Can Your Website Help Itself?

TABLE OF CONTENTS

(Page to #3 for a GREAT Christmas Gift Idea.)

1) What's New at the Shared Self Publishing Experience

Keep up with traffic figures. See what kind of audience a big, do-it-yourself site can draw. Then, find out how to increase YOUR presence on the site...for free.


2) FEATURE ARTICLE: In the internet's subsistence environment...
Can Your Website Help Itself?

It's the Law of the Jungle out there on the Web; no one gives you anything you haven't earned. Lay a trap for traffic!


3) SiteBuildIt's 2 for 1 Special

I attracted your attention by building my site with SBI. Learn how you can give yourself an SBI site for free.


4) Authors Who Understand the Importance of Traffic (Online AND Off)

Meet two authors providing proof that you have to offer something more than your own books.


5) New Pages on the Site

When you signed up for the newsletter, you were promised an update on new pages to the site. Here they are!

==============
Functionality Alerts!
==============
If any links in this newsletter don't work, it's probably because your email software cuts off the link text at a line break, then prints the rest of the link as plain text. To use one of these links, try copying the WHOLE link then pasting it into your browser.

This email was designed to be read in an email reader that reads html. If you don't have one or yours is turned off, this letter might not look great but I'm guessing you're still smart enough to make sense of what I'm saying!
==============

1) What's New at the Shared Self Publishing Experience

As I mentioned in the last two newsletters, I've been focused on my children's books site - where I sell electronic versions of my own books - recently. I've been working like crazy to keep growing traffic to that site. Here's an update...

The site is now logging over 1000 visitors per day. Most of that is search engine traffic: Google alone sends me over 700 visitors a day.

Here's how much traffic my top search terms brought me in November, followed by my Google search rank for the term:

# hits - search term - Google rank for search term
704 - classic children's books - #3
507 - cheap children's books - #1
436 - bibliotherapy - #2
421 - free children's books - #1
412 - Sesame Street Magazine - #1
325 - free books for kids - #2

What is a #1 ranking worth?

• Google reports 880 people a month search CHEAP CHILDREN'S BOOKS.
• I received 507 of those clicks.
• Those clicks led to this page.
• I receive a 13% commission on all sales made through that search box at the top of the page.
• Nearly $1500 in book sales were made through that box last month.

Do YOU have a plan for landing atop the search rankings?

Because after I received 507 of the clicks for those 880 searches, there wasn't much left for the 55 million pages below me!

New Opportunity for You

I've added a blog section to The Shared Self Publishing Experience. Now you can create - for free - a dedicated blog page and share in this site's existing traffic. You'll also receive:

a) another link to your site (or the webpage of your choice), and
b) a link to one of your books on Amazon (if they're on Amazon!)

Unlike other pages on The Shared Self Publishing Experience, you can be as self-promotional as you want. Here's where you'll find the details and the form with which to post.

I've created a sample blog so you'll get the idea!


2) FEATURE ARTICLE
Can Your Website Help Itself?

I met someone recently who left me thinking about subsistence. Living without easy access to the necessities.

Now, I'm not one of those who thinks the financial crisis is a sign that civilization is about to collapse. I'm reasonably confident that my neighbors and I will continue to receive electricity and fresh water.

But I have been putting more thought into appreciating these things - and pondering what I would do if I could no longer count on them.

The notion of subsistence also got me thinking about the Web.

The internet might be all about infrastructure, but no one guarantees its denizens - websites - the necessities.

A website survives, of course, on traffic. Without traffic it can't pay for itself; it has to rely on a benefactor - you - to keep it alive.

The Web has no "safety net," no welfare state; the government doesn't guarantee your site some minimum of life-giving attention.

You only get as much traffic as you EARN.

You see, traffic is like water - flowing where the path of least resistance takes it. To make use of it, you have to ensure

a) that some of it flows by you, and
b) that you have something with which to capture it.

Building a better bucket

You need to help your writer's website help itself by situating it where the traffic flows. Among other things, that requires keyword awareness, knowing what search terms people use to find sites in your "neighborhood."

Once you know what people are looking for, you can try to make sure your site provides the answer.

Have you ever done keyword research? If not, chances are your site doesn't get significant traffic.

A new batch of buckets I'm setting out

On my children's books website, I try to sell my own books (among other things). They're books meant to help parents teach children better behavior. Of course, I always want to attract MORE of those parents to my website.

It occurred to me that some of those parents might be looking for stories with morals. Fables have morals. I decided to try to attract some fable traffic.

Aesop, after all, has been dead a couple thousand years. His works are in the public domain. Of course, that means lots of people have posted them to the Web. How could I find myself a competitive edge?

In other words, how could I get parents searching for those fables to find ME?

Well, I checked out a bunch of those other sites. They had in common that they list Aesop's Fables by title. That struck me as not very useful. If you don't know the fables by heart, how will you know whether The Mule and The Grasshopper or The Lion and The Jackal has the moral you're looking for?

I decided I'd index the fables by moral. That way when people Google "birds of a feather" (14,800 people a month do), a potential customer might locate me that wouldn't have otherwise.

Get the idea?

My writer's website helps itself by setting out lots of such buckets. (Aesop alone offers hundreds of buckets - I mean, fables - though I'll do my keyword research and figure out which ones will likely lead to significant traffic.)

If you're a typical author with a small site featuring little besides your own book(s), you've set out a thimble-sized bucket in a place where water doesn't flow. Your site isn't optimized to capture traffic for specific, popular searches.

Such a site survives not on traffic but on your willingness to indulge it and "wait for it to work."

Success ISN'T around the corner. The Web is a subsistence environment and you need a strategy to survive...and thrive.

If you don't know what keyword research looks like, you need some serious website help.

The most successful websites are those that start from scratch with a keyword-based plan to succeed. A website named after yourself or your book is always going to be limited in its potential.

If you ever find yourself interested in creating a keyword-aware website, I recommend using SiteBuildIt.

With SiteBuildIt, you do your keyword research at the beginning, rather than as a "Where's my traffic going to come from?" afterthought. Your website becomes what it should be - what it needs to be.

Find yourself at the top of the rankings - where the readers go, where the traffic flows. That's the best website help I can offer!


3) SiteBuildIt's Best Special of the Year

This is my favorite time of the year to promote SiteBuildIt, because it's the week or two of the year when YOU can get the best deal.

I've been using SBI for nearly 3 years. They don't advertise; they depend on customers like me to spread the word.

And I'm a good customer: my wife and I have 4 sites between us.

But sometimes I feel a little silly. Why? Because after three years, I know their promotional routine.

About 5 times a year, SiteBuildIt runs a promotion. It always has a different name, but it's always the same deal:

Buy 1, get the 2nd for two-thirds off.

Well, at Christmas the offer is different. Buy the 1st, get the 2nd one FREE.

It's the best deal of the year, every year. It means you can give SiteBuildIt as a gift, and get a free site for yourself.

What does it mean to give (or get) SiteBuildIt?

It means a simplified process that shows you not just how to slap pages up on the Web, but how to "plot" and write a website that works.

Good poems have structure. Good fiction has structure. Good screenplays have structure.

Good websites have structure. And if you didn't know that, you might just be saddled with a website that doesn't work.

The 2 for 1 special means you and someone you love both get a suite of easy to use software tools that enable you to do Web-work that isn't wasted.

The special "lasts" until midnight on Christmas day. Why did I put lasts in quotes? Because I've also been around long enough to know that SBI always extends its specials a few days - but I never know how many.

So think about getting a year of SBI as a gift before Christmas, then give the free one to yourself. And here's an added bonus:

The freebie can be delayed for up to 9 months. That means you can wait until next September if need be to start the clock ticking on your own new website.

Learn more about SiteBuildIt's 2 for 1 special.


4) Two Authors Who Understand the Importance of Traffic

1) Mr. Beller's Neighborhood of Authors...and Readers

I stumbled onto an amazing site this month when I found out that one of the authors on The Shared Self Publishing Experience had posted to it. It's called, Mr. Beller's Neighborhood.

It's proof that what a site can be is no more limited than what a book can be. The only limits are those set by your imagination.

Mr. Beller is Thomas Beller, a respected, renowned, traditionally published author. And never mind his reviews from

• The Washington Post
• The San Francisco Chronicle
• Time Out New York
• Publishers Weekly
• Entertainment Weekly, and
• The New York Times Book Review...

Mr. Beller still saw the advantage of building an online presence about something more than himself. So what's his site about?

Mr. Beller's Neighborhood is Manhattan. It's a site filled with over 1000 pieces of short fiction - by hundreds of authors - set in Manhattan.

So author Beller attracts traffic from folks interested in fiction set in New York...and guess what?

Thomas Beller just so happens to write fiction set in New York. What a great fit!

Think he might manage to sell a few of his own books with this unique approach? Think he has a slew of lesser known authors who appreciate the opportunity and exposure he's given them?

Talk about WIN-WIN.

2) Wellsboro's "From My Shelf" Bookstore - Where Hobo Found a Home

I've opined many times that a one book website is virtually as silly as the notion of a one book bookstore. Then along comes Kevin Coolidge to prove my point.

Kevin and his girlfriend own a bookstore in Wellsboro, Massachusetts. Kevin has written one book. His bookstore sells 12,000.

The "audience" of customers he attracts by virtue of offering such a resource to the locals provided him the perfect venue to feature his self published children's book, Hobo Finds a Home.

The 700 copies he sold from his store alone helped him land a traditional publisher.

Can we agree that Kevin would have had a hard time paying the rent if his store had sold only his book? People don't shop at a store with only one product.

Read Kevin's post here.

My wife and I sold 129 books through Amazon alone during the first two weeks of December. (This doesn't include my books, her books, or books from vendors other than Amazon.)

We were commissioned on each of these sales.

Creating a well-trafficked website requires little more than "stocking the shelves" with LOTS of content - content consisting of words and thoughts on particular subjects on separate webpages. Let SiteBuildIt show you how!

5) NEW PAGES ON THE SITE

When you signed up for this newsletter you were promised updates on new stories posted to The Shared Self Publishing Experience. Below you'll find the new pages added to the site since the last newsletter.

Each url below reflects the title given by the author to their self publishing experience (minus the punctuation). To visit a page, paste into your browser's address bar the characters

then paste in the characters for the particular page that catches your eye.

I'll note the best posts in each category by bolding them. Remember to read the comments! (Because when writers write back in response to my questions, sometimes that's where the best information is.) And please post your own comments as well!

book-series-goes-from-royalty-publishing-to-pod.html

weight-loss-surgery-food-journals.html

my-first-selfpublishing-experience.html

blogging-my-way-along.html

i-call-it-samizdat-not-selfpublishing.html

the-right-choice-at-the-right-time.html

control-freak-teacher-self-publishes.html

self-publishing-because-of-subject-matter.html

why-share-the-wealth.html

writing-a-cathartic-experience-for-me.html

learning-the-hard-way.html

outdoorsman-short-stories.html

lauren-reeser.html

mccluck-farms.html

lela-tablishvili-graphic-designer-painter-cartoonist-book-cover-designer.html

gary-val-tenuta.html

warponycreations.html

richa-kinra-children-book-illustrator.html

margaretspoetrykornercom.html

mikemonahanbookscom.html

http://www.best-childrens-books.com/book-of-poems-finds-common-thread.html


WRAPPING UP

Please remember that this newsletter is perfectly suitable for forwarding to your self published friends and acquaintances! You can also recommend to them that they sign up for the newsletter on The Shared Self Publishing Experience home page. Also remember to tell those folks they can post to the site in return for a link to their site!

This newsletter comes from

Add it to your address book so it doesn't end up in the Spam pile!


THANK YOU