History That Never Was

Now that the 2024 WriteHive Online Conference panels are available on their YouTube channel, I’m catching up on the ones I missed during the conference itself and sharing some of the things I gleaned from them here!

Jessica Salina’s presentation, “Passive Marketing: How Authors Can Leverage SEO,” is a brilliantly useful watch for anyone who wants to promote their work, whether they’re an author or not. While most of her examples are particularly useful for authors, other creatives and even non-creatives can learn about how search-engine optimization (SEO) works and how you can set yourself up for success in that arena.

I took a lot more notes on this presentation than many of the other WriteHive panels and presentations I’ve talked about to date, and it’s difficult to really summarize the immensely valuable information. There are a lot of acronyms other than SEO that Salina covers, which I won’t rehash here, lest this become an “alphabet soup” post. There was also a lot of information on statistics related to SEO and searching in general, which, of course, can rapidly become dated as it’s always a moving target. But even as such, seeing the generalized trends from the time of the presentation (not quite a year ago as of this writing) can be helpful in planning a strategy. And though I’m mostly talking about SEO for websites here, she does also mention SEO for social media.

Some of the non-acronym related information that was useful to me was her discussion of links on your site vs. people linking to your site (backlinks) and how you can position your website so that it encourages people to link to it, which then raises its value in terms of search-engine ranking. She talked about ways in which authors can contact people who run websites with similar audiences as your own and offer guest posts, which then would have those sites linking to your site. She also talked a lot about how to research good keywords to include on your website and in blog posts (if you have a blog), including a ton of free tools for keyword research and recommendations on how to use that research to inspire blog posts.

Finally, she gave a list of the four things that authors who want to improve their passive SEO can do.

1. Keyword research (finding what people search for)
2. Content marketing (presenting content related to what people search for)
3. Technical SEO (ensuring accessibility for search engines AND users)
4. Link building (connecting with relevant, high-quality sites)

This is all a very quick summary of some of the highlights of the presentation for me. If you’ve got an hour to spare (maybe a bit longer if you pause it a lot to take notes, like I did), you should definitely watch the entire video on WriteHive’s YouTube channel. Be ready to take a lot of notes and come away with a ton of information about how you can improve your passive SEO!

Tags: advice, blogging, conference, marketing, online, panel, website, writehive, writing

This entry was posted by dawn.vogel on Monday, February 10th, 2025 at 6:00 am and is filed under Advice. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.