3.  Nurture Your Audience: One executive quoted in the Times article about Lil Wayne’s record success said, “He stayed connected and nurtured his audience . . . He was always working.”

How can a freelance writer nurture their audience and drive more traffic to their website/blog? One of the marketing techniques I favor is guest blogging. Lesser known blogs may be more amenable to featuring you as a guest blogger than well-known blogs (although it doesn’t hurt to shoot for these).

Staying involved via guest blogging illustrates the “go deep” advertising principle alluded to above. This was perhaps the smartest thing Lil Wayne did that contributed to his success.

How does he use this to drive sales?

While he wasn’t writing his name above album captions, he was constantly feeding his fan base via other popular artists, and picking up new fans all along. If you know his music, then you know he has a very distinct sound. Distinct enough that you want to know hear more music by him. So, when you hear he has an album coming out, you buy it.

For fans who already know who you are and love your stuff, you continually give them a dose of you by doing something to stay connected to them, eg, collaborating with other artists they may already know and like (guest blogging).

This keeps your name constantly in front of them – in a fresh way – and builds an even greater bond with them, eg, “I can’t believe he wrote a post on another one of my favorite blogs. It’s so cool that two of my favorite artists/bloggers collaborated like that.”

I've been lucky enough to appear as a guest artist (blogger) on several "celebrity blogs" (ie, highly trafficked blogs) in my niche, eg, Copyblogger.com and FreelanceSwitch.com and FreelanceWritingGigs.com, to name a few. Just between these three, that's about 100,000 new readers I introduced my blog/site to who probably never heard of it before. That's going deep and wide.

4. Be Distinct: Nothing under the sun is new. BUT, how you present it can be. Lil Wayne doesn’t rap about anything we haven’t heard before. But he does have his own sound; a distinct way of delivering what's old in a new way.

You can do the same. Don’t try to copy someone else’s writing style. Develop your own.

Why Freelance Writers Fight Themselves & Limit Their Success by Doing So

Many bloggers and writers fight themselves, trying to get it just right or be like someone else. Luckily, blogging is a freeing forum in which to write. It encourages you to be unique. Capitalize on this. If you’re new to blogging or website ownership, then you may struggle to find your voice initially. This is normal.

Looking back over some of my stuff from a few years ago, one of the things that stands out to me is that there was nothing “of me” in the posts. These days, I write the way I talk more or less. It flows better for me. And if sometimes an off-the-wall-thought or personal anecdote occurs to me that fits the text at hand, I’ll write that into the post. That’s “the me” in there.

In the beginning especially, even when it feels like there’s no one reading your stuff, continue to stay true to what you are. Now that doesn’t mean not switching courses if something isn’t working. But, switching courses doesn’t mean changing the destination. It just means changing how you get there.

What I find though is that too many freelance writers and bloggers give up too quickly and never take the time to settle into their blog or website. Realistically, I think it can take six months to a year to find your voice, your writing style, figure out a direction for your blog, how you want to monetize it, etc.

I’ve been blogging since 2005 and the first year, I really was just blogging to be blogging. I had no sense of direction other than “I want to help other freelance writers.” But, that’s so vague a concept. There's no meat or teeth to it. It takes time to develop “meat and teeth.” So don’t be so quick to throw in the towel.

In the final part of this series on how to drive more traffic to your website or blog with good content, I’ll discuss two techniques I’m using effectively to drive traffic to my site, no matter what I’m writing about.  

Stay tuned for Part III of How to Write Content That Drives Traffic to Your Site.