Archive for November, 2005

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Reader Questions: What Blog Service Do You Recommend?

Tuesday, November 29th, 2005

What blog site would you recommend. I currently have a blog on Bloglines.com

http://www.bloglines.com/blog/KevinKingston it’s called, “The Real Estate Investors Blog” I find the format very easy to work with but am concerned that it is a bit tough for people to subscribe to. So I was just wondering if you guys knew of a Blog site that may be easy to subscribe to or even have some type of e-zine format or e-mail alert feature.

Thanks in advance!
Kevin Kingston

I’m not that familiar with Blogline’s service, to be honest.

There are really two types of blogging systems – software you host yourself on your web server and services that host the blog for you.

Software You Host

At BookLocker, we use WordPress to manage all our blogs. This is software you install on your own server. The default installation only allows you to create one blog. We’ve modified our version to allow for the creation of multiple blogs so we can offer these to our authors at no cost.

We also create our blogs under BookLocker subdomains. For example, this blog is under the URL: http://marketing.booklocker.com/. We could have put it under the URL http://www.booklocker.com/marketing. (In fact, it was under that URL for a while.) But it has been our experience that search engines more easily index subdomains. So Bloglines is probably not doing you any favors hosting your blog under its main URL.

Here are some of the more active BookLocker author blogs:

http://travel.booklocker.com/
http://exploringseventies.booklocker.com/
http://appalachian.booklocker.com/

Prior to WordPress, we used a piece of software called MovableType. It is a fabulous piece of software. In fact, our oldest and most popular author blog is still on it (we haven’t transitioned it to the new system yet). But MovableType made a change in the way they charge for the software – it is now per author – so the licensing for us was cost prohibitive given that we wanted to offer blogs to all our authors.

Hosted Blogging Services

Services that host the blog for you are what most people use. I usually recommend two options:

1.) TypePad – this is the hosted version MovableType, the software I discussed above. It costs money, but it is probably the best service out there. You should spring for the Pro version ($149.50 per year) because it offers the most flexibility.

2.) Blogger – this is a free service. Google owns it now. The trade-off for getting a blog for free is that Google runs ads on your blog. You can pay to have the ads removed. But if you are going to pay, I’d recommend just going with TypePad. It has more features for the money.

UPDATE: Jan Price writes: ” I am just reading your newletter and notice in the marketing blog your husband is hosting has some misinformation included. I use blogger and it does NOT run ads on my blogs. There is an option to add adsense or something but I haven’t yet run across any sites using it, thankfully.” – Thanks, Jan. Blogger did run ads on the free version at one time, but Google must have changed that policy.

A new hosted service to come on the scene is WordPress.com – a hosted version of the software we use. I’ve never played with it, but I imagine it works exactly like our version. It is free, so you might want to check it out as an option instead of Blogger.

Regarding your question about “subscribing”, what you are referring to is subscribing to the RSS feed of the blog. I’ve described RSS Feeds before, but an RSS feed is essentially a special URL that contains a list of the most recent posts on your blog. By monitoring that file with special software or through special web sites, a person can see when you add new content to your blog without having to visit it every day.

I read a study recently that only 12% of the Internet population uses RSS. That isn’t surprising because, as you touch on in your question, accessing RSS feeds requires jumping over a few technical hurdles.

First off, you need some sort of feed reader (also known as a feed aggregator) – that is the software or service that monitors RSS feeds and notifies you when sites get updated.

Here are comprehensive lists of feed readers for Windows and Mac. Some are free, but many cost money.

Bloglines, the service you are using to manage your blog, also doubles as a web-based feed reading service.

There is talk that the new version of Internet Explorer will have feed reading built in. Mac users already have this with their browser – Safari. And if you are a FireFox user, the feature is known as Live Bookmarks.

Anyway, for the average user it is pretty confusing. Which is probably why only 12% use RSS feeds.

I’ve recently found a service that basically emails you when a blog is updated. Blog owners can offer this to their readers. I have it on this blog (you can see the blank on the right under the heading “Enter Email Address:”. It is called FeedBlitz . The basic service is free. You can subscribe to the pay service to customize the emails that are sent out.

If you decide to add FeedBlitz to your blog, you can add it via the FeedBurner service. FeedBurner allows you to monitor who subscribes to your RSS feed, as well as add all sorts of neat features to enhance it.

Posted in blogs and rss, reader questions | 5 Comments »

Reader Questions: Contacting A List Of People By Email

Monday, November 28th, 2005

Is there a master mailing list somewhere that will hit all the websites that
should be informed about a no-fee writing competition? Or do I have to find
contact addresses for every writing website one by one?

Best of all possible regards,
Pat Hartman
Virtual Venice
http://www.virtualvenice.info/

Pat,

The short answer is no, there is no master list. You need to find the email addresses one by one.

The quality of a list of email addresses has a lot to do with the procedures one uses to build and maintain it. Here are the rules I go by:

1.) If the list was compiled by a third party, that party needs to have used a double opt-in sign-up process. What that means is the subscriber doesn’t just put his or her email address into a blank on a web page, but also confirms the subscription by responding to a set of instructions sent to that email address. This assures the actual owner of the email address entered it, and not some automated program or other person. Believe it or not, there are a lot of people who write programs that enter fake email addresses into sign-up forms. Sometimes it is done maliciously, but many times it is done to probe the script processing the subscription requests and see if it has any exploitable security holes.

2.) If you rent the list from a third-party, that third-party should physically send the message on your behalf. If that third-party simply gives you the list and lets you do your own mailing, you can be sure the list was not compiled using double opt-in methods. More than likely the addresses were harvested randomly from the Internet. It takes a great deal of resources and time to build a quality, double opt-in list. People who go through all that trouble simply do not hand over their hard work to anyone, no matter what the circumstances.

3.) The list should have a bounce rate of less than 5%. What that means is when you send out a mailing, the number of undeliverable emails should not be more than 5% of the total size of the list. Anything higher than that means the list has a lot of bad email addresses on it.

4.) Any email messages sent to a list should be done under the auspices of the list owner. If subscribers join a list expecting to receive emails from list owner Joe Sixpack and instead starts getting messages from Sally Housecoat, they will at best be confused and at worst be extremely pissed with you.

Now, that all said, you now probably will understand better when I tell you this – any list you personally do not have a hand in building is not worth your time. You can never be sure of how another party built their list or how they manage it day-to-day. And if they didn’t follow the rules I listed above, your reputation suffers by association.

Whenever I need to build a list for a specific, one-time mailing, I simply do the research to find the right web sites, newsletters and discussion lists to contact. Then I write a personalized, individual email to each prospect. I do not mass email the same generic message to everyone. Yes, it takes a lot longer to do it this way. But the results are much better.

Posted in email marketing, reader questions | No Comments »

Reader Question: What Is The Best Type Of Site For Selling Books

Monday, November 21st, 2005

So if it is between a blog or a website, which do you recommend if you are selling your book on it? Can a blog have pay pal associated with it for instance? Also, what are the advantages of a blog over an e-zine?

Willow

Blogs, web sites, and ezines are all really just variations of Internet publishing. They all use text and HTML code to do their things. So there is a lot of cross-over in functionality. But you need some idea of what you want to accomplish before you decide which one to do because one format may be better than another.

I personally push blogs to authors because most authors are not experienced in the technical side of the Internet. And blogs hide a lot of that technology from them while still giving them the benefits of a web site. But a blog is designed to be a format where you crank out short, pithy commentary on a regular basis. If you can’t sustain that, then a blog will do you no good.

A straight web site, on the other hand, is typically the opposite of a blog – lots of static, unchanging pages. Now that might be fine if your purpose is to sell a product, where the information on the page never really changes over time. But if you are trying to build an audience, that is not a good way to go. You want changing content. You aren’t going to get repeat readers if you don’t give them new stuff to read on a regular basis. The blog format just makes it easier to create new stuff.

An ezine typically means an electronic magazine or newsletter. It has columns and features and formally written articles. This is obviously designed to build readership because by definition the content is always changing. But again, it is a complicated endevor for an author. Blogs can acheive a similar effect for less effort.

See, I think this is where unknown authors get confused. The major purpose of their web sites should be to build readership, not sell books. Selling books is really an after-effect of building readership. If you have an audience, then everything else will follow.

To answer your specific PayPal question – yes, certainly you can add PayPal or some sort of shopping cart system to your blog.

Posted in blogs and rss, reader questions | 14 Comments »

Reader Question: Redirecting URLs So Search Spiders Will Follow

Monday, November 21st, 2005

I am thinking of getting a URL name equal to that of my book so people can search the title itself and find my page. If I do this, however, I would want to create a destination site (of this name) that would then link to the blog I’m building on Blogspot. This is a no-no according to this article. An alternative suggestions?

Jonathan

The best way to set up what you want to achieve is to not do the redirect at all, but host the blog under the URL under which you want to be found. So you should register the name you want, then find a web site hosting service – a place where you can build a web site under that URL.

If you want to use Blogspot, you can do want they call publishing via FTP. This allows you to use their system to create the blog, but use your web site hosting service to host the blog.

If you don’t mind paying for the service, you can use the blog hosting service TypePad. They have a feature called domain mapping that allows you to host your domain on their service. It is only available in their Plus and Pro packages, so you can’t get it for free.

If for whatever reason you don’t want to do the above, then you can do what is called domain, or URL, forwarding. Most domain registrars offer this for a modest annual fee. Basically, they set up what is called a permanent redirect to whatever alternate URL you tell them. So, for example, you could make the URL: http://www.YourBook.com/ go automatically to: http://YourBook.Blogspot.com. Permanent redirects are search engine friendly because they happen at the web server level, not the page level. They are designed specifically for situations where you have to move pages, or whole sites, to another computer on the Internet with a different URL.

Posted in blogs and rss, search engine marketing | No Comments »

Reader Question: Sending Press Releases Online

Friday, November 18th, 2005

Wow, I just wandered into your stuff on blogs and ended up with the good article on press releases. I converted my cousin Stan’s release for Growing Up in a Foxhole from Arial/Richtext to plain text. It worked but the photo of the book cover vanished. Can I not include it in a text only document?

Nope, you cannot. Text-only means just that – text only.

The etiquette for online releases is to send only text, with a link to any supporting files. Many corporate email systems strip off attachments if they are coming from unknown parties. The reason for this is to curtail the transmission of any viruses. Also, there is nothing worst than getting an email with a huge attachment from someone you don’t know and having it clog up your system. It happens more frequently than you’d think.

In fact, my email client is set to not download messages that are larger than 40K.

Some other tips:

+ Many computer systems use different fonts to render the email message. If the font you choose has different characters than the recipient’s computer, the characters will not render correctly. The safe bet is to save the message as “text only” with your word processor. The text only option uses only ASCII characters, which are viewable by all computers. If you have any non-ASCII characters in your document, you’ll be able to see and correct them at that time.

+ Always do hard line breaks at then end of each line of the message. I usually do them at 60 characters. Otherwise, the recipient may:

get a
message with
sentences
that
looks like this

versus:

a message with sentences that looks like this.

+ Always make sure any URLs are on one line and less than 80 characters long. Most systems insert line breaks after 80 characters. If your URL goes over that, there is a good chance it will get split over two lines, thus breaking it. Example:

Correct —
http://www.booklocker.com/books/2187.html

Incorrect –
http://www.booklocker.com/bo
oks/2187.html

+ Always be sure to put the “http://” in front of the URL (http://www.booklocker.com/ versus www.booklocker.com). Most email readers use the “http://” as an indicator to know the series of letters is a web address and should make it clickable.

Posted in press coverage, reader questions | No Comments »

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