September 2nd, 2010
As the battle heats up in the e-reader war there is great opportunity, for the consumer. For the content provider things are a bit more difficult. Every device seems to have it’s own proprietary software — rendering (at best) a few other formats useless.
So what format should you use? At this point there is no one best answer, just strategic compromises. For instance, the Kindle has huge market penetration and a fantastic marketplace but only renders black and white. So children’s books will be a bit lack luster. The iPad renders color but some users complain about reading on a backlit screen and certain formats require additional software. Android Handhelds are portable, render in color but don’t read the popular MobiPocket format. Barnes and Noble Nook only reads three of the thirteen formats available but they have distribution in their favor.
So you’ve written a book which means you already know who your audience is. Now figure out what devices they’re likely using and build to them. Create a couple formats and let your fans decide how to fulfill their needs.
Resource: Wikipedia published this handy sortable grid to help you decide the best way(s) to publish your masterpiece.
Tags: Amazon Kindle, Apple, Barnes & Noble, Barnes & Noble Nook, E-book, ipad, kindle, Noble Nook
Posted in Book Publishing, Resources, The Mobile Wild West | No Comments »
August 27th, 2010
Meet Bob – he’s the robot with pages – in fact, he can print and bind a 300-page book in about four minutes. If only I could afford the $150,000 price tag. Check it out The Espresso Book Machine.
Posted in Book Publishing, Random | No Comments »
August 24th, 2010
In general, we have become a get-it-now society. I think this is partially due to the amount of information we receive to our brains daily. You hear the phrase “I don’t have the bandwidth” all the time. People are overwhelmed. Mostly we are overwhelmed by choices. I bring this up because it is so important to remember this when you market your book. Have you made it possible for buyers to easily buy your book from anywhere on your website? Is your book even available yet?
This begs an entirely different question: When do you begin promoting your book?
The answer is: as soon as possible. But, here’s the key: Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Author, Book, Business, Shopping, Website
Posted in Articles, Internet Marketing, Tweet this, Website Wow | No Comments »
August 17th, 2010
I get close to 700 e-mails a day. It’s exhausting. Perhaps a fourth of my incoming e-mails are SPAM, so I tag them as junk and they go away eventually (only to be replaced by others). Many people ask me about this modern day phenomenon: “how do you get rid of SPAM?” Well, the simple answer is “you don’t.” You can mark it as junk or bounce it and that will help. There are some tools and SPAM combatting methods that I will list Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: 2002, Akismet, email, Facebook, Joomla, Spam, Uniform Resource Locator, WordPress
Posted in Articles, Internet Marketing, Resources, Tweet this | No Comments »
May 13th, 2010
Why Are Web Designers Such Flakes? A Reality Check.
Circling the drain of unresponsive or missing in action web designers is a common dilemma. The Question is this: As a self-respecting author with a plan and a purpose, how do you choose a designer you can afford and rely upon?
As a small publisher, or self-published author, you are faced with the high-cost of publishing a book. Your ever-growing budget includes editors, book cover and interior design, maybe a book coach or adviser, printing costs, fulfillment needs, marketing … my goodness, where does it end? When does the author start making money? Well, this is a question for another article all together. The point here is, how much should you allocate to the added expense of Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Author, Business, Computer programming, Design, Interior design, Web design, Web Design & Development, Website
Posted in Articles, Internet Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Tweet this, Website Wow | No Comments »
May 11th, 2010
Articles about Blogging are for the most part boring. It’s the same story over and over: you should be blogging—blogging drives traffic—blogging is a great marketing tool…. And yet, most bloggers quit after a few weeks, or worse yet, never get started.
There are a slew of reasons people have for not blogging: I don’t have time. It doesn’t seem to be doing my site any good—no one reads my blogs? I don’t know what to blog about.
The truth is, blogging does help drive traffic, blogging will build your audience, and it will establish your name in the marketplace! The trick is this: you have to be patient and consistent. You won’t see results right away, in fact, it can take up to a year before your blog builds a steady and loyal following—but it will, and that’s the exciting part.
Admittedly, when you first start blogging, it may seem like you are stuck on a desert island pontificating to the palm trees. Persevere!! Those smoke signals will reach your market eventually, and here’s the best part: even if no one reads your blogs, search engine spiders do. Here’s how it works: the more you blog, the more relevant content (and keywords) you have for crawlers to index.
Let’s say for example you are trying to increase your ranking for the term “kids and guns.” Google will rank your site for this term if it appears in your site frequently and it is relevant to the other content of your site. The best way to ensure relevance for this term is to blog about it frequently—don’t overdo it though, always blog as if you are speaking directly to your audience, saying the same thing over and over is boring. Even if you don’t think you have an audience now, you will. With this example, after a few months of blogging, your site might start to appear in the search engines for “kids and guns,” and slowly people will start to find you, read your blog, and tell others about you. If your content is relevant to this topic, readers might subscribe to your RSS feed or book mark your blog.
You see, it’s not really about how many people are commenting on your blog—although it’s certainly nice to get feedback. In the beginning, it’s about creating content! You know that saying, if you build it they will come? Well, this is true, but you have to upkeep your blog by adding new content a minimum of once a week—otherwise the cobwebs will build up and no one will ever visit your blog—believe it or not, Internet spiders and crawlers don’t like cobwebs (bad Internet humor).
Chances are, if your inspired your readers will be too.
Tags: Blog, Google, Marketing, RSS, Search Engine Optimization, United States, Web crawler, Web search engine
Posted in Articles, Internet Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Tweet this | 3 Comments »
May 8th, 2010
Google offers many support tools for authors. One of my favorites is Google Alerts. This is the clipping service of the Internet. I’m interested in Internet Marketing for Authors, so I ask Google to notify me anytime these words appear online.
I recommend that you setup a few Google Alerts for things you are interested in (five to ten). This will help you stay on top of new trends, research your topic, and also tell you what your competition is doing. Remember, it’s okay to share your findings with your readers, in fact they will appreciate it if you do all the research and become their number one resource for valuable content (think Huffington Post). While your at it, setup an alert for your name—you want to know what others are saying about you.
Word of caution: Too many alerts will clog up your in box and drive you crazy. Also, be specific. For example, I placed the alert for my name in quotes: “Jeniffer Thompson.” This ensures that I am notified when my complete name (spelled correctly) appears somewhere online. Otherwise I would get a notice for every Jennifer, Jeniffer, Jenniffer and or any other similar variation online (of which there are thousands).
When it comes to Internet Marketing you need to be mindful of how you spend your time lest you reach critical burn out and move to a cabin somewhere in the backwoods of Wyoming (that sounds pretty good).
Tags: Business, Companies, Google, Google Alert, Internet Marketing, Marketing and Advertising, Search, search engines, Tools, twitter
Posted in Internet Marketing, Tweet this | No Comments »
May 7th, 2010
For many years I have recommended that authors host their blogs on their own servers. I have several reasons for this way of thinking. Firstly, as authors, we are attempting to drive traffic to our websites, to draw in our audience, and to make the sale. Placement within the search engines is an important step in this process. However, the only way to gain placement is to be ranked for keywords that your potential audience is searching for. See, this is how they find you, which is way more effective than standing on a street corner shouting the merits of your wares.
A blog ensures that you have fresh, relevant content posted to your site frequently. This is important because the search engine bots and spiders are out their scanning websites for, you guessed it: fresh, relevant content. If you have a stale website then not only will your audience lose interest, so will the spiders. The blog is the perfect author-marketing tool, and there are so many good platforms to choose from: WordPress, Blogger…rrr, well, until now.
This new fact is important.
Blogger has discontinued FTP Publishing. This means that Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Blog, Blogger, Google Analytics, Open source, twitter, Web search engine, Website, WordPress
Posted in Articles, Internet Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Tweet this | 3 Comments »
April 21st, 2010
I’ve always advocated the use of images to break up text on the screen and draw attention to your words. After, all a picture’s worth a 1,000 words right? Well yes, but, here’s an interesting thought. What if everyone is using the same photo? What then?
Since I opened my design house (Monkey C Media) in 2004 I’ve become acutely aware of how common stock images are worldwide. One micro-stock house is iStock.com – which of course is an inexpensive place to buy royalty free stock photography and images. It’s a great tool for finding just the right image to place on your postcard, website, in blog posts, and even on your book cover. Unfortunately, the secret is out.





It’s kind of creepy. Everywhere I go I see the same five people advertising myriad products and services. They are on billboards, in magazine ads, on the home page of medical sites, attorney websites, family counseling sites, and believe it or not, I’ve even seen these same people posing as the legitimate owners of various companies. These people really get around.
Stock images are a necessary evil; they make it possible for anyone to buy relatively high-quality images to promote themselves. So, what do you do? First, check and see how many downloads your desired image has had before choosing it to represent your company. Second, look into a more exclusive stock house like Getty Images where the images will be more expensive, but the usage way lower. Third, consider hiring a photographer. When it comes to your brand, the investment will be worth it.
Tags: Advertising, Arts and Entertainment, Business, Getty Images, Photograph, Photography, Stock, Stock photography
Posted in Internet Marketing, Tweet this | 5 Comments »
April 19th, 2010
Word to the Wise: Don’t lose your URL. Many people are tempted to purchase a URL (domain name, like www.Jeniffer Thompson.com for example) for five years or more so they don’t have to think about it again. Well guess what—you do want to think about. I can’t tell you how many calls I’ve received from someone whose website went down because they let a URL expire. What’s worse, is that most of those people had no idea where they purchased the URL or how to get it back.
Quick TIP: if you can’t remember where you purchased your URL, you can find out here: http://whois.domaintools.com. This website will tell you who purchased it, when it expires/expired, and most importantly the email associated with that URL.
How does this happen? Well, a Registrar will notify you that a URL is getting ready to expire, but if you no longer use that email address, you’ll never get the notification. Once a URL expires, you have 30 days to get it back, otherwise it becomes available for purchase from anyone. Yikes.
With time, URLs become “seasoned.” This means that they are ranked and indexed by search engines like Google. This takes time and is valuable to your Internet Marketing efforts. If you lose your URL, you’ll have to start all over and that is, well, that’s unnecessarily tragic.
So, don’t think of your URL as something you need to buy and forget, think of it as your anchor, the foundation for all of your work. Without it, things begin to crumble, if not completely crash.
Tags: Business, Domain name, Google, Uniform Resource Locator, Web Design and Development, Web search engine, Website
Posted in Internet Marketing, Tweet this | No Comments »
January 27th, 2010
One of the best ways to optimize your website and increase your visibility is to have lots of incoming links—that is, lots of sites that link to your site. The higher the number of incoming links you have, the higher you are ranked in search engines like Google. Of course, it’s best that these sites are already ranked in Google and have a certain amount of popularity. Think of it like you would the schoolyard politics of popularity: Let’s say you have 150 really unpopular friends in junior-highschool (follow me here), this doesn’t make you popular—you are judged in accordance with whom you hang with. This is also true with Google’s ranking system. If 150 unranked sites link to you, you have gained nothing. However, if 10 really popular, highly-ranked sites link to you, Google assumes you have something of value to offer and they increase your ranking, and you gain more visibility.
But this is not why I decided to write on this subject. What I really want to talk about is anchor text and how you can leverage it to promote yourself online.
Whenever you add a link to your site (even within the pages of your own site) the words that people click on (the link) is called anchor text. For example, if you use the word “here” as the clickable word (the link) that people click on to learn more, you are highlighting “here” as the notable subject. I’m sure you have seen this – click HERE to learn more and then you physically click “here.” This used to be common practice, especially for people leading visitors to pages within the same site. The truth is, this is a missed opportunity to promote your subject and optimize your site for a viable term. It is better to use words that describe what you are promoting. What you really want to promote and optimize for is your company name, or maybe your book name, or your product name, or maybe a service you offer.
For example: let’s say I want to promote my speaking service (which I do). I could tell you to click here to learn more about my speaking topics OR I could say something like: Jeniffer Thompson is a professional speaker…. OR Jeniffer Thompson offers seminars on Internet Marketing for authors.
Because I have used a keyword phrase as my link (my anchor text) Google will index my site for that term. And, if someone does a Google search for “seminars on Internet Marketing for authors,” they just might find my site—because Google now ranks my site for that term. The more this term appears on my site—the more Google will view it as relevant content and the higher I will appear in the search engines for that term.
So, next time you are writing a blog post, remember this: A blog post is a link. Strategically choose words that you want indexed in the search engines. Of course, make sure it’s relevant to your topic or people will never take you seriously and ultimately, every time you write content for your site you should be speaking directly to your audience, not to a search engine.
That’s all for now. I look forward to adding more tips weekly, so check back soon.
Oh, one more thing: Jeniffer Thompson offers seminars on Internet Marketing for authors (hee hee)
Tags: Add new tag, Anchor text, Google, Internet Marketing, promote online, Ranking, Search, Search Engine, Search Engine Optimization, Tools, Web Design and Development, Web search engine, Website
Posted in Internet Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Website Wow | 1 Comment »