The Art and Business of Online Writing: How to Beat the Game of Capturing and Keeping Attention

by Nicolas Cole

If you are writing or sharing links to your writing on platforms that use hashtags, the correct way to do hashtag stacking is to do a little research before you post—so you can tag your content with popular, relevant folders. First, go back to your list of popular writers within your chosen category. What hashtags are they using? Why are they using them? For example, one writer might tag all of their posts #writingadvice, because if you’re searching for writing advice on a social platform, this is a good folder to start scrolling through. By tagging your posts with that same hashtag, all you’re doing is telling the platform to organize this specific post within that folder. This is step one. The second step is to then create different tiers of folders for your posts to be organized within. When you click on a hashtag on any social platform, you can see how many people are currently using that hashtag. What you want to do is tag your posts with a blend of both large, popular hashtags and smaller, niche hashtags. For example, #writing is typically a very large folder because it’s so broad. A lot of different types of content could be tagged #writing—which means even though you’ll be tapping into a wider net of people, you’ll also be reaching a more generalized audience. But #businesswriting or #fictionwriting are more specific. They’re smaller, in the sense that they’re niches and not broad, all-encompassing categories, which means the audiences you’ll be tapping into are sl...