My Next Thousand LRC Articles . . . and Yours

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This is my thousandth article on LewRockwell.com I have already begun work on the first of my next thousand.

You may think “That’s a lot of articles.” Let’s keep this in perspective. Rabbi Jacob Neusner has written over 950 books – on average, a book every other week for 40 years. Now, that’s output!

I recommend that you begin to work on your first thousand articles, if you haven’t begun already. Let me tell you why. And how.

It all began for me when I submitted my first LRC article in May of 2000. I did not imagine that I would have a thousand articles published over the next eleven years. But, one by one, they added up.

This site eats of lots of copy. It publishes about 72 articles a week. That is 3,744 articles a year. That means over 41,000 articles over the last eleven years. So, the editor is always looking for articles. This creates opportunities for writers. Opportunity knocks.

At well over 40,000 articles, LRC has a high Google ranking. Google prefers content-rich sites. There are few sites with more content.

By emphasizing economics issues, but not focusing exclusively on them, LRC has more traffic than a more narrowly focused economics site. The site acts as a magnet for the Mises Institute site. This has led to Mises.org’s becoming the most widely visited site in the world on economic theory. It dwarfs the site of the American Economic Association, the site of America’s professional economists, which does not even have its own Web domain. Its site is an appendage of Vanderbilt University.

The timing of this site was ideal. It began in 1999, the final year of the economic boom that began on August 16, 1982. On Friday the 13th, 1982, the Dow Jones bottomed at 777. The Mexican government was threatening to default, even nationalizing foreign-owned banks. That got the Federal Reserve to begin to inflate. The stock market boom began. It did not permanently end until March 2000.

The Website of the Mises Institute had gone up in 1995, within a year of the introduction of the graphics-based Web browser, Netscape Navigator. It was a pioneering site. The death of Murray Rothbard in 1995 kept him from seeing the results of the most important educational breakthrough since Gutenberg’s development of movable type in the mid-fifteenth century. The LRC site has made Rothbard more famous in death than he had ever been in life.

In a sense, this was fitting. Rothbard’s mentor, Mises, died in October 1973, a nearly forgotten figure. The following June, a week-long conference of a handful of Misesian scholars was held in the village of South Royalton, Vermont. Then, in October, Hayek won the Nobel Prize in economics. These two events launched the second phase of Mises’ American career. The Mises Website launched the third stage, making him a figure known worldwide.

The timing of the Mises site was perfect. There was not much competition. I started GaryNorth.com in 1996. Something reminiscent of Albert J. Nock’s Remnant principle appeared. People found these sites. Word of mouse took over. The first search engine, AltaVista, had arrived in late 1995. It became the Google of its day.

Then came LRC in 1999. It was a hybrid. It was not a blog, featuring the thoughts of one person. It was a series of links of interest to the editor. It still is. But it was not a portal site like the Drudge Report. It was more focused. It was more idiosyncratic.

By the time I wrote my first LRC article, the site had a lot of traffic. I had 35,000 names on my e-letter list, so I was publishing regularly. I was already publishing my paper-based letter, Remnant Review, through Bill Bonner’s Agora organization. Agora took over the marketing of Reality Check, my e-letter, in 2001. LRC began posting a lot of my Reality Check letters. It still does.

We hear about the web of life. I am more into the Web of life. E-letters promote sites; sites promote e-letters. If you have a site, you need an e-letter, and vice versa.

The advantage of having articles posted on a high-traffic site like LRC is that links in the articles back to your site raise your site’s traffic and its Google ranking. It always helps to include a link back to your site in your articles. (Hint, hint.)

Not every article will be accepted. The only editor who accepts all of my articles is me. I have written over 7,000 for my revamped site since 1996. Four articles a day add up.

As you write more, you get better at it. So, I recommend that you write more. Start a blog on WordPress.com. It is free. If you get enough readers, you can download the free software at WordPress.org. You can use it to run your own site. You can get a site hosting company that allows you unlimited domains for about $5 to $7 a month, total. At under $10 per year to register a domain, you can afford several. Your time is costly. Domain hosting isn’t.

Write lots of articles. Send the good ones to LRC. Who knows? Maybe some will get published. They will add up.

If you want to link to one of my site’s open access articles, that would be nice. (Hint, hint.)

Once online, an article usually stays on line. The Remnant will find it, sooner or later. Think of Mises. Think of Rothbard. The Remnant finds them, day by day.

Do a few videos, too. You can use a cheap Webcam or a pocket camcorder like the Kodak Zi8. You can use Screencast-o-matic. It’s free. The main thing is to buy an external lapel microphone. That $25 investment will make a huge aesthetic difference. Start a YouTube channel. It’s free. It’s easy. Then post your videos on your site’s pages.

There is lots to be done. Just because you did not get in early does not mean that you can’t have influence. Piggyback on LRC. You will have 3,744 chances over the next 12 months. Get busy.

July 1, 2011

Gary North [send him mail] is the author of Mises on Money. Visit http://www.garynorth.com. He is also the author of a free 20-volume series, An Economic Commentary on the Bible.

Copyright © 2011 Gary North