Archive for January, 2011

Okay, it’s not like me to write a headline that’s a play-on-words (in fact it’s generally a web no-no). But I couldn’t resist

The purpose of this post is to point out how the time of day that you choose to do things on the web can make a world of difference. So next time you want to post a blog entry at 3 in the morning or go onto Facebook at 10 am, keep these things in mind….

• Have you ever opened an email when you’re busy, then closed it and said, “I’ll read that another time”? And did you actually take the time to go back and re-read it? Probably not. MarketingExperiment.com took it upon themselves to test what time of day people were most likely to not only open an email, but read it and click through to its site. They found that executives and entrepreneurs on the west coast were more likely to read email late at night, while those on the east coast were responded better early in the morning. So keep seniority level and geography in mind next time you send an email to potential readers.
• What time are your readers on Facebook? That’s when you should be posting status updates. Depending on how many friends your Facebook friends have, your comments may only be appearing on their wall for a half hour or less. So make sure to post when you know your friends are online and active. Depending on the age of your audience, that can vary. But evening hours are usually your best bet.
• If you have a Google Adwords account, listen up! One of the nice features Google offers as part of this account is a daily spending limit. If you hit that limit on any given day, your ads will stop running. Which can be great …. except for the fact that your ads may stop running just when your readers are searching for your book! If you dig into your website traffic statistics, you can discover which time of day you’re getting the most visitors to your website. If it happens to be later in the day (and the evening is the most common time for web use), then make sure your Google ads aren’t expiring before the end of the business day. To do that (and still keep your daily limit), you can set specific hours that your ads will run — say after 3 PM. That would ensure that you won’t run out of funds when it matters most.

These are just three examples of how time of day matters, and how putting your time, money, and effort into marketing your book and your website at the wrong time of day can be ineffective. So it’s simple: test, test, test. Figure out who your audience is. Send emails at different times of the day. Post on your Facebook page at different times of the day. And pay close attention to which efforts get the most response. Eventually, you’ll be able to find the sweet spot on the clock.

An English professor of mine once said, “Poems often come from other poems.”   I have found that poems can come from old blogs posts as well.  Looking through blogs and journal entries can provide rich text to take from and emote.   A great exercise for anyone with writer’s block!  An author could develop characters, storylines, and dialogues from old posts.

Below is an excerpt from a blog I posted on Sept. 26, 2008 at 9:04 p.m.  I used it as inspiration to write a few Haiku poems.

I like the Midwest. The sunrise in the morning is inviting. I feel so energized when the light shines on the lake and reflects on to the trees.  The nights are enchanting. The sky is clear and the stars shine bright.  It sounds simple, but it truly is breathtaking. I do a lot of thinking under that night’s sky.

Welcome Home

Inviting sunrise

The trees sing with the cold wind

A Midwest morning

9:04 p.m.

Stars shine through the black

Provoking the lake to dance

Night enchants the poor

I thought my past blogs (rarely viewed) were done with.  Being able to utilize them as a writing tool has motivated me to blog more consistently so I’ll have content to work with in the future.

An article in a recent issue of Internet and Marketing Report reinforced something that I’ve been saying for a while: When it comes to website content, keep text brief!

Now don’t take this personally, but keeping text short can be quite a challenge for authors

Here’s why you need to do it, though. According to research, you have only two seconds to catch a visitor’s attention before he or she decides to leave your website. That’s not enough time to read a paragraph, let alone a long sentence!

With that in mind, here are some tips on how to make sure your web content gets as much attention as possible.

1. One thought, one sentence. Keep your sentences between 15 and 25 words. Once your sentence contains more than one idea, it’s too long!

2. Simplify. Browsing a website is not like reading a scientific journal. Avoid complicated words that some people won’t understand. Make your message simple and easy for someone to absorb in one glance.

3. Think columns or bullets. Nobody is going to read a paragraph that spans the entire width of a website. There are two ways to avoid this. One is to make sure you have columns built into your site design — with each text block only taking up a segment of the page. Another option is to use bullets wherever possible, so that things are broken up into short, easy-to-browse lines.

4. Don’t let paragraphs ramble. Long, chunky paragraphs are a no-no. A visitor is going to see the length of it and decide that it’s not worth the time. In fact, research shows that lengthy paragraphs make a subject look even more intimidating. Try to keep your paragraphs to four to six lines of text.

Just an interesting side-note from the article … apparently, long paragraphs became the norm in journalism from magazines. Editors trying to fit articles into the fixed space on a printed page were forced to combine paragraphs that otherwise would have been broken up. But we have no size restrictions in the cyberworld, so lean towards breaking your paragraphs up — not combining them — whenever possible.

I’ve spent the past few months focusing on completing manuscripts rather than concentrating on writing.  My language skills, writing exercises, tips from various writers’ magazines and literature journals are ready to go in my mind, but the message in my writing gets lost in all the formal structure.

I’ve been substituting emotion and thought, for conventional words and rhythm.  I forgot how easy it was to capture the moment by free styling.  Simply sitting down at the computer and typing what I feel brings certain tranquility to my storytelling.

When I first started writing, I would jot down anything ‘inspirational’ that came to my head – on napkins, scrap paper, and on the back of receipts. I don’t do that anymore.  Instead I get hung up on how behind I am in my revisions.  I’ve learned this month that in order to keep my creativity fresh and true to myself, I need to take a break from the conventional.  I’m setting aside time to put the laptop away and scribble on paper.  I’m reverting into my old habits – while keeping my new skills… to remember how to write and why I write.

Blogging for me has actually become a way to exercise my free-style writing.  I think a writer must take a break from that incomplete project and come back to it with fresh eyes and mind.  New ideas (to include in my stories) come to my head as I blog clumsily about my mundane life and writing process.

Do you remember the quarks that got you through those first drafts?  Maybe incorporating them into your writing routine will bring about those youthful ideas that drove your passion in beginning.

I’ve worked with hundreds of authors in the last five years. Some of them ask for my feedback on what they’ve written for the website before we go live. Which is great — it’s always good to have someone who knows the web world offer their two cents on things. And then I have other clients (not naming names here) who not only don’t ask for my opinion on what they’ve written, but actually reject the one or two recommendations that I offer unsolicited.

So that leads me to the question: Should author websites have editors? After all, an author’s writing in a book is usually edited. Should the same be done for their website content? Here are a few ideas I have on why it should…

• Print vs. web. Book authors are probably pretty well versed in writing book-style. But web-style is very different. First of all, someone is likely to spend only a few seconds on your website, so it’s important that you write your content in an eye-catching way. In fact, writing a headline for a website is like writing the first page of a book — it’s what will make someone decide whether to stay or not. Which is not something a book author tends to be familiar with.
• Objectivity! A website is basically a portfolio of an author’s work and life. It’s hard to write objectively about yourself. There’s something to be said for a third party offering an unbiased opinion on what’s being written.
• Copyediting. You wouldn’t let your book be published without a copyeditor, would you? Then why should you publish your website without someone who is an expert on commas and prepositions giving it a once-over?

Too often, web designers and developers will just plop in whatever text an author sends. I must confess, I’m guilty of that sometimes. But maybe editing should be a more crucial part of author website development….

What do you think? How would you feel about having an editor look over everything you’ve written for the site before it’s live? Share your thoughts, please!

This speaks for itself. Check it out: http://www.facebook.com/TheHungerGames

Kudos to whomever at Scholastic built this. I would have no idea how to do this myself, but I’m sure going to start doing some research into it. This would be an amazing way to give an author’s Facebook presence their own look and feel, and integrate links to the website, places to buy the book, etc…  right into the design.

What do you think? Are you as impressed as I am? Please share your thoughts!

I had a conversation with a client yesterday. He was wondering why the search engine optimization campaign we launched just last month wasn’t leading to the skyrocket in book sales that he had hoped. There were several points I had to make to try and lift his spirits. And I thought those might be worth sharing here as well….

1. SEO isn’t immediate. When it comes to your placement on Google and such, your best gift is time. The longer your site is around, the more you will start climbing up the ladder. We just implemented a new search engine optimization strategy a few weeks ago, so it’s important to give it time to work.

2. Always look at the stats. Before rushing to judgment on whether a campaign is working, look at your site traffic numbers (and if you don’t have Google Analytics, sign up for it STAT!). Have your traffic numbers started increasing since you implemented your new SEO strategy? Which keywords are people searching for before they end up on your site? How long are they staying on your site? Are they clicking around? These numbers can help you determine the success or failure of your campaign.

3. Traffic doesn’t equal sales. Even if your SEO campaign has been a resounding success and has quadrupled the site traffic that you’re getting, that doesn’t mean that you’re necessarily going to sell more books. There are a wide range of reasons why people coming to your site may not be buying your book. Maybe the page people are winding up on isn’t promoting the book prominently enough. Maybe the book is overpriced. Maybe the keywords you optimized for aren’t attracting people who would buy the book. The possibilities are endless.

In these situations, the best thing you can do is test, test, test. If the traffic isn’t going up after several months, try a different SEO strategy. If it is going up, and you’re still not selling books, you can try optimizing for different keywords. You can try offering a sale price on the book to see if it increases conversions. You can create a “landing” page on your site and optimize that — so that people who arrive there will immediately be hit with the book cover, a tantalizing description, and a link to buy it.

SEO isn’t quick or easy. Nor is making your book a bestseller. But do your homework and test, test, test and your SEO efforts can increase your sales.

I read something in Internet and Marketing Report recently that I took to heart. I’m implementing it now, and you may want to as well. It’s about taking advantage of all that social media has to offer.

In the article, Seth Greenberg, VP of marketing for Intuit, says that his company decided to ask 10 million customers to give them a “like” on Facebook. Only 1% of them did so. That may not sound like much, but those 100,000 people brought them 15 million impressions to their website. And, according to Seth, the “friends” who saw it were four times more likely to buy from his company than someone who just saw a banner ad. Basically, they got more bang for NO bucks than they would have if they paid for an ad.

“So how does this work?” you may ask … Facebook offers a “badge” that you can create, and then Facebook will provide some simple code you can embed on your website for that badge to appear. Whether you’re an author or a public speaker, you can embed this simple code that encourages people to “like” your website. Once they do that, a status update will appear with their profile — and on the walls of all their Facebook friends — stating that they “like” your website. Most people on Facebook have hundreds of friends, so this really could be a great way to get your website out there to potential visitors.

Just yesterday, I went ahead and embedded this link on every page of Smart Author Sites. I know, both you and I are dealing with a lot fewer people than Intuit, but that doesn’t mean it won’t make a difference! So please go ahead and click on that “like” button on the top right of this page. I’ll let you know if it leads to an increase in traffic. And also consider trying this experiment on your site. It’s easy, it’s free, and, according to Seth, it can have a big payoff!

A great press release I came across today … Thought any up-and-coming author would appreciate it.

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How Any Author Can Prepare for a Successful Book Launch in 2011

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