Love To Read
by Althea Longley
Althea's website
Site: Love to Read Althea, I always like to say there are two kinds of author websites. 1) Those intended as little more than a detailed calling card. This kind is intended to depend on traffic YOU drive to it. 2) Those intended to attract traffic - lots of it! - from people you've never met. Yours is a perfectly serviceable calling card site. That you're disappointed in the results suggests to me you wanted it to be more a website of the 2nd sort. I have to be honest with you: Your website is a long way from being THAT kind of website. But let's start with some smaller things. Things that have little to do with attracting traffic but more to do with visitor experience and their impression of you. That font on your home page is pretty ornate, and low contrast as well. (Purple on purple.) I'm only 46 and I'm having a tough time reading it. The top of the page promises "Four New Exciting Books." You then proceed to show us 6. That suggests your website is showing signs of aging! (Also, one of the books, Flora, isn't clickable.) On the book pages themselves, you have three links at the bottom. One says, Contact Me, and one says, Buy Me. Of course, we know what you mean, but as a writer you might not want to be giggled at for such things. Buy Me implies the book is me. Contact Me implies you. So the page is "speaking" as if written by two different Me's. Now let's look at things from a traffic point of view Problem #1 is that Google hasn't yet indexed your site. I can tell by Googling a unique phrase, putting it in quotation marks (i.e. "courageous mother superior in Storm Bird") and Googling. Your page doesn't get pointed to. Google doesn't yet know you exist! Similarly, when I type "Althea Longley," your site is nowhere to be seen. That's not good. Fortunately, you're speaking to it by posting links to your site on your pages on other sites (like Lulu), as well as posting to this site and purchasing a Premium Listing. Pretty soon Google will find you by linking to you from other sites. The more links to your site - by the way - the better. But let's put on the hat of someone who wants to find something with the search engines, rather than someone who wants to be found. I'm a lover of fiction. I'm about to take a trip Down Under, so I fancy an Australian novel. I google Australian Novels. Google returns a Wikipedia list of 271 such novels, along with profiles of some 13 Australian novelists. Success! Surely on this list I'll find something good. Now what if Google had sent me instead to your site? Frankly, I'd be ready to fire Google and hire Yahoo! Not because you're not a great writer - you may very well be - but because I never wanted Google to pick an Australian novelist for me. I wanted to make that decision! That's why the search engines behave as they do. They refer searchers to information resources. Wikipedia had the answer to the query Australian Novels. Your site only has the answer to the query What Has Althea Longley Written? I think we can agree that Australian Novels are queried more often than Althea Longley. Alas. There's a relatively well known American film from some years back called Field of Dreams. The line of dialogue it's best remembered for is this: "If you build it, they will come." It was most definitely not a film about the internet. The building of a website is anything but a guarantee of traffic. The number of websites overwhelms the number of searches. If we were to divide clicks by web pages, we'd all be lucky to have one visitor a day. A precious few websites do a lot better It shouldn't surprise anyone to learn that the sites that get a disproportionate amount of traffic do so for a reason. Some sites get it because they do something so well. (Think Google.) Some sites get it because they're so huge. (Think Wikipedia or Amazon.) It might actually be that the pages on your site get more traffic per day than particular pages on Amazon. But Amazon has millions of pages! You have 6 or 7. How can a poor author do more than "build it," hoping "they will come"? Well, the first trick is recognizing that we have an advantage over most everyone else... We can write. The second trick is doing the research to figure out what you know that other people tend to search for. I don't know much about you other than you "Love to Read." (It's right there in your url!) Perhaps you should be reviewing Australian Novels. (Google reports 1000 people per month search that term.) Imagine that: You reviewing all those wonderful books you read... Posting the reviews to the internet under the heading Australian Novels... Drawing traffic from people searching for same... Sharing some of your favorite books... (Maybe even making a commission when searchers click to Amazon from your site...) And then mentioning that you just happen to be an Australian Novelist yourself! An author on this site wrote a novel that featured running. On his site he compiled a list of all the running novels he knows of. It's the most trafficked page on his site. He reports the search engines send up to 5 visitors per day to that page. Has this been of any help? What I'm recommending is that rather than thinking of what YOU think should be on your site so that people know about you (an approach that presumes perfect strangers have an interest in you), think about what you could put on your site that perfect strangers might be searching for. And not just perfect strangers, but particular kinds of perfect strangers... Perfect strangers who might have a predisposition to buying Another Chance or Storm Bird or Flora or Dear Don or Removing the Masks or No More Butts. There are tools on the net that can help you find what search terms people use and in what numbers. Here's where I got the search number for Australian Novels. I use (and swear by) an outfit that provides a complete suite of tools for such research. Just remember: put yourself in the shoes of the searcher, rather than the bookseller. The internet actually rewards giving. Give free information, get traffic. It really can be that simple!
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