A few weeks ago I talked up the idea that writing for web is a rather glamorous business full of nuances. It is certainly an entertaining line of work, though like anything else, I would have to of course let you know that being a freelance writer isn’t all beer and skittles.

So before you give up your career as a successful doctor or manager of something unimportant, you had better realize that writing for the internet isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

#5. The Internet is Freaking Huge

When a person sits down in front of the television, it’s rather obvious they’re going to watch something. There’s not much else you can do on a television. But the internet, on the other hand, isn’t just about reading the news. There are a lot of other things you can do to occupy your time. You can peruse forums, watch TV shows online, play online games, read Wikipedia, create a website, download porn, and any one of a million other things. But the sheer number of activities you can do online isn’t the only roadblock found by online writers.

Much like in any other line of work there is a significant amount of competition you’ll be fighting against for readers. If you look at resources like Google Analytics, they’ll be happy to tell you that there are infinity billion blogs already in existence online right now. And if you think it’ll be an easy matter of being found amidst all of that other noise and mindless blather, you’ve got another thing coming.

Considering the numerous other blogs available online, odds are that they’re all trying to stand out from all of the other blogs just like you are. And all of this effort to one-up each other creates an even larger amount of noise to contend with. The world of internet writing is thus reduced to a simple matter of creating hard-to-ignore distractions and then keeping your audience. In terms of web writing, this is the longest and hardest part of writing for the internet. Before you can even get an audience, you’re just going to be a blog like any other according to just about anyone who comes across your website. A 14-year old girl can maintain a blog. That doesn’t say much for you.

If you’re looking for recognition or acclaim for your writing, you’re going to be in for years  of disappointment.

#4. Your Audience Doesn’t Know You or Care About You

This is the cold and hard truth about this writing job. Sometimes you’ll have exceptions in the case of celebrities where they’re already known before they even start contributing online content. If you’re talented enough and work hard for a good few years, then you could potentially create a loyal fanbase of readers who actually know you personally and want to support your success. And even that is rare.

I’ve been writing online content for nearly two years now, many of which haven’t really been noticed. No one knows me and no one cares about what I have to say because where my works are appearing aren’t the place people go to find out about this. This may seem like a failure to some people, but this is how it works in writing for the internet. You work your way up to the websites people actually visit for news.

This isn’t an impossible problem to overcome and there are plenty of ways to get people to remember your name and the articles you write. But the main problem in accomplishing that is consistency. Some articles do betters than others, and it’s noticeable by the number of comments you get. If you’re consistent in the quality and entertainment factors, then it’s more likely that people will notice you and become dedicated readers.

#3. Getting Comments is Ridiculously Hard

Having a comments section on your blog is a rather novel idea. It creates an outlet for mass, instant feedback that is completely unique. But more often than not it creates a home for spider webs (i.e., no one responds) or a lot of inappropriate remarks irrelevant to the article as a whole. The latter is thankfully not entirely common on websites with low traffic.

But the former is not uncommon at all. Starting off, you will more than likely have a very difficult time soliciting feedback or creating meaningful (or any) conversations from readers. Best case scenario, you’ll at least get a Facebook “like.” Unless your article is covering a truly controversial topic or your opinion is completely ill-informed, most readers will typically remain silent.

If you don’t make use of website traffic tools like Google Analytics, it’ll feel like no one is even visiting your website. But when you pull that tool up, you’ll see that people are indeed visiting, and even how long they’re on your website before they lose interest. Generating comments for your blog is incredibly difficult unless you are catering to a naturally verbose audience.

This isn’t very common except in politics and video gaming.

#2. Getting Good Comments is Even Harder

Thanks to social media, almost every piece of content online offers readers the ability to voice their opinion. Unfortunately, commenters tend to be horrific by nature. They aren’t just offering constructive criticism about how they want to beat your face in with a frying pan for the things you’ve said, they’re doing this for every video, movie trailer, video game review, and whatever else. Bad comments are everywhere.

I can only speculate as to why comments are inherently negative throughout the internet. Trolling isn’t just reserved for forums these days. You may be quite proud of what you’ve written only to have it ripped down by some moron seeking to put down another to feel better about the fact they still live in the basement of their parents’ place and still play World of Warcraft. Negative comments are just something you’ll have to deal with.

Depending on your audience, you can expect your readers to be somewhat intelligent, educated, and kind. You can’t always rely on that, though. If you’re just starting out, negative comments are more likely to have a negative effect on your perception of your own writing skills. By writing for the internet, you are leaving yourself open for attack, however unwarranted it may be. Sure, you’re also leaving yourself open for great comments, but it is so much easier to just say, “You’re an idiot” rather than “This isn’t complete garbage.”

Point of the matter is you will always be facing the threat of incredibly offensive comments in anything you do online. And if you’re a new writer, these comments will always be terribly painful. You may try to ignore the comment or put down the commenter in your mind as being a bully, troll, or whatever, but it will still hurt. No matter how painful the comment, you can’t afford to be baited into responding in an equally negative fashion. You’ll get over what was said.

Eventually you’ll become immune to all comments. I haven’t reached that point and I likely won’t for a while. But you can always deal with comments in one of several ways:

• Develop a thicker skin
• Don’t read the comments
• Focus on every comment until you can’t sleep at night through the tears

Do whatever. No matter the case, comments are not the worst thing you could deal with.

#1. SEO is Annoying

There are probably things worse than this, but I think this ranks pretty high in my mind. I may simply have not gotten used to the clunky nature of SEO or it really is as unnatural as it feels. If you’re not familiar with it, SEO is called “search engine optimization” which essentially means the use of keywords in content writing with the purpose of boosting search rankings of your website.

Inserting keywords into the text of your articles requires a conscientious effort on your part simply because of how unnatural keywords can get. You have your “short-tail” keywords, which are the ones with the highest level of traffic and, conveniently, the highest level of competition. These are words like “project manager,” “video games,” and “athletic shoes.” You can use keywords like these, but you’re going to be on page 500 of the search results because countless other more well-traveled websites who use these keywords will dominate the searches.

This means as a new online writer you will be left with the “long-tail” keywords. These are the less common keywords that are lower competition. These are those words that don’t make any sense when integrated into a regular English sentence like “athletic food shoe store website” and “focus on the family video game reviews.” Those aren’t exactly easy to cram naturally into a sentence and end up looking quite weird when you read it. But putting them in exactly as they’re searched for, and in large enough quantities (i.e., using lots of long-tail keywords) is what will get you to appear in more search engine results on the first page. And showing up on the first page is what matters most as an online writer.

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