Why Writers Need StumbleUpon and Other Social Networking Sites: What Are The Top Networking Sites For Hubpages?

We writers want to see success with our published works, and we want the money which goes with it. The factors that can make it hard for many new writer are, that they do not understand the art of publishing and writing. There are two worlds that we live in.

One is the online world, and the other is the offline world. You make money in both, and you, as a writer, need to focus on publishing in both.

Publishing and making money is not hard, nor is it difficult to do, but the factors, which make it harder, for writers to have success online is the idea that they have to promote their published writing. Most get the idea that you have to "talk up" your book, because to make money you need to tell others about your books or your online writing. The same idea goes for publishing online-- except promotion is a bit different.

Using the social networking sites, and improving your writing will help you promote your works. Social networking is important to writers who want more money, but also want more exposure to their books. These are gold mines for many writers, and they are not used as well as they should be.

Now, I am not suggesting that you ignore your many social networking sites, but know which ones give you the best value in creating the buzz you want for your writing. The key to success in writing for a living is making money. In this case you make money indirectly.

The key to the social networking sites is participation, and sharing your work. This means you are in essence adding a link to a place where you know people will find it and like it. This is easy to do. The top social networking sites are the ones which get traffic to your hub. From my own experience this is Stumble Upon, as more people will need to see it to "like it."

FaceBook is valuable as well, but more often than not people will only "like" the link and not go and "see" your work. The same holds true for Digg and other sites where one needs to click on the link to have traffic to their hubs.

Sign up using your email address, and add your websites to these places, also add writing friends pages there. The key is not to look like you are spamming, but are offering value. this means that you also look at your friends work and "like them." This is a bit time consuming, but if you are wanting to get your writing out there this is a must.

So why Stumble Upon? 15 million users are found there, some are more active than others. With FaceBook, you are limited to friends, and many of my friends on FaceBook become annoyed at the constant "links" to my work. Thus far, StumbleUpon is the big winner, but it does take work.

This is where the writing hits the road. Frankly if you are a writer, you'd better be prepared to learn SEO and keyword research. I understand that this is hard, but if you are wanting to make money online you will have to do this. The search engines are the ones, which by far will make you money through the affiliate programs such as, amazon and Google AdSense.

The honest truth? You need to focus on writing quality, and then you need to focus on keyword research and SEO. If you don't and focus only on getting massive traffic, or increasing traffic, then you will get traffic but no earnings. If you are looking to get traffic to say your blog, which sells a book or two you have published, then you will need to remember the first rule of social networking: You make money with it indirectly.

Social networking is a must, but it is something you do with keyword research or with a plan to sell your books or e-books. Writers make money with their books. This can be self-published books (edited by a professional editor of course!) or you are getting paid for guest blogging, or other freelance work.

The point is that for writers, you need to be seen and social networking provides the means to be seen. If you want to make money with your writing, you need to step it up-- with ether e-books and paperback books, or with keyword research and SEO for your online content.

The two go together. For example, if you go to say Stumble Upon you can like you hubs, which, if well written, will make people go to your profile, which if you have one, has the link to your blogs on it. then people can go from your profile to your blog.

You would also be wise to put your blog on the social networking sites, this has resulted in traffic to my blogs. The point is you can do this for pretty much all of your writing sites, and see traffic. Again you need to think hard about where you will get your comments, or how to create the money you want, but the foundation is traffic.

In the beginning, the more traffic you get the better, but you will need to also think long term which means you will need to work out how you will get the search engine traffic or that reader who needs your expertise

Everyone needs a boost some time. In other words, at some point you will be faced with the fact that you are not getting what you want. That might mean new readers or it might mean that one of you online sites isn't doing so well.

It is a lot easier to do the small things when they are small. I'll give you another example: let's say your seeing some success with your published books, made a bit of money with them, and your blog is pretty successful, as in you make a few extra pennies here and there. Nothing much, but things are going well... until that bad review, or that week you took off from writing... then sales go down, or traffic goes down....

You've got a problem. Now, you need the links from FaceBook or StumbleUpon or Digg or all of them, and you didn't do this. You've got a problem. No more money, no more traffic, those links look pretty nice right about now...

Unfortunately, you didn't do them... and you are now scrambling to make the money you once did... all because no one really knew of your blog or your hubs or whatever. Now you need social networking sites, but it's a big thing, and a small bit of time.

Social networking is like writing a book, you write the first draft and then you edit it because you know you will make mistakes. This is true about making money online and offline. Then you have re-written your work.

Only to find more mistakes, but your editing does become a bit faster. Over time you can write and re-write your book sooner, and with an eye to the reader. The same goes for social networking. In the beginning it will be slow going, and you will want to give up-- don't. Take it a step at a time, add a link to one website-- such as StumbleUpon, and then to Facebook, and do this everyday.

Think of this as writing, only getting your work out thereso that when you publish your next book, there are people who are already reading your work and will more likely buy your e-book or paperback book. That is making money indirectly with social networking as a writer. Just remeber it is one step at a time, and joining a social networking site is a good beginning.

To your success.