Monday, November 30, 2020
Web Marketing VI
To keep you informed about what this is about, 1) I am a prolific writer with many books, but they don't sell; this could be because I'm a bad writer (runs in the family), or could be because I do all my own marketing, and do it quite poorly. I after all dump these books in a sea of self-published work; I don't rely on publishers at all. i rely mostly on this system of blogs and tweets that nobody reads. I'm working on it though.
The statistics are in for Dec. 1. November was better than October for people actually looking at blogs, but since the running averages reflect Sept-Nov., they are still pretty anemic, and only four of the top twenty went up. More than four of the top twenty went up in views in the month, though; things are looking a little better. I also began passionately using some of them; I posted on eighteen of the twenty nine, some several times, and that's actually better for me; usually I only do a dozen. My goal is to use them actively.
It's come down to about twenty-nine on my main system, and another five on my press blogs, which i care about, because the press will ultimately sell the books, i hope. i'm not sure they are related though. lots of my main blogs link to the press blogs but hey, book sales are anemic too. who knows what you have to do to keep things afloat.
My focus really will be to make each one look good, so that when a visitor comes, they linger, they're entertained, they learn something. Whether they link to the press blogs and buy a book, who cares. Nobody buys books anymore anyway. Let's just say, if they know who I am, I've succeeded on some level.
Does anyone actually make blogs work? Just curious.
The statistics are in for Dec. 1. November was better than October for people actually looking at blogs, but since the running averages reflect Sept-Nov., they are still pretty anemic, and only four of the top twenty went up. More than four of the top twenty went up in views in the month, though; things are looking a little better. I also began passionately using some of them; I posted on eighteen of the twenty nine, some several times, and that's actually better for me; usually I only do a dozen. My goal is to use them actively.
It's come down to about twenty-nine on my main system, and another five on my press blogs, which i care about, because the press will ultimately sell the books, i hope. i'm not sure they are related though. lots of my main blogs link to the press blogs but hey, book sales are anemic too. who knows what you have to do to keep things afloat.
My focus really will be to make each one look good, so that when a visitor comes, they linger, they're entertained, they learn something. Whether they link to the press blogs and buy a book, who cares. Nobody buys books anymore anyway. Let's just say, if they know who I am, I've succeeded on some level.
Does anyone actually make blogs work? Just curious.
Monday, November 23, 2020
Web marketing V
I am currently depressed as I am not selling a whole lot of books, and it could be, as I've said, that I'm just not that great a writer. Or it could be that I gave a lot of them away on the web, basically, and you can probably read the best of my stories here, since I put them avidly on the web for years before I decided to package and sell them. And nobody buys haiku, though it turns out that someone in Japan does, and I occasionally sell a few in odd places. So anyway, I investigated my ratings worldwide and found out I don't even have any in Japan for my stories, as perhaps they haven't translated those pages (?), but, sales are fairly anemic going into the holiday, I'll admit. And on the off chance that it's marketing I'm looking at the blogs. What else can I do? Throwing pop into the twitterverse doesn't seem to be working.
But I have about thirty active blogs, and they don't seem to be working all that well either. Nineteen of the top twenty trended downward in terms of views, on November 1, based on how many people actually viewed them in October. Of the thirty or so I call my own, only a few trended sideways altogether, and the only one that trended up did so almost entirely by chance, as I've done nothing to it for years.
Based on the assumption that my active using of them will make their views go up, I obviously haven't been active enough on them, and, the one that did go up was one that I have an active community looking at, and reading, and possibly even linking to, the Cloud Quakers blog. The top two are my personal blog and my professional blog, where I post regularly without being prompted, and where I'll post sometimes eight or ten times a month regardless of whether anyone is reading them or not. People do visit them. With the personal blog I suspect that quite a few of the visits are me, since I start there and use it for lots of things. But the general lesson I get from this is that, if you want them to increase in viewership, you have to use them actively for something or other, and the search engines will catch on that they are current, and not just topped off with a hello there which is intended to keep tepid viewership numbers from crashing.
Now there could be obscure outside reasons for the crash. It could be that all blog viewership crashed in October as everyone went outside and stopped searching for random information. It could be that the tepid blog-renewal-reawakening campaign that I started way back in Aug-Sept. didn't quite catch the search engine's notice right away, and by their algorithms a lot of these blogs are pretty sleepy and not worth a whole lot in the grand picture. I have no idea how the search engines do their algorithms on these things but I had not intended them to attract visitors in the first place. On the contrary, I just made them because I thought there had to be a blog out there to do this particular thing.
Here's an example: where u at w/chat was intended to promote the idea that we should do formal study of people's chat behavior and the evolution of chat as a medium. To me that's an important function. I don't have a whole lot to say about it these days, which is why I haven't posted since November 2012 and it has rather tepid viewing numbers. It is #12 on my list with over 1100 viewers altogether, still over a hundred a month, but going down. What should I do? I literally have nothing to say on the subject, except what I just said. I am not about to start studying chat behavior, even my own, although I think the general topic of auto-correct messing with your head is fascinating. Should I just say some dumb thing so that the crawlies know I'm not entirely dead? I guess I should. It may be worth some viewers though they may not roll in until February.
That's the kind of doldrums I'm in. I'd like to be selling books now, though I'm perfectly happy to keep writing them with no expectation of their ever going anywhere. The latest deals with a single rock that sticks out over the countryside southwest of Boston, in a place called Dedham, where I had a number of ancestors who dropped in and mixed. I like to know who these people are, so writing books is a way to make myself do the research. The books don't sell; nothing sells. I drop it on a sea of self-published whatever, I guess. I get the doldrums. But then, I post on these blogs like crazy. Why not? This month I've posted on fifteen, some of them several times. And I plan to keep it up.
But I have about thirty active blogs, and they don't seem to be working all that well either. Nineteen of the top twenty trended downward in terms of views, on November 1, based on how many people actually viewed them in October. Of the thirty or so I call my own, only a few trended sideways altogether, and the only one that trended up did so almost entirely by chance, as I've done nothing to it for years.
Based on the assumption that my active using of them will make their views go up, I obviously haven't been active enough on them, and, the one that did go up was one that I have an active community looking at, and reading, and possibly even linking to, the Cloud Quakers blog. The top two are my personal blog and my professional blog, where I post regularly without being prompted, and where I'll post sometimes eight or ten times a month regardless of whether anyone is reading them or not. People do visit them. With the personal blog I suspect that quite a few of the visits are me, since I start there and use it for lots of things. But the general lesson I get from this is that, if you want them to increase in viewership, you have to use them actively for something or other, and the search engines will catch on that they are current, and not just topped off with a hello there which is intended to keep tepid viewership numbers from crashing.
Now there could be obscure outside reasons for the crash. It could be that all blog viewership crashed in October as everyone went outside and stopped searching for random information. It could be that the tepid blog-renewal-reawakening campaign that I started way back in Aug-Sept. didn't quite catch the search engine's notice right away, and by their algorithms a lot of these blogs are pretty sleepy and not worth a whole lot in the grand picture. I have no idea how the search engines do their algorithms on these things but I had not intended them to attract visitors in the first place. On the contrary, I just made them because I thought there had to be a blog out there to do this particular thing.
Here's an example: where u at w/chat was intended to promote the idea that we should do formal study of people's chat behavior and the evolution of chat as a medium. To me that's an important function. I don't have a whole lot to say about it these days, which is why I haven't posted since November 2012 and it has rather tepid viewing numbers. It is #12 on my list with over 1100 viewers altogether, still over a hundred a month, but going down. What should I do? I literally have nothing to say on the subject, except what I just said. I am not about to start studying chat behavior, even my own, although I think the general topic of auto-correct messing with your head is fascinating. Should I just say some dumb thing so that the crawlies know I'm not entirely dead? I guess I should. It may be worth some viewers though they may not roll in until February.
That's the kind of doldrums I'm in. I'd like to be selling books now, though I'm perfectly happy to keep writing them with no expectation of their ever going anywhere. The latest deals with a single rock that sticks out over the countryside southwest of Boston, in a place called Dedham, where I had a number of ancestors who dropped in and mixed. I like to know who these people are, so writing books is a way to make myself do the research. The books don't sell; nothing sells. I drop it on a sea of self-published whatever, I guess. I get the doldrums. But then, I post on these blogs like crazy. Why not? This month I've posted on fifteen, some of them several times. And I plan to keep it up.
Saturday, November 14, 2020
Web marketing IV
I have expanded my inquiry. I am clearly not doing so well with marketing. I have come to another lull when I have sold absolutely nothing for a period of time.
Except that I happened to look at my kindle ratings for India, of all places, and noticed that in India I am doing much better than here. What is up with that? I'm not sure. I have these ratings in the millions for all my books. Kindle rating of a million or two here, there, in the paperbacks, ratings like eight million, ten million. Most of these ratings are stable, they only go down (or up, in number) by ten thousand a week.
But I have this one kindle rating, in India, of three hundred thousand, unusually low. It's like I'm a star there. And there are some questions I have: are India's kindle sales separate from amazon.com? Am I actually getting income separately from there that I just don't see when I have my amazon.com reports looking so empty?
Then, second, I can create half-price deals, which sometimes result in kindle sales or a small bump in rating for something. If someone buys a half-price kindle version of some book, I notice and get a few cents, maybe like thirteen cents, on the transfer of the e-book version of my book to them. Maybe I should be charging more, but that's a different question. My question here is, if I'm doing so well in kindle India, why doesn't it show up in the amazon.com overall rating? Or are they separate?
I watch that low rating, three hundred thousand or so, and it seems relatively stable. My other ratings, they will crash at a rate of a hundred thousand a week if they are that low (low in number, high in rating) which they got by a single sale or two. You can only keep a low (good) rating if you have sold a lot of books. And this makes me wonder.
More on this later.
Except that I happened to look at my kindle ratings for India, of all places, and noticed that in India I am doing much better than here. What is up with that? I'm not sure. I have these ratings in the millions for all my books. Kindle rating of a million or two here, there, in the paperbacks, ratings like eight million, ten million. Most of these ratings are stable, they only go down (or up, in number) by ten thousand a week.
But I have this one kindle rating, in India, of three hundred thousand, unusually low. It's like I'm a star there. And there are some questions I have: are India's kindle sales separate from amazon.com? Am I actually getting income separately from there that I just don't see when I have my amazon.com reports looking so empty?
Then, second, I can create half-price deals, which sometimes result in kindle sales or a small bump in rating for something. If someone buys a half-price kindle version of some book, I notice and get a few cents, maybe like thirteen cents, on the transfer of the e-book version of my book to them. Maybe I should be charging more, but that's a different question. My question here is, if I'm doing so well in kindle India, why doesn't it show up in the amazon.com overall rating? Or are they separate?
I watch that low rating, three hundred thousand or so, and it seems relatively stable. My other ratings, they will crash at a rate of a hundred thousand a week if they are that low (low in number, high in rating) which they got by a single sale or two. You can only keep a low (good) rating if you have sold a lot of books. And this makes me wonder.
