Barb Drozdowich's Blog, page 35
February 28, 2016
Promotional Checklist for Book Blog Tours
Today is a full day of information on the blog!
As I said last week, this week we will be starting a series on myths.
Today’s myth comes from the world of Book Blog Tours.
Authors shouldn’t visit and/or comment on blogs that are featuring them during a book blog tour.
This topic seems to rear it’s ugly head every so often. As I write about in my 3rd book, Book Blog Tours: An Essential Marketing Tool for Authors, a blog tour is the virtual equivalent of a book signing or an author meet & greet. The point of a tour is two fold – for readers to find out information about your book, and for you to meet and hopefully chat with readers.
How are you supposed to do that if you don’t visit the blog?
In a recent review of my book, a reviewer actually said not all bloggers are comfortable with authors commenting on their blogs. Call me old fashioned, but if bloggers don’t want authors commenting on their blogs, why are they featuring books?
In my world if an author comments on my blog my day has been made! I love what authors do for my world – without the books that they create, my world would be sadly lacking.
As far as I’m concerned, a book blog tour is the equivalent of a meet & greet – so if you don’t make the effort to chat and make friends – you’ve lost out on a valuable opportunity to network.
To help you with your next tour, please find a promotional checklist below. This checklist is in my book blog tour book and is a great guideline to help you remember everything you should be doing during your tour.
Promotion is a group activity! You want to get as many people involved as you can.
Make sure you get all the materials for the post to the book blogger well in advance. Be certain to include all your social media links and all buy links for the blogger to incorporate into his post.
Send an e-mail around to your author groups, your critique partners, even your mother, to let them know about your upcoming promotion, and then send a note or reminder a day or so in advance. Even if none of your friends do this, set an example of how this promotion thing is done.
Post something on your blog about your stop, complete with a link to the book blogger’s site. If this stop is part of a blog tour, you can put a schedule on your sidebar that links to your post with more details.
If you can, schedule some tweets ahead of time to let your friends know where you’ll be.
Drop by the blog first thing in the morning to confirm the post is live and that you have the correct link. Leave a comment of thanks for the blogger and a few words about your book. Let everyone know you’ll be back to answer any questions or address any comments periodically throughout the day. Before you post the comment, check to see if you can subscribe to comments. This little function will allow you to be notified when there are new comments posted to the blog. Sometimes the blogger will let you know when there are comments, but you should do your best to be autonomous.
Post something on your Facebook page reminding everyone to drop by and meet a new book blogger and say hi. Remember, authors who write the same genre as you should always be looking for new friends, especially friends with blogs, because friends will be willing to go the extra mile to help with promotion.
Post an announcement or two on Twitter to encourage your Twitter followers to head over to the blog and say hi. If you have your blog feed connected to your Goodreads author page and your Amazon author page, anyone who is a fan of yours on Goodreads will be notified of the stop, and people who find you when shopping on Amazon can find out about your stop on the book blogger’s blog.
I’d encourage you to send around an invitation to a Goodreads event, but my tolerance for those has waned, and I’m starting to see them as spam.
Make sure you Follow, Like, and Circle the book blogger on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ so you can retweet (RT) her tweets, share her posts on Facebook, and comment on her Google+ shares.
The last suggestion on my list is to, at some point, stop by the blog and use all those little Share buttons. They are important. Almost 30% of my hits now come from Stumbleupon, and frankly, I don’t spend much time there. Those little buttons are like the vegetables your mother tried to get you to eat—just close your eyes and get it done.
I hope that the checklist will come in handy.
In other news, my Blogging for Authors book is one step closer to being published.
Isn’t the new cover beautiful??
And stay tuned for news mid-week. I’m going to release the first part of the survey of book bloggers that ended in January!
And then there is a WordPress for Beginner’s course that is probably a week away from being live…busy, busy, busy!
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I’d like to thank you for dropping by today! If you have a friend that would benefit from this post, please use the share buttons below to pass it on. I have created 25 or so videos to address sticky problems on blogs that I frequently get questions about. If you are interested in getting these videos or any of my posts delivered directly to your inbox, sign up for my Tech hints newsletter off to the right sidebar⇒
I’ve now re-worked and republished the four of my books. They were written in hopes of helping authors and bloggers. If they sound interesting, click on the covers and you will be taken to Amazon. For those of you who have been following along, The Book Blogger Platform was published a short time ago.
Stay tuned for news.
The post Promotional Checklist for Book Blog Tours appeared first on Bakerview Consulting.
February 21, 2016
Quick Primer on the CAN-SPAM act
Do you want to save yourself $16,000.00 ? What do you know about the CAN-SPAM act?
Today I’m visiting Rachel Thompson’s Bad Redhead Media blog to talk about the CAN-SPAM act and why you need to pay attention to it as an author. Click on the link and wander over. I promise it’s a quick read 
Next week, I’m thinking about starting a series on debunking some of the myths that I regularly hear. Should be entertaining!
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I’d like to thank you for dropping by today! If you have a friend that would benefit from this post, please use the share buttons below to pass it on. I have created 25 or so videos to address sticky problems on blogs that I frequently get questions about. If you are interested in getting these videos or any of my posts delivered directly to your inbox, sign up for my Tech hints newsletter off to the right sidebar⇒
I’ve now re-worked and republished the four of my books. They were written in hopes of helping authors and bloggers. If they sound interesting, click on the covers and you will be taken to Amazon. For those of you who have been following along, The Book Blogger Platform was published a short time ago. In other news, ‘Blogging for Authors’ will be finished by the proofreader at the beginning of March. Hopefully it will be out on Amazon as soon as possible!
Secondly in news – I’m almost finished the analysis of the survey of book bloggers – expect something from that front soon!
Stay tuned for news.
The post Quick Primer on the CAN-SPAM act appeared first on Bakerview Consulting.
February 17, 2016
Why We Love WordPress (Infographic)
Today I want to share an infographic that shares my thoughts about WordPress. I hope you enjoy what it has to say! Please share with your friends and don’t hesitate to pop by and read the original article here.
The post Why We Love WordPress (Infographic) appeared first on Bakerview Consulting.
February 14, 2016
Stats Tutorial Part 6 – Top Posts & Pages and Clicks
For the last few weeks we’ve been talking about stats. If you are just joining us now, you might want to check out the previous posts as follows:
Part 1: Introduction & how to put stats collection in place
Part 2: Information on stats collection
Part 3: Google Analytics & Jetpack Stats
Part 4: Time on site and bounce rates
Part 5: Are your readers mobile? And where does your traffic come from?
Today we are going to talk about the last bits of information that we can get from WordPress stats – Top Posts & Pages and Clicks
Looking at the upper right of the Jetpack Stats widget you will see a box labeled Top Posts & Pages. This will help you understand where people start their reading journey on your blog. It is likely that a large number of the entries are for “Home page/Archives.” That means that people have clicked on your direct URL to get to your site. If they have clicked on a direct link to a specific blog post from a FB post or a Twitter link you will see that indicated by numbers beside specific posts. Not only can you use this to find out what are your most popular posts – and give your readers more of similar content – you can also make generalizations about starting points on your blog.
As an example, on my business blog I created a blog post with screenshot walking people through the process of adding Amazon affiliate links to their blog posts. This post is almost 2 years old, but it gets at least one hit every day – and most days it gets 20 or 30 hits.
Lastly, the box further down on the right is labeled Clicks. This area tells you what has been clicked on, on your site and how many times. As I mentioned in the post on Affiliate links, stats can tell you clicks on buy links, but only affiliate links can tell you clicks vs sales. If you have things you want your readers to click on that aren’t sales links, your Clicks section will help you understand that type of traffic. For example, I have a link to my site – The Book Blogger List on most sites that I manage. I’m interested in how many times that link is clicked on.
Let’s conclude this section of Stats with some final thoughts. Stats should help you understand a lot about your blog and your readers’ behavior. I hope that you use it to make changes where necessary to your site or to your content. I also hope that you take all the information that you gather with a grain of salt and sense of humor. Although I know that I could spend hours analyzing the stats for my sites, I don’t. And I don’t suggest you do either. Use them as a tool to guide you but not as an obsession to occupy time that you should be writing!
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I’d like to thank you for dropping by today! If you have a friend that would benefit from this post, please use the share buttons below to pass it on. I have created 25 or so videos to address sticky problems on blogs that I frequently get questions about. If you are interested in getting these videos or any of my posts delivered directly to your inbox, sign up for my Tech hints newsletter off to the right sidebar⇒
I’ve now re-worked and republished the four of my books. They were written in hopes of helping authors and bloggers. If they sound interesting, click on the covers and you will be taken to Amazon. For those of you who have been following along, The Book Blogger Platform was published a short time ago. In other news, I handed ‘Blogging for Authors’ in to my editor on Friday – hopefully that title will be out on Amazon as soon as possible!
Stay tuned for news.
The post Stats Tutorial Part 6 – Top Posts & Pages and Clicks appeared first on Bakerview Consulting.
January 31, 2016
Stats Tutorial part 5 – Are your readers mobile? Where does your traffic come from?
For those of you just joining us, I’ve been writing a series on stats for the last few weeks. If you missed out, you can find the previous posts here:
Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4
This week we have one more item to talk about on Google Analytics and then we’ll move on to Jetpack stats.
The last item on my list for Google Analytics is the type of device the readers are viewing the site on. Are they reading your site on a desk top computer or a mobile device like a tablet or a phone? The section that you want to look at is under Audience and then Mobile on your Google Analytics account. Have a peek at these numbers – they might surprise you. The news tells us that more and more people access the internet using a mobile device so Google strongly encourages us to have a mobile responsive website.
What’s a mobile responsive website? It’s one that will change so that it looks good and is readable on all screen sizes. In other words one that reorganizes itself, not just gets smaller. If you want to do a test – the website of my favorite coffee shop – Timmy’s is mobile responsive (http://timhortons.com) Look at the site on your desktop or laptop computer and then have a peek at it with your phone while you consider how your day could be made better with a cup of coffee….
I digress….
Frankly, I’ve had a lot of authors that I work with say – “I don’t have a tablet or a phone and I’m sure that my readers are only looking at my site on a desktop computer.” I then challenge them to look at their stats. Some are right but some are quite surprised by the percentage of their readers that view their site using a phone or tablet. Every audience is different, but just like where your audience is geographically located is important, how they are reading your information is also important.
Let’s move on to what you can learn from Jetpack stats found on WordPress. All of the information that we will talk about looking at on Jetpack stats can also be found on Google Analytics but I like the presentation on Jetpack better.
If you look at your full screen view of Jetpack stats it has 6 sections that we will look at. Three today and we’ll finish off next week. The most obvious section is the bar graph that fills the top area. This bar graph can be changed to see the numbers by the days, weeks or months. This section like the other sections we will talk about has a summary link in the upper right corner. I often find looking at the summaries of each of these areas is more helpful than looking at one day’s worth of stats – gives you a wider view.
Although it’s lovely to know how many people visited your blog each day, we want to look at the details of these visits to get information that we can act on.
Moving down and to the left, find the box that is labeled “Referrers.” This is where your traffic is coming from. In most cases, you will find where your reader clicked on something to lead them to you. I use this area to find people that have linked to me – as reader will click on those links and visit my site – and also to see what kind of traffic you are getting from your social media accounts. If you have never looked at this information before, you might be surprised by where your traffic is coming from. Just because you have a lot of retweets on Twitter doesn’t mean readers come to your blog. This section will help you to understand how effective your social media accounts are in drawing traffic to your blog.
The section below “Referrers” is “Search Engine Terms.” I don’t pay a lot of attention to this area but I am interested in determining what people are searching for when they find my sites. I’ll look at the results every couple of weeks. Honestly, I am often entertained by what words or phrases people use to find my sites. Look at your results and see if you can see some interesting search terms.
The box below “Search Engine Terms” is “Subscriptions.” This will tell you how many people use the WordPress subscription functionality to subscribe to your blog or to comments on your blog. To see who has subscribed to your blog in this fashion, just click on the link and you can see a list of names. One point to keep in mind is that people who subscribe to your blog generally don’t count as hits on your blog as they get your content emailed to them.
I think that’s enough information for today. I know that many people can get overwhelmed by numbers so I like to keep these posts short. Next week we’ll finish off talking about Jetpack stats. I look forward to your comments and questions.
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I’d like to thank you for dropping by today! If you have a friend that would benefit from this post, please use the share buttons below to pass it on. I have created 25 or so videos to address sticky problems on blogs that I frequently get questions about. If you are interested in getting these videos or any of my posts delivered directly to your inbox, sign up for my Tech hints newsletter off to the right sidebar⇒
I’ve now re-worked and republished the four of my books. They were written in hopes of helping authors and bloggers. If they sound interesting, click on the covers and you will be taken to Amazon. For those of you who have been following along, The Book Blogger Platform was published a short time ago. In other news, I handed ‘Blogging for Authors’ in to my editor on Friday – hopefully that title will be out on Amazon as soon as possible!
Stay tuned for news.
The post Stats Tutorial part 5 – Are your readers mobile? Where does your traffic come from? appeared first on Bakerview Consulting.
January 24, 2016
Stats Tutorial Part 4 – Time on Site and Bounce Rates
For the last few weeks we have been working our way through stats.
We are at Part 4 – for the previous posts check here, here and here.
Let’s move on to “time spent on site” and the “bounce rate.” It seems that everyone and their dog are willing to spout an opinion about how long your blog posts should be and whether or note you should have a magazine format for your site.
Two points here: firstly, you need to compare apples to apples – if someone is suggesting an ideal word count for your posts, ensure that they are talking about word count for your niche of blog. It is unfair to compare marketing blogs with author blogs, as an example. Secondly, I feel that these decisions should be made on the basis of your stats.
To start with we need to find out where to find these numbers. Both the “Average Session Duration” and “Bounce Rate” are found on the Dashboard or the first thing you see when you log in. The Average Session Duration is the average amount of time spent on the site. Look at that number, set a timer for that amount of time and read something until the timer goes off. That will give you a general feel for how much your readers are reading. If the average is over a minute, you are actually keeping their attention for a good amount of time! But…I’ve read quite a few posts recently suggesting that authors write 1500 to 2000 words for every post. Can you read 2000 words in a minute or less?
Let’s expand on that to talk about magazine format blogs. This format is one where only an excerpt shows of the post. The reader must click on a button or text link to read the entirety of the post. I’m not a huge fan of this format for authors as I feel that readers of blogs are innately lazy and more often than not, they do not click to read more, they just move on. Keep in mind that every audience is different and generalities are dangerous to make, but your stats will tell you what’s happening on your site.
To answer this question, we want to look at not only the time that readers spend on our site, but also look at what’s called bounce rate. Bounce rate can be defined as “the percentage of visitors to a website who navigate away from the site after viewing only one page.” Bounce rate is a number needs to be taken into context. If your landing page – ie, the page that people land on when they type in your direct URL – is blog posts and they are displayed in their full version – only viewing one page is not a bad thing. If your landing page is a welcome page that gives a short blurb about you and your books and that’s where the majority of your traffic starts, it’s a bad thing if they leave after one page. That means that they aren’t reading any of your blog posts.
Before you have a panic attack – as I did when I first figured out what ‘bounce rate’ was – you need to take these number into context. First figure out where your audience starts their visit to your site and then look at bounce rate. To add a bit more context, Google Analytics will also tell you the average number of pages viewed. So do they start one place and quickly more elsewhere? There are various strategies to link posts to one another as well as link them to various other sources of information to keep readers on your blog longer. I feel that the longer you can keep a reader on your blog reading and looking around, the more likely you are to get a sale or a subscription to your site.
Make sure you watch for next week’s post as we bite off another manageable chunk of stats information to chew on
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I’d like to thank you for dropping by today! If you have a friend that would benefit from this post, please use the share buttons below to pass it on. I have created 25 or so videos to address sticky problems on blogs that I frequently get questions about. If you are interested in getting these videos or any of my posts delivered directly to your inbox, sign up for my Tech hints newsletter off to the right sidebar⇒
I’ve now re-worked and republished the four of my books. They were written in hopes of helping authors and bloggers. If they sound interesting, click on the covers and you will be taken to Amazon. For those of you who have been following along, The Book Blogger Platform was published just over a week ago. In other news, I handed ‘Blogging for Authors’ in to my editor on Friday – hopefully that title will be out on Amazon in just a short while!
Stay tuned for news.
The post Stats Tutorial Part 4 – Time on Site and Bounce Rates appeared first on Bakerview Consulting.
January 19, 2016
The Anatomy of the Perfect Blog Post (Infographic)
Today I’m going to share another awesome infographic. This one describes the perfect blog post – step by step! I love it so much that I’ve referenced it in my latest book that I’m writing!
I hope you enjoy this as much as I did! For the full post, please visit here.
The post The Anatomy of the Perfect Blog Post (Infographic) appeared first on Bakerview Consulting.
January 15, 2016
How to Structure a Perfect SEO Optimized Page (infographic)
Today’s Infographic is OUTSTANDING!
I spend a lot of time explaining to authors how to create posts that are structure properly and are created to do more than just communicate. This infographics beautifully summarizes everything that I talk about.
I guess my job here is done I’ll just refer everyone to this post
*wanders off in search of coffee*
This infographic was found HERE
*****
Oh, and my latest book was published yesterday. Busy, busy busy.
It can be found on Amazon…isn’t the cover pretty?
More about this another day…back to work…..
The post How to Structure a Perfect SEO Optimized Page (infographic) appeared first on Bakerview Consulting.
January 13, 2016
January 10, 2016
Stats Tutorial Part 3
Last week we talked about stats programs that can be used to measure the visitors to our blogs. You’ll remember that I share videos to help put Google Analytics in place and I also recommended using Jetpack if you have access to it.
The two stats programs I recommend have their strengths and are very similar in many ways. I use Google Analytics to look at where my audience is coming from (geographical location), time spent on blog, bounce rate and what type of device my readers use to access my site. I use Jetpack for everything else.
Let’s start with Google Analytics. At first glance, Google Analytics is an overwhelming collection of numbers and percentages. That’s why I focus on a small number of figures – I find that I don’t get overwhelmed with information that I either don’t care about, or can’t use, that way. When you go to your Google Analytics dashboard you are presented with an overview of a week’s worth or a month’s worth of summary numbers. Where we are going to start our discussion is the geographical location. To find those numbers, look on the left side of your screen for Geo and click on the arrow to expand the section and then click on Location.
I’m very interested in where my audience is physically located. I think that the normal reaction with blogs is that our audience is likely from our own country. Because our site is available on the Internet, it is open to the world. You might be surprised to find that a large percentage of your hits come from a different country that the one you live in. I know that India and the various Oriental countries are considered emerging markets for bloggers. I have one blog that has almost 50% of its traffic from India.
Why do we care where our audience is from? The first reason would be to help us understand who are readers are, and secondly to help us focus promotions of various sorts. Let’s use my blog that has a lot of it’s audience from India. If I want to do a Facebook ad that targets my demographic but don’t include India in the choices, I may not be targeting my readers. Likewise, if I want to expand the reach of my blog using a FB ad, I can include countries that I know I don’t have much of a readership in.
Let’s use the example of a giveaway. Since I live in Canada, I’m frequently excluded from a lot of giveaways and other promotions so this is a topic that is dear to my heart. If I know that the majority of my audience is from other countries than the US and offer a giveaway that excludes all countries but the US, am I going to alienate my readers? Something to think about.
I think that’s enough to look at for today. Next week we will be moving on to talk about time spent on your site as well as the bounce rate. Remember all those people telling you how long your posts should be? Are your long posts actually being read?
More on that next week!
* * *
I’d like to thank you for dropping by today! If you have a friend that would benefit from this post, please use the share buttons below to pass it on. I have created 25 or so videos to address sticky problems on blogs that I frequently get questions about. If you are interested in getting these videos or any of my posts delivered directly to your inbox, sign up for my Tech hints newsletter off to the right sidebar⇒
I’ve now re-worked and republished the first three of my books. They were written in hopes of helping authors. If they sound interesting, click on the covers and you will be taken to Amazon. Another one – The Book Blogger Plaform – will be published in the next week or so. After that, plans are in place for at least 4 more books in the coming months. Stay tuned for news.
The post Stats Tutorial Part 3 appeared first on Bakerview Consulting.
