Building a New “Online Presence”

I’ve been a keyboard jockey for a number of years, having built a lot of websites and done quite a bit of online marketing.  As I’ve been researching the world of publishing, I’ve seen a lot of references to the need for an author to build an “online presence.”  To me this is obvious, but it presents me with in interesting quandary.

I write with a pen name, primarily because of the mainstream business that I own.  While I’d truly love to be able to seek publication of my erotica under my given name, it’s just not practical at this stage in my life.  I invest too much of my personal experience and predilictions into my writing to have conservative business clients interacting with that side of me.

So many times over the years the old line has rolled through my head, “If only I’d known then what I know now…”  Well, now it’s time to build an online presence for myself as an author, from scratch.  Considering the need to keep my worlds compartmentalized, I can’t exactly start posting all over personal Facebook page about my foray into erotica, just like I couldn’t do it regarding the adult sites in my portfolio.  I also can’t exactly start pushing traffic from my mainstream sites.

The great thing about this is that I get to apply everything I’ve learned about the internet to a fresh venture.  For starters, I’ve taken an old site of mine called Twisted Erotica and given it a breath of new life as a gallery of erotic fiction and poetry; instead of just a place to post a few old poems and build up credibility with the search engines for a few nice, kinky keyphrases.  Now that I know how to build traffic and networks of websites, I’m giving this venture a chance to become something extraordinary.  Stay tuned, it’s time to try something a little different.