AuthorHouse Blog

An article by Template Monster entitled “You are Being Lied About Reciprocal Links” cites some research by WebSideStory saying:

Exchanging links has been an important part of generating traffic since the concept of Internet marketing was first established, but at least 90% of people looking to trade links don’t understand the real benefits and, therefore, fail to make the most of them.

The vast majority of web site owners think that exchanging links is only helpful because it can boost their rankings in search engines such as Google.com. They are however, useful for this purpose since the number of links back to a site is figured into ranking calculations. But according to WebSideStory’s StatMarket Web site optimization service, search engines account for only little more than 13% of an average web site’s traffic.

I would agree that most website/blog owners don’t understand how to build “good” link programs vs. “a” link program. For example, if you are blogging on the topic of home improvement to help build a platform for your “How to Roof a House” book, adding a link to your blog to your local library, your best friend Bubba’s fishing blog, and vacation pics on Flikr.com won’t really help your cause. Likewise, if you buddy Bubba links to you and calls the link “My Buddy’s Blog”, it won’t help either.

When search engines evaluate links, they weigh in a lot of other factors besides the gross number of links. For starters, they look at the relevancy of your links. If we use the same example, a link to Home Depot’s “Top 10 Roofer Mistakes” articles, Louisiana Pacific’s dealer locator site, or link to the publisher of “How to Roof a House” these links are seen as relevant to your blog.

Another thing to consider is links “to” your blog. This is very important as they create in-bound traffic and tell search engines you are more relevant than blogs with fewer links. Search engines assume that a blog/website with a lot of links is more important than a blog/website with fewer links. Bubba’s link to you won’t hurt you, but then again it won’t really help you that much either. Now if Home Depot links back to you, that will definitely be a homerun in your link building program.

You also need to look at establishing links from websites or blogs that have more traffic and visibility than yourself. Bubba is a nice guy, but unless he is a famous guy or has a cult online following, his low traffic will tell the search engines he’s a virtual “nobody”. Home Depot is a “somebody” and can help you with your rankings. To find out how you can tell, read my Handy Little Browser Plug In for Authors post.

The last piece of the puzzle that most link builders forget to plan for is the name of the link to your blog. If the name of the link to your blog reinforces the keyphrases or words you are trying to be found under in the search engines, this will help your search rankings for those phrases. (Give me an example, Tom!) Okay, let’s take our example of the “How to Roof a House” book blog that we have been using. Ideally, anyone searching for “roof repair”, “how to roof a house”, or “roof house” will find this blog in the organic or free listings on Google. The common words are “roof” and “house” in all three phrases.  So, if the link to your blog had the words “roof” and “house” in them, it would greatly help your link program and search engine ranking. Home Depot would put a link on their website to “Tom Britt’s How to Roof Your House Blog” or “Roof Your House Book”, these words reinforce your own blog’s metadata and it helps you build more traffic. With this in mind, go back to Bubba and tell him to put “Roof Your House Book” on his blog and at least get this working for you.

Believe it or not, blogging turned 10 years old this month according to Guardian Unlimited. “After a quiet start they revolutionised the web; now one is born every second,” the writer Bobby Johnson cited.

“Check this out. Amazing!” It took just a brief sentence, and after those four words a revolution followed.

The first entry on Scripting News effectively ushered in the first blog 10 years ago. In the intervening years these online diaries have been touted as the future of media, labelled “pathetic drivel”, and caused court cases, prison sentences and international incidents. But love them or loathe them, bloggers around the world have ensured incredible growth for the medium. Latest figures indicate an estimated 70m blogs in existence, with around 1.5m posts being written every day.

Read the whole story and see a timeline

Before I give you my two cents on which self-publishing company is the best, I have to admit that I have been working with AuthorHouse for over three years as an independent consultant so my opinion is a bit tainted to say the least. They do not pay me to post on this blog for them, TomBritt.com is all mine. But I figured it was time that I speak up and tell people why AuthorHouse is such a great self-publisher for so many authors.

I’ve read several blogs and websites posting their reviews of self-publishing companies, some of which I’ll try to link to here: Top 10 Reviews (AuthorHouse is ranked #2), How to Publish a Book (AuthorHouse is recommended), and Write and Publish Your Book (Top 5).

Obviously, I recommend AuthorHouse for a couple reasons:

• Experience: AuthorHouse was the second self-publishing business over 8 years ago (behind XLibris) and will most likely be around tomorrow as well. With over 87,000 self-publishing companies around, you want to work with someone that will most likely be there for you down the road.
• Most title counts: AuthorHouse has over 40,000 live titles in Ingrams right now, more than any self-publishing company. While they have not landed all self-publishing clients, they have landed the most.
• Personal attention: The new process adopted by AuthorHouse in 2004 really does put the author in the middle of the process. Authors have a really high approval rating 30 days after they publish with AuthorHouse (above 90%)
• Marketing services: AuthorHouse offers several marketing services for authors post-publishing. While most authors know how to write, they are not so competent in marketing themselves.
• Self-selected royalties: The ability to select your own royalty schedule is a big plus. Some self-publishing companies fix your royalties at 10-15% and that’s it. With AuthorHouse, you can charge what you want for your books above the wholesale cost you pay for each book.
• Still your book: You maintain the rights to your books, leaving the options open down the road to be acquired by a traditional publisher, have your work adapted to film, or sign a licensing deal for merchandise/audio/film/etc.
• Bookseller return program: If you want to be able to go to bookstores and have them order your books, AuthorHouse has the only program of it’s kind that allows them to return your print on demand books. Sure, other self-publishers have come up with programs, but they manage the inventory themselves or force the bookseller to purchase/ship back to them.

Remember, I’m biased because I know the folks at AuthorHouse well and have come to appreciate what they do for an aspiring author for only $698. However, I think that if you gave AuthorHouse a chance you’d find that you would be an AuthorHouse evangelist, too. Referrals are still their largest source of new customers.

A lot of you understand how to add Google AdSense ads to your blog or website and make money from clicks you generate to their AdWords partners. If you are using Blogger, Typepad, or Wordpress, this is pretty easy to do with either a widget or click of a button.

Where bloggers and website owners sometimes miss a golden opportunity is through paid affiliate programs. Similar to AdSense, affiliate marketers pay you either a percentage of the sale or per click to advertise their products or services on your website. Perhaps the largest and easiest to use (in my opinion) is Commission Junction (www.cj.com). Signing up as a “publisher” is free and allows you to peruse their thousands of affiliate programs that they manage and sign-up for those that would be most relevant to your website or blog. Each affiliate lists their company information, what they will pay you, and you can view the creative banners and ads that you can choose from to place on your site. Commission Junction also tracks your performance for each campaign you subscribe to and manages the payments to you as well.

As a general rule, I don’t recommend affiliate programs like this or even Amazon’s affiliate program because they generally only pay if someone purchases a product, subscription, or service as a direct result of your click. I would much rather make $.25-$2.50 per click than 10% of a purchase. How many times have you:

1. Seen a banner ad
2. Clicked on it
3. Bought that item or service

Affiliate programs do provide one service for you that AdSense ads won’t: build a hallo of brands that reinforce yours. Associating yourself (almost said ‘affiliating’) with brands like Wal-Mart, Amazon, GoDaddy, or eBay can sometimes bring an air of validity to your otherwise struggling blog. Casual users of your website will never know you aren’t making any money on those ads, they will think that they are paying you to be there. In some ways, they are, but it might take 1 million clicks to get that 10% of the $6.95 book off of Amazon.

Buying television ads through broadcast and cable networks is a lot easier these days thanks to SpotRunner.com. The old days of calling each television station, meeting with reps, shooting commercials, and paying for “branding” ads that you hoped would generate a few calls at 2:00 am are over. Certainly, cable television has changed the way network ads are bought and sold, but SpotRunner has taken it to a whole new level.

The first hurdle that SpotRunner.com solves is the lack of professional quality video for commercials. They inventory hundreds of canned commercials for all types of businesses. Just search their database by keyword or industry and watch generic videos online to find your next commercial. Once you have picked one out, you simply upload your logo and company information and SpotRunner.com customizes the audio track and puts your logo and company information in the commercial.

The second hurdle that SpotRunner.com helps you overcome is access to any and all broadcast and cable networks around the country. You can search and select networks by area, MSA, channel, and even select airtime preferences…all online! That’s right, you can become your own placement agency.

Most importantly, they allow you to place your own ads, schedule your airtime, create your own budget, and pay for the ads all online. This is truly a self-directed, or self-published, model for television commercials.

If you need some help, no problem. SpotRunner has a staff of sales people that can provide assistance over the phone. If you want to place an ad, need help creating an ad that is not on SpotRunner, or want to help Tom Britt out (who doesn’t, right?), send me a note and I can purchase your ads for you and they pay me 5%. Don’t worry, I won’t charge you to help but I can get a commercial cut for you if you like at an additional fee.

All media outlets are going to pay per performance and targeting their audiences, even radio. This deal between Google and Clear Channel will help save a hurting radio industry, but expand the PPC targeting offering that Google can provide. According to the NYT article, Clear Channel isn’t exactly diving into bed with Google, only giving them up to 5% of their inventory to sell.

Think of all the AdWords clients, bidding away on keywords through Google.com and the millions of AdSense partnering websites and blogs. Now imagine that these clients can post a :30, :10, or even :60 second audio file to their account and place targeted radio ads based on a show’s topic, timeslot, or MSA.

Spotrunner.com is already offering targeted television media buys around the country with a similar model, minus the keyword targeting of course. I’m doing some tests in Branson where we are hosting a two-day writers conference in late May. I’ll report back on how they perform.

Full story from New York Times

If you have a blog, website, or social networking page, throwing a few of Google’s AdSense ads on your sidebars can help you make a little money. You won’t get rich, but you might make enough to pay your hosting bill each month.

AdSense is a program that allows you to place ad code on your website which reads the text on your website and matches pay-per-click ads from advertisers in their AdWords program. For each click you generate to one of their partner advertisers, you receive a piece of the action. It doesn’t require a lot of programming and you have full control over the look& feel of your ads, placement, and even keep competitors off your website.

Even if you are selling banner ads yourself, supplement your rotation with a few AdSense ads, especially if you are blogging on a competitive industry (insurance, legal, automotive, publishing, etc.).

Thanks to the Cape Cod Writers Center in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, I’ll be hosting a two-day workshop on May 11th and 12th for area authors at the Holiday Inn in Hyannis. Friday night will be an Internet marketing workshop from 6:00-9:00 pm where I will give everyone a primer on how the Internet works, set up a blog, buy online ads, and even play the role of “site doctor” taking questions from the audience about their own website issues.

Saturday will be an all-day workshop with the morning session covering the publishing industry basics, traditional vs. vanity vs. self publishing alternatives, and an economics of publishing “show me the money” presentation. After lunch, I will step attendees through the process of self publishing, reading contracts, preparing files, and go through an actual live book to show how it works.

I’ll be sticking around Sunday to do one-on-ones with people that want more time, have additional questions, or just want to talk about their personal situation without the entire class hearing about it. It should be fun!

If you are interested in attending and live in the area, visit CapeCodWritersCenter.com!

Corporations and publicists alike are hiring bloggers by the truckload to create in-bound traffic, buzz, and positive PR for their brands. If you are looking to make a little extra money by writing for various blogs, each requiring different backgrounds of expertise, visit the ProBlogger Job Board. You can search through job postings for bloggers, video bloggers, and podcasters from every type of online business imaginable. Why not establish yourself as an industry expert and get paid for it?

AuthorHouse’s Director of Author Development and WriteStuff Faculty member Tom Britt was interviewed this week by Sharon Gamble of WFYI Radio in Indianapolis, Indiana. They discussed Tom’s involvement with WriteStuff, who attends these conferences, and what to look for with this year’s 2007 WriteStuff Writers’ Tour.