K is for Key Word Density is Crap: Myths About Freelance Writing Debunked or How I Reached Clout Level 7 in Less Than a Week

I joined Associated Content in 2006, published 14 articles, than for some unknown reason lost interest and never came back, until this past week, some 4 years later. When I logged in last week, my account was clout 4 with 17,000 page views, and 14 articles. This morning, 7 days later, my account is clout 7 with 35,000 page views and 98 published articles.

My huge jump across 3 pay levels in less than 7 days and the doubling of page views in that same amount of time, has, needless to say, resulted in some folks messaging me asking for tips on how I did it and what sort of SEO and key word density I am using to move up the AC ladder so very, alarmingly fast.

There is a secret to it, and a story behind it. And here it is:

If you watch closely to what I say in this article and how I say it, you'll find the answer to how it happened, before I actually tell you. It may seem to go off-topic for a moment, but I assure you, there is a reason for this, as you soon shall learn.

I may be fairly new to AC, but I'm not new to internet writing. There have been articles and blog posts written about me, suggesting that I may be one of the world's "most influential online writers". I get on average 2,000 emails per day. Many writers published for the first time, email gushing letters of thanks, attributing my "Thirteen Step Method" or my "Publishing Methods" as the secret to their success. (Google me and you'll see what I mean.)

A few weeks ago, I said this to my best friend. He laughed. He said "You? But you have agoraphobia, you haven't left your house in 30 years. You have Autism - it's all any one can do to get you to speak two words."

At 8 AM the next morning, he called me and said: "I Googled you. You...you're...you're, like, famous, or...or something. Google had millions of hits on you. You...you...you have fans. I had no idea. Oh my God - should I be asking for your autograph or something? Your...your....WOW...I can't believe I'm the best friend of a celebrity and I never knew it!"

My Bishop, found out the same thing a couple of months ago when he attempted to have me excommunicated from the Mormon Church, for publishing my autobiography, a fact I mentioned on one of my 32 blogs. My readers, knowing of my super strict adherence to LDS Church policies - were outraged, and many of them set out to contacting church leaders to say as much. The church's secretary had to change his phone number after some 300 of my fans called to complain. Fans were telephoning our tiny town in Maine from places as far flung as Florida to Germany to New Zealand and all places in between. The Bishop was stunned. He said "I thought you was a nobody. How do you know all these people." Yes, that is one of the dangers of judging someone based on what they look like or where they live. Being Autistic and homeless causes many of the locals to hold that same "oh she's an insignificant homeless, retarded nobody" view of me.

Of course it helps that I write under multiple pen names, and rarely under my real name, thus why people who know me personally don't realize I'm famous. The fact that I am homeless and live on the streets under a 8'x6' tarp, doesn't help convince the locals that I'm a celebrity either. Because I am homeless - several locals thought it was alright to vandals me, not realizing that they were vandalizing a celebrity or that everything they did was being posted online and with pictures as they did it. When those same people saw that blog post and made the connection as to who I was, that the person they vandalized was in fact someone they knew online by another name, they ran and hid in shame.

There is of course the fact that I was already a quite famous "child celebrity" many years before I joined the online world. I at the young age of 12, caused a minor outrage that spread to global proportions, because I wrote a letter that shocked the world. So, when I by the time computers and internet came along, I already had a world wide following of fans, and going online just gave them easier access to reading more of my outlandish rants of protest.

How did this come about and what does it have to do with key word density? I'm getting to that.

Once upon a time, in August of 1997, I discovered computers, the internet, and online forums. I promptly Yahooed (Google was invented yet) for forums to join, created accounts with more than 300 of them, and set about to chatting online with every one I could find on every topic imaginable. It was not long before I had a fan following - a small group of people who made a habit of joining every site I was on, in order to read and comment on my posts.

In 2003, I discovered blogs. Today I have 32 of them, my longest one having well over 4,000 posts and having as of today: 132,964 unique visitors since February 16, 2007.

Little known to most people online, is the fact that my computer, a massive home built mess of interconnected hard drives lined up together, also stores copies of EVERY SINGLE forum post I had ever written - all of the several hundreds of thousands of them. Keeping in mind that I average writing 7,000 words per day. These forum posts, eventually get combined, edited, tweaked and dissected until I publish them - usually online via places such as Squidoo, and now here on AC, or as print books and chapbooks.

My articles, consistently get high page views no matter where I publish them, I expect they will do the same here on Associated Content as well. On Squidoo, my articles got so many page views, that other writers started emailing me DEMANDING I send them screen shots of my dashboard, to prove that the page view totals were correct. Such things happened after it was announced that I was one of the top ten highest paid members on Squidoo in 2008. (Squidoo no longer makes such announcements due to the flame wars these announcements caused.)

I joined Associated Content in 2006, published 14 articles, than for some unknown reason lost interest and never cam back, until this past week, some 4 years later. When I logged in last week, my account was clout 4 with 17,000 page views, and 14 articles. This morning, 7 days later, my account is Clout 7 with 35,000 page views (and rising fast - I published an article yesterday which received 303 visits in the first hour) and now have 98 published articles.

Like I said, my huge jump across 3 pay levels in less than 7 days and the doubling of page views in that same amount of time, has resulted in some folks messaging me asking for tips on how I did it and what sort of SEO and key word density I am using to move up the AC ladder so very, alarmingly fast.

So What Is My Secret?

The secret? There is none. I do not have a secret to how I do it. I just write the first thing that pops into my head. I use no formula. I didn't even know what SEO and key word density was. I had to Google to find out what they was talking about. I'm afraid I don't know anything about SEO or key word density. Maybe it's the fact that I have Autism and have a very hard time understanding technical things, but I wouldn't even know how to write using key word density or how to optimize my articles for search engines. And I do have to wonder - maybe it's my complete and total lack of any use or worry about SEO and key word density, that is in fact the very secret to my over all success online. It's too soon to say how successful I will become here on Associated Content, only time will tell if the fast jumping action of the past 7 days will prove to be a fluke or a standard.

I have Autism. I don't care about search engines. Heck, I don't even care about my readers, and I have plenty of hate mail to prove it. I write exactly what is going through my mind. You see, I have Autism and I don't talk. If you want to know what I have to say, you are going to have to sit down and read my words, because I'm not going to speak them verbally.

In other words my writing is a conversation. I write my articles as though you the reader was sitting across the table from me and I was speaking verbally with you. And that, is the key to my success. My readers are constantly messaging and emailing me and saying they find my writing style easy to read because it feels like I'm am speaking to them, rather than just informing them. They like that I speak with conviction and passion.

The Secret

Did you see it? The secret to my key word density and SEO success? If you did not, than I suggest you go back to the beginning of this article and read it all over again.

You will notice 2 things:

First: I write down every thing that happens to me in my life and a turn it into an article. My life is quite literally an open book that is being published online. Each of my articles is not written for Google or for the readers because each of my articles is in fact a diary entry, with the internet being used as my virtual dairy. This gives me a never ending list of topics to write about, because I write about events (likes, dislikes, habits, hobbies, family, pets, careers, etc) that took place in my daily life. Life happens and I write about it just the same as it happened without giving SEO or key word density a single thought.

Over the last 14 years I have built up a following of readers who actively seek out anything which I write. They want to know what I have to say next. They have read a lot about my life, they know me better than some people who know me personally. They want to know what is going to happen next in my life. They are reading the events in my life, as though they were watching a reality TV show, so they come back day after day, week after week, year after year, to find out what I'll say or do next.

Now, I'm not saying you have to write down everything in your life the way I do. No. What I am saying is - build up a following of readers by finding your unique voice and a list of some things you enjoy talking about a lot. Share your thoughts and ideas. Talk about things that are important to you. Talk about things you enjoy. And do it every day. Every day, publish a new article. That's the secret to getting loyal readers who keep coming back for more.

Second: I have so many articles now written (I stopped counting when I reached 10,000) and published online, all about things that have happened in my life, that I have a non ending list of on-topic articles that I can link to from each of my new articles. This drives traffic to my other articles, thus causing the page views of one article to than equal the pages views of the other article.

You did see the links here in this article didn't you? Usually I use no more than 3 links to my other articles, but for the sake of making a point, I peppered this particular article with links to many of my articles, to show you what it is I mean.

I would like to point out that in my 14 years of writing for online sites, forums, blogs, and ezines, that I have learned that the amount of links in your article does have an effect on page views the article gets. Article with no links at all, tend to get low page views. Articles with 3 links get very high page views. Articles with lots of links, get the least amount of page views. I have no idea why this is, I just know that it's a trend I've seen in my own articles published across varying places, and so I do recommend placing 3 links within the text of your article - preferably links to other articles written by yourself.

But How did I By-Pass Two Whole Clout Levels?

And as for the jump in Clout Level? Well, I have no idea how I went for 4 to 7 without stopping at 5 or 6 in between, but I think it must have something to do with the fact that the day before that happened, I had published 75 articles. No I didn't write them all in one day - I wrote them over a period of months, but than published them all in one day. Each was Tweeted and sent to FaceBook, and mentioned on my big 4,000 post blog. In the end word of them was sent out by me to some 7,000 people (my avid followers). Each of those articles averaged 4 to 7 pages - 4 of them had over 25 pages each. In other words, in the space of 7 days I published well over 500 pages, and told 7,000 people about those 500 pages, and they than spent the week visiting them. Thus accounts for the 13,000 page views that I received in the past 7 days.

And there's one more thing I'd like to point out here: none of my 7,000+ readers are members of Associated Content. You can see that fact alone, just by the fact that I have only 9 "fans" listed on my profile page. In other words, it would seem that page views coming from non-member ISPs move you up in Clout much faster than page views from other Associated Content writers. Interesting.

So, you see, my jump in Clout and page views had nothing to do with SEO or key word density and everything to do with my having spent the last 14 years building up a following of devoted fans.

In Conclusion: My Advice To You

You should throw SEO and key word density out the window and write from the heart instead. Be yourself. Speak in your articles, as though the reader was sitting in the room having a conversation with you. Readers like that. And in the end, it's your readers who will read your words, not Yahoo, Dogpile, Google, or any other search engine. The search engines will bring you traffic, but it's the readers who recommend your articles to others, who will keep your traffic coming for years to come.

What's your take on this? I'd love to hear what you have to say about this post. Leave a comment and share your views!

This is the sister article to my other article: How to Make a Hundred Dollars a Day with Associated Content

This article was first published on Associated Content, under the title K is for Key Word Density is Crap: Myths About Freelance Writing Debunked or How I Reached Clout Level 7 in Less Than a Week on March 25, 2010 and is copyright toWendy C. Allen and The Twighlight Manor Press.