(I).T. Sherpa

Every writer needs an I.T. Sherpa, someone who understands not only how to establish an online presence, but how to make your sites search engine friendly, and can guide you through (or manage!) your I.T. stuff.

So, what does my I.T. Sherpa do?

1. He designed the layout of my website, to include writing the code for pink camouflage, selecting the layout, setting up affiliate accounts to Amazon and others, and placing GoogleAds and such on the site.

2. He updates my WordPress format and gadgets as needed.

3. He uploads my ebooks to various other sites.

4. He manages the Search Engine Optimization of my site, to include feeding the site map to Google every day, so Google indexes all my posts and pages.  He also installed an SEO pack to my site, so I can tag each post, every time I post.  He does a lot here but I don't understand a lot of it.

5. He monitors backlinks to my pages, alerts me when there are new links, especially to blogs.  Then I go to the blogs and post to readers/fans.

6. He monitors site traffic and analytics, so we can discern patterns in days and/or times of days when people visit the site.  We hit 526,000 in Alexa ranking and have a new baseline of 230 unique visitors a day.  He can tell you from where each visitor came (country/state), what they Googled, what sites they were referred from, how many were direct traffic, etc.  We can use this info to time releases of blog posts and/or books.

7. He also manages the mailing list and comments pages.

I'm sure I do him a huge disservice with my simplified version of what he does, but these are some of the basics that make my site easy to find and use. 

The best part: he does all this for free.  There's no cost, but some elbow grease to keeping our site up and running and talking to the search engines.  If you can find someone to help you, you'll realize quickly how invaluable an I.T. Sherpa is.