Hacking Wattpad

TAGS

Since Wattpad took down the feature of ranking in genres (aka Hotlists), there have been  a lot of mixed reactions. While the basic idea is the fact that users can now rank for certain 'keywords' - aka Tags, for writers who had worked their sanity out to get on the Hotlist, this was bad news. But hey, Wattpad has basically given us the ability to rank in multiple hotlists - or at least one out of 30!

For me, I see two beautiful sides to this. First off, users can now add more tags (30) to their stories which ideally should increase the tendency of your story being discovered (people search based on these keywords, right? Now you got 30 to play around with!). More importantly, Wattpad has finally revealed a secret to why the good old advice of "add tags to your book description" just didn't seem to work as expected. Some of these tags were irrelevant even when they don't look like it.

This leads us to today's hack : TAG IT LIKE A PRO

As I'd mentioned earlier, tags are a major factor to your story's discoverability. This works in two ways;

i) Tags act as keywords during a search.

ii) Tags are also the basis on which the unlimited micro hotlists in which your story could rank.

So let's say you're looking for a bad boy  story (don't worry, your secrets are safe with me), in the search box you can narrow down your search result to find exactly what you want. So if you write bad boys stories in a mafia world, your potential readers can easily find you rather than having to sort through gazillion bad boys in high school drama.

Now the real juicy part, unlimited micro hotlists. This is where the real hack comes in. When Wattpad started, you could only rank in a genre and sub-genre (2 options only), today you can rank in a genre & 30 sub-genres (1500% more options!)

The big question then becomes "how do I know what tags are relevant for your story and how to make sure you're getting the best out of each without ending up ranking "#1 in Juice"

OPTION 1

Search through the Top 20 boks in your genre (use the Hottest Paid Stories collection). They've been handpicked by the orange gods at Canada so they got to be doing something right, right? Take a note of relevant tags on their stories which match yours. You want to make sure these tags are at least fairly competitive because #review is different from #reviews (more of that in a bit).

OPTION 2

What better place would there be to find very specific tags that are relevant and should help increase your ranking than on Ambassador managed profiles. Aha! Didn't see that coming eh.

My best bet is that irrespective of whatever genre you write, there's got to be at least one Ambassador-managed account for it. Many of these accounts have tens of thousands of followers and sticky engagement rates. Here's what you want to do; get on all ambassador run profiles related to your nice, give them a follow (because, why not?) and go through their published stories to find what tags they use which relate to what you do (I'd predict at least 50% relevancy with whatever king of story you're working on). There are main genre profiles like @Fantasy and subgenres (@highfantasy) which gives you a lot of choice.

When selecting tags, you should ensure a high engagement within such tags. A tag with 24 stories might get you ranked #1 but a tag with 1K stories (same number of stories on the original Wattpad Hotlist) should give you more relevancy due to higher competition. So since variety is the spice of life - or so we're meant to believe 'cos some of y'all only live tuna flavored taco - you'd want to give a slot fot 3 tiers of tags; Very competitive (VC), Competitive (C), Low barrier to entry (LB) , freestyle tags (F).

VC - >5K Stories (these boost your story's relevancy)

C - ~1K Stories (more likely to rank here)

LB - <1K Stories (higher tendency to rank)

F - Story specific tags (for uniqueness)

I'd say to have a tag ration of 25% (VC), 30% (C), 30% (LB), 15% (F). 

To put that in perspective 'cos your math sucks, lol, you always want to have 7 VC tags, 9 C & LB tags and 5 F tags.

You should know though that there are a few moving parts to this system like the quality of stories in each hotlist and all, however, implementing this hack here alone could be an absolute  game changer for you.

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That's it for now, got any questions, chuck them in the comment section down below, I'm answering all.

Also, I'll be helping 5 people review their tags  FOR FREE, all you have to do is leave an in-line comment here with just your book title & genre and tag at least 5 of your friends to comment a +1 on your book to be win a free review.

DON'T FORGET TO LIKE BRO, I WARN YA! 

Hit the STAR ⭐ button now.

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Bad Boy Gabe 😎