Jamieson's Poetry

by Leland Jamieson
(East Hampton, CT, USA)

Site: Jamieson Poetry

How much traffic do you get? About 20 hits a day.

How much comes from the search engines? 78-83%. The lower figure is for one theme page people reach with the search term "poems with metaphors." The higher figure is for another theme page people reach with the term "short rhyming poems."

How much money and time have you put in? Little Money. A lot of time. I'm retired. But it comes at the expense of writing more poetry.

Has the site met your expectations?

No. I've only had one sale in the past year. I've taken your advice with respect to the following:

1) I added a free tutorial with rewards for participation. No takers.

I added four theme pages and have utilized video readings (Youtube & Gather) to send listeners to those pages. I call the videos "Change Pace Poetry." I've done 18 to date. "Change Pace Poetry," used as a search term, comes up quite high on Google. Still, the videos do not deliver as much traffic as the two search terms above.

2) Despite my recent defense, at your suggestion, of the French loaf on a wine red tablecloth for a cover, I decided it lacked the exciting visual dynamics to draw the reader in to it (remember my daughter thought it was a cookbook for bakers) and prompt him or her to buy it. Having a non-exclusive agreement with Lulu, and since their pricing structure would not permit me to lower the price, I brought out a second edition with CreateSpace (which is part of Amazon.com). Using their templates, I redesigned the cover and put the book on sale on 2/17 on the publisher's site and today on Amazon.com for $12.95 (the original price had been $17.95). Don't know what the results of these changes will be.

3) My next thought is to get more inbound links which utilize "poems with metaphors" and "short rhyming Poems" as hot link terms, but I've not quite figured out how to do that. Those seem to be the most productive search terms for the poetry I write.

4) It also seems I ought to create an instructional module for how to utilize metaphors in poems.

Steve, I have to say, before I forget it, that I really am glad you are out there in cyberspace encouraging us all. I'm retired on a shoestring, so I haven't money, but I have time, and I've learned a lot in the course of all this. Don't mind learning more, or working steadily at it.

I have another book in manuscript form that is almost ready to format in page proofs, so what I learn about selling 21ST CENTURY BREAD: SHORT RHYMING POEMS POST-9/11 (note the key word in the new sub-title) will help promote that as well.

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Leland, you've made me an emotional ping pong ball this Sunday morning!

Firstly, readers should know that they can read our earlier conversation, which will explain some of the changes you mention above.

Now, why am I an emotional ping pong ball? Well, when I first read what you wrote, I felt awful. I was thinking to myself, "Look at all the changes Leland has made at my suggestion, and look at how poorly it's panning out for him." I was wishing I'd charged you money, just so I could refund it!

Then I read our previous correspondence more closely. Interpolating, it looks like you used to get about 3 visitors a day. Now you're getting 20. If your traffic is up 5-600%, I decided I deserved a plaque!

I guess the real truth is somewhere in the middle. An author with three hits a day - and there are many such authors - is looking for orders of magnitude improvements.

So let me start with a disclaimer: orders of magnitude improvements are difficult to accomplish without orders of magnitude increases in content. Still, you've had at least one impressive success.

Short Rhyming Poems is Googled 2400 times a month. That's a pretty decent keyword, and you're on page 1 of Google results, at #7 out of 285,000 pages. That's pretty damn good, but let's not be satisfied. If we can move you up the page, chances are we can squeeze something close to an order of magnitude increase in clicks on that particular search.

Start by creating a link to another page in your site from your Short Rhyming Poems page at http://www.jamiesonspoetry.com/page16.html

The search engines value link text highly. If you were to use Short Rhyming Poems in your blue link text, it could bump you up in the rankings.

So could changing the page's file name to jamiesonpoetry.com/short-rhyming-poems.html. In fact, I would make such a change on ALL your pages. Page #s tell Google nothing.

Change your "meta" so it's particular to the page. The lead keyword for THIS PAGE should be Short Rhyming Poems. And rewrite your meta description to be prose, not a list, some 150 characters long. Summarize the page, using the keyword.

Also, consider adding more text ABOUT Short Rhyming Poems to the page. Help us learn something!

Now, with an eye toward book sales, let's step back and try to put ourselves in the head of someone who just Googled Short Rhyming Poems.

Is this person looking to buy a book of same? I doubt it! THAT person just typed the term into AMAZON'S search box.

Can we ALL take a moment now to appreciate the magnitude of the task we've taken on? We are trying to sell a book to someone who arrived with NO intention of buying one! It's as if you're a store owner trying to sell your product to a window shopper.

Actually, it's worse. People arrive at our sites looking to get information/education or art from us for FREE. So it's actually like trying to sell product to a shoplifter!

Does that seem daunting? It should. Conversion rates are ABYSMAL on the internet compared to bricks and mortar. Most visitors in a real store arrive open at least to the possibility of purchase.

But here's where the internet has it over standard retail: it's possible to drive thousands of people a day into your "store" at no cost. In other words, it's possible to survive off the tiny proportion of people who actually purchase, and tiny increases in conversion are magnified.

So, Leland, let's look at your product through the eyes of someone who wasn't book shopping. Someone who's looking for either free art or free info. Clearly, to motivate a purchase, you would have to be offering something more, something unexpected, something visitors want but didn't know they want. Which is why I love your idea of an instructional module.

I don't know if that's something you planned on offering WITH your book, but that's how I see it. Like a teacher's study guide, it would work in conjunction with your book, one useless without the other.

Okay, I've tried to address

1) Incrementally increasing traffic by maxing the potential of your most productive keyword, and
2) Increasing conversion

But what about that "orders of magnitude" increase in traffic we all crave?

Total search engine traffic is the sum total of keywords you rank highly enough to be found for that result in a click to your site. The inelegance of my prose aside...

You've gotten a taste of what a juicy keyword or two can do for your traffic. Orders of Magnitude require, well, a hundred more juicy keywords!

I'm looking at a traffic report for my children's books site. In the 21 days that have passed so far this month, I've been found for over 7600 keywords.

They follow a normal distribution. My most popular keyword has been found about 25 times a day. By the time we get to my 100th most popular, it's about 2/3 of a click per day.

My third most popular - Stories With Morals - reminds me of your Short Rhyming Poems. It brings in about 13 clicks a day, ranking #5 at Google.

I'm royalty when it comes to Stories With Morals! But if it were my only keyword, I'd not be happy with the time I've put into my site.

Leland, you've heard me mention the service I use (SiteBuildIt) to, essentially, coach me through the building of a search engine focused site.

Keyword search is a huge part of the service's value. They scan successful sites in your niche - let's call it Poems - for keywords that include your niche word, and for keywords that don't. This tool would likely have revealed the potential of Short Rhyming Poems, but also Definition Of Meter.

Using the tools, you'd be presented with hundreds and even thousands of keyword suggestions for you to filter through, both in terms of their traffic potential and for whether they suggest subjects you feel competent to hold forth on.

I hear that you've already put too much time into your site (for what you've gotten out of it) and that it detracts from poetry-writing time, so SBI might not be for you, as it requires significant content-writing time. It's also 300 bucks a year.

But we do live in this crazy i-world now where credibility - as deemed by the search engines - is largely a matter of how much you say. That may seem horrible to some writers, but others find it preferable to a world in which publishers were the gatekeepers. There is the potential now to create your own success by sheer force of will.

Here's a powerful free research tool to play with.

One final thought on bolstering your strength for Short Rhyming Poems: please read this article on adding a book list to your site.

I hope this was of some help!