to submit your feed to search engines and track feed usage.
We hope that you will use these suggestions to promote yourself and your work.