Archive for December, 2005

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Targeting Podcasts Instead of Radio

Tuesday, December 20th, 2005

Angela (my partner/wife) ran across this today:

Author Paul A. Toth seeks established writers who want to tell their stories on TothWorld: The Paul A. Toth Podcast.

It started me thinking that podcasts could be an excellent outlet for the self-published author.

A podcast is kinda like TIVO, but for radio. People create and record audio programs with their own equipment, then put them on the Internet as a downloadable audio file. There is special software (or in the case of iTunes, the iTunes software itself) that looks for new files and downloads them automatically to the subscriber’s computer (or in the case of iTunes, their ipod).

So, for example, if I were a subscriber to a certain podcast, my iTunes software would pull down the audio file each time the podcast creators put up a new program. The software then automatically puts it into my ipod so I can listen to it whenever I want. That is what’s cool about it. I don’t have to remember to visit the site and download the latest show. The iTunes software does it for me.

And unlike live radio, I don’t have to be listening at the time the program is recorded. (That is what makes it like TIVO.).

Home-grown programs have been around since last year. But the phenomenon exploded this past Spring because Apple made podcasts part of the iTunes music store. So now millions of people are getting exposed to this format. And lots of mainstream media programs are putting their shows in podcast form too.

If you don’t have iTunes, you can use other software to download these programs. Juice (formerly called iPodder) is probably the best.

http://juicereceiver.sourceforge.net/index.php

Here is a directory of podcasts programs:

http://www.podshow.com/directories.html

Authors can promote their book by finding the creators of these podcasts and pitching interviews. Or, if they are so inclined, creating their own podcasts.

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Different People Get Different Results from Google

Monday, December 19th, 2005

Here is a good article on why people who do the same search on Google can get different results.

Why do I see different Google results than my clients?

Essentially, the answer is this: Google is pulling its results from any one of an estimated 80 different data centers spread throughout the country. Which data center is dependent on the geographic location of the searcher. Those data centers aren’t in perfect sych with each other.

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Search Engine And Directory Registration – The Basics

Monday, December 12th, 2005

People expend lots of energy and discussion on getting listed in the big search engines. There are, though, really only two things you need to know about this subject:

1.) There are only three major search engines nowadays worth the bother – Google, Yahoo and MSN.
2.) Aside from creating good content and making sure your site is reachable by these engine’s spiders, there isn’t a lot more you can do.

So the moral of the story is: A.) build a content-rich site, and B.) Submit the URL to Google, Yahoo, and MSN. In other words, submit and forget.

Now, that said, there are literally hundreds of subject-specific search engines and directories worth registering your book with.

Say, for example, your book is about rare coins. You would want to make sure the web site supporting your book is listed in Coinlink.

As you might have guessed, there are directories of search engines that only index content on specific subjects. Here are the major directories for finding this type of search engine:

http://www.beaucoup.com/
http://aip.completeplanet.com/
http://www.searchability.com/
http://www.search-engines-search-engine.com/

Another method is to go to Google and, together with keywords that describe your book, add, in quotes, the following phrases after it:

“submit your site”
“submit a site”
“submit site”
“suggest a site”
“suggest site”
“add a site”
“add url”
“add a url”
“suggest a url”

So, for example, if a keyword phrase describing your book is “rare coins”, you’d format the queries like this:

“rare coins”, “submit your site”
“rare coins”, “submit a site”
“rare coins”, “submit site”
“rare coins”, “suggest a site”
“rare coins”, “suggest site”
“rare coins”, “add a site”
“rare coins”, “add url”
“rare coins”, “add a url”
“rare coins”, “suggest a url”

Cut-and-paste each, one at a time, into Google’s search blank.

What you should get back are all the web pages with those two phrases on them. That is in theory, anyway. What you actually get back are web pages with those two phrases on them, mixed together with lots of web pages that aren’t relevant. You’ll have to pick through the results and pull out the pages relevant to your needs. You’ll want to look for sites that are clearly directories and that also accept submissions.

Once you go through the above processes, you should end up with a list of search engines and directories that accept submissions from Web sites that cover a specific topic.

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Amazon Affiliate Campaign

Wednesday, December 7th, 2005

I’ve been tossing around a book marketing idea for a while. I’m going to throw it up here and ask for some feed back.

For lack of a better name, I call it an “Amazon Affiliate Campaign”.

Before I go into the details, though, here is some background info to help you understand where I’m coming from.

A long time ago we used to do a thing call a reciprocal linking campaign (or just “linking campaign” for short). The idea was to search out sites and ask them to put in a link to your site if you, in turn, put in a link to their site.

Back in the egalitarian days of the Internet, this strategy worked pretty well. But those days have been gone for a long time. People just don’t link to strange sites anymore without good reason.

So here is my twist on this…find Amazon Affiliate stores that contain books on the same subject as the one you are promoting, and make a request that they add your book to their store.

Quick side note here to explain an Amazon Affiliate, for those who don’t know. Amazon.com provides a program whereby sites can list books in Amazon.com’s inventory and get a cut of any sales that result. No one outside of Amazon.com knows for sure how many affiliate stores exist, but the estimate is in the hundreds of thousands. So there are plenty of prospects to choose from.

The big trick, of course, is how does one go about finding Amazon Affiliates to approach. There is no public list (at least that I’m aware of). But I think I’ve figured it out.

Enter this into the advanced search screen of Google:

In the blank labeled: with all of the words, enter these words (include quotes):

“In association with Amazon.com”, bookstore, (KEYWORDS DESCRIBING YOUR BOOK.)

Then go to the heading labeled: Domain, change the pull-down menu value from only to don’t, then enter “amazon.com” in the blank.

What this does:

It tells Google: “Find pages that have the keywords “amazon.com”, “bookstore” and (YOUR KEYWORDS), but don’t show me anything from amazon.com itself.”

You should get, among other things, a list of Amazon Affiliate bookstores that have books on subjects similar to your book.

For example, let’s say your book is about birds. Entering the following:

“In association with Amazon.com”, “bookstore”, “birds”

and

“Don’t return results from the site or domain: amazon.com”

Will yield results like this:

http://www.parrotparrot.com/bookstore/
http://www.surfbirds.com/Book%20Store/bkstoreindex.shtml
http://www.hikingwebsite.com/stores/books/

You then approach these people. Tell them your book is listed on Amazon.com. Ask them if they will put a link to your book in their store.

Some variations on the search:

+ substitute: “In association with Amazon.com” in the search string with just: “amazon.com”.

+ try the search with a variety of keywords related to your book, not just one or two.

Some caveats:

1.) Not every result will be a bookstore, or a site you’ll want to deal with. You’re going to get a lot of junk and duplicate sites. You’ll need to pick through the rubble to find the gems.

2.) You might need to send the store owner a review copy before he or she agrees to add your book. Personally, I think this is a better use of review copies. The likelihood someone will actually look at it is much higher. Most review copies sent to traditional book reviewers end up in the garbage.

3.) These instructions call for using Google as your search tool. You’ll get more refined results if you use metasearch software – basically software that sends the search query to multiple search engines at once and deletes the duplicates before showing you the results. The best tool for Windows PCs I’ve found for doing this is Arelis. It is actually a tool specifically for doing traditional linking campaigns, but it can be easily adapted for this specific purpose. Unfortunately, there isn’t as good a tool for the Mac crowd (of which I am now part). The best tool I’ve found so far for the Mac is DEVONAgent.

This strategy is much better than simply asking a bunch of sites to link to your book. You are helping people make more money and improve their bookstores versus asking for a free link. Plus it is easy. Adding an additional book to their store is trivial since the book is already in Amazon.com’s database.

I’d love to hear feedback on what authors think of this idea. Add them to the comments section below.

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Blogs Are Still Useful Even If They Aren’t Under Their Own Domain

Monday, December 5th, 2005

In a recent comment on a past post, Pam of Nerds Eye View wrote:

Another note I’d like to share – I read an article recently that emphatically stated you should host your own domain if your blog is a self-promotion tool. They liked using a yourblog.typepad.com or yourblog.blogger.com to using Hotmail for your business email. Your mention of publishing via FTP is the way to get around this.

In case I wasn’t clear, it is always the best situation when you host a blog/site under your own domain. Moreover, there is evidence that at least Google factors in the length of time you’ve had the domain registered, as well as the length of time you register a new domain for. So a domain registered in 1995 would carry a lot more weight than one registered in 2005. And a site registered today for 10 years carries more weight than once registered for just a year.

Unfortunately, though, registering a domain, editing the DNS record so it points to the right server, and putting up some HTML pages so a web site works is confusing for many people. That should not be a roadblock to creating a blog.

One can overcome the advantage of owning your own domain simply by creating good content on a regular basis. This is the factor that trumps everything. Focus on producing good content (detailed information that isn’t replicated on some other site). From that, work on getting people to read and link to it. If you can do that, then good search engine exposure will follow.

For example, we have several sites that are subdomains under booklocker.com and they get indexed just fine. We even have an author blog under our old system, which organized them as directories under a subdomain, and it ranks well. It is even recognized as a Forbes Best Of The Web pick.

So to put it simply, do a blog under your own domain if you can. (TypePad has a nice feature called Domain Mapping that gives you the benefits without the hassle and Blogger lets you FTP to other servers.) If you just can’t figure it out, don’t let that stop you. Blogs are still useful when hosted under a subdomain. And it is certainly a much, much better situation than doing nothing at all.

Posted in blogs and rss, search engine marketing | 1 Comment »

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