techne-eikon.com

Continuing with my writing research yesterday, I discovered a site that talks about how to market you book, and yes, even get it on the NewYork Time’s Bestseller List. I have to say, the idea of writing for a living has seized my imagination. I’m having little daydreams of appearing on Oprah… or maybe that’s just my mind trying not to think about the cigarettes I’m not having…

However, the more rational, non-nicotine dependent portion of my brain is fully aware that the success of a book is more a matter of marketing than talent. Though talent certainly helps, I have read enough trash thta was highly rated to know better. That’s where John Kremer’s site comes in. Mr. Kremer is the guy who helped Deepak Chopra make The List, amongst others, so I think that I will spend some time browsing his site, and see if I can glean any marketing nuggets from him.

All of marketing ultimately comes down to one thing: creating relationships. If you don’t understand this basic principle, you will ultimately fail as a book marketer. Indeed, you will fail in life as well.

That’s from his site, and as a marketer myself, I know it to be true. Now it’s just a matter of actually writing a book…

The wife an I are both smokers, and as of late we have been on a smoking reduction plan. About this time last month we were puffing at the rate of at least a pack and a half each per day. Horrible, I know, but it kind of sneaks up on you after 2.5 decades of behavior. If you are a clock watcher, this works out to a cigarette every 30 to 40 minutes. I’m surprised that neither of us has had a heart attack yet.

So we are reducing our habit to manageable levels, with the ultimate aim of stopping entirely. Stage one involved going on the clock, and only sparking up once an hour, on the hour. It seems to be working. Yesterday we both got caught up in what we were doing, and actually missed the timer, going up to an hour and a half between smokes. So today we are pushing it out a bit, and going for an hour fifteen minutes between.

If we can continue stretching out the time between, we hope to be completely quit of the things by summers end. That’s not too bad, considering that it took us 25 years to become the smokers we are today. We’ll see how it goes…

Continuing my search for a DIY publisher, I decided to add Lulu.com to my short list. I had previously seen Lulu, and at the time wasn’t overly impressed. Things have changed. Lulu’s self publish options have expanded beyond books, far beyond in fact. Offerings now range from books to calendars to mouse pdas for printed materials, but things don’t stop there, oh no! You can also self publish CD’s and DVD’s, digital artwork, even ringtones! And this is only a partial list…

Like Wordclay, Lulu is free to use, and has optional paid features, should you want them. You can purchase an ISBN number, as well as marketing packages, and professional services. Prices seem a little steep to me, with the caveat that I don’t yet know what “fair” is in this marketplace.

Lulu also has an online shop that gets your book listed. Unless you want to pay for one of the marketing packages, marketing is again, up to you, but that seems to be standard fare for DIY Publishing. Which might be a good part of the reason it’s called “Do It Yoursief”…

The journey continues…

There’s this little thing I’ve been doing on the side for a little while now: writing fiction. Mainly in the literary romance genre, but not exclusively. The vast majority of my stories are short, and written for an audience of one, namely my wife (she likes that kind of thing). Now, at her suggestion, I have started to look at trying to get published. One option is of course to self publish, and it makes a certain amount of sense to do so, for there are literally tens of thousands of books, stories and manuscripts competing for publisher attention.

The advantages of self publishing are significant. Your masterpiece gets to market faster, and with less editorial changes, and the author gets to keep a higher percentage of the proceeds. The disadvantage is that the author is in charge of all marketing, a time consuming task to say the least. Given that I know at least a little bit about marketing, I have been investigating various sites that help you Self Publish your work.

One such is Wordclay.com. So far they look pretty good. The site is user friendly, and they don’t charge ay up front fees. They even have a bookstore that your book will be listed in. They have an affiliation with a major distributor who will make your book available to over 25,000 US retailers. There are add on services that can be purchased, such as an ISBN number and a domain for your bookstore page, but as near as I can tell, these are optional.

I think that I will be putting Wordclay on my short list as one possible venue for my book. Of course, this supposes that I will actually write a whole book… unless I decide to publish a collection of my short stories instead… hmmm, the wheels are turning now…

It’s been a little while since I last posted, but it’s ok, I have an excuse. It even comes with a Doctor’s note and everything. In case you haven’t guessed already, I have been sick with this mean little bug that’s making the rounds. The interesting thing about this little beggar is that, at least with me, it liked to play hide and seek.

I would wake up in the morning feeling ok, but within an hour my condition would worsen  and in no time at all, I would feel like garbage. Then it would pass, and the whole thing would start over again. In some ways this was more tiring than just being sick until you get better. The upshot of it though, is that I became very aware of what needed getting done, given that I had only a limited amount of time to do it in.

Long story short:I have delisted myself from a large variety of Internet Marketing newsletters that are all essentially saying the same thing: buy this (product) to be successful. Um, no, thank you. As an offshoot of this I have realized, in a fit of clarity that can only come from the realm of the sick and ugly, that trying to make a buck from techne-eikon, at least in it’s present form, is not likely to happen.

Not because I don’t know what I’m talking about, but because I am one voice out of millions. It’s all been said and done before, and the competition is fierce. Quite frankly, I just don’t have the passion for the subject to want to compete here. If I had something new or unique to offer, then sure, but I don’t and that is the truth.

So, once again, t-e is going through a final format change. It’s a personal blog. Period. Right now I’m of a mind to declare that If I actually consider trying to make some money by blogging about blogging, or blogging about making money on the internet, I will delete t-e just to remove the temptation.

So over the next little while, as I get caught up on this and that, I will be deleting categories and/or posts that are just taking up space, and creating new ones as I see fit. Ther might be the odd “make money” post, but only if I feel like talking about something that I am doing that is actually making money

For those of you who do read t-e, thanks, thanks and I hope you will stick around, because when I’m not talking about money, I am actually capable of having the odd original thought or two. Some of them are even good.

Cheers, Marc

There are a couple of upgrades happening this week that I wanted to let you know about. First, and most exciting, is Netvibes Ginger is getting released to the public! Yes, that means you! Even if you’re not an existing Netvibes user, starting tomorrow, you will be able to get your very own Netvibes profile! Just pop over to Netvibes.com, and sign up. Done!

The other upgrade I wanted to let you know about is from my webhost, 1and1.com.  On March 06, 2008 between 12 am EST and 6 am EST, 1and1 will be upgrading the servers that t-e is hosted on to  the rock solid Debian/Linux 4.0 operating system. In addition, Perl, Python and Ruby are all getting upgraded to the latest. What does this mean to you, my dear visitors?

Actually, not that much. There may be a brief outage during the upgrade, but apart from that, t-e will be exactly the same, though I am hoping that my already good load times will get great, but that’s just me. I’m not expecting any problems, because in the 4 years I have been with 1and1, the (very) few problems I have had were resolved within a matter of minutes, even when I called tech support at 3 am.

With hosting plans starting at $4.99/mo, and one or more domains included (depending on the package), and additional domains priced at $6.99/yr for a .com, 1and1 would have to truly screw up to convince me to move. But all of that pales for the geek in me, when confronted with the fact that my sites are hosted in a $25 million dollar facility, with daily backups and triple redundancy. If you hear a strange dripping sound, that’s just me drooling. Sorry.

If the preceding paragraph sounded a bit like a sales pitch, I apologize, but I truly am a bit of a fan of 1and1. I cannot recommend them enough to anyone who is on the lookout for solid, reliable, and affordable hosting. End of sales pitch.
All in all, a busy week, with more coming up. I have some related experiments on the go, and will be reporting the results soon. Without giving away too much, they involve Entrecard, Project Wonderful, and Spott as effective means of generating traffic.

That’s it for today, and I will talk to you soon

WARNING! The following is a late hour rant, and might not be worth the time it took to write. You have been warned. 

It’s late, I’m tired, and there, sitting in my inbox is another bloody email, marked “Urgent!” Not really thinking about what I’m doing, I click it up. Sure enough, there’s the pitch: “urgent”, “time limited offer”, etc, etc, ad nauseum.

The only thing that’s urgent about this kind of crap is my need to hit the delete button. It offers me nothing of real value, just a bunch of promises, promises that prey on the fears, insecurities, and greed of Joe Average. Almost invariably it turns out to be an affiliate marketer  pushing some other affiliate marketer’s ebook or course, chock full of stuff that he, in his turn, got somewhere else. So not only is it crap, it’s used crap!

Speaking as an internet marketer myself, I completely fail to understand why marketers are even using these kinds of techniques anymore, when the market has very clearly shifted (and rightly so, I might add) to what I call value marketing. That is, marketing that gives the prospective customer something of genuine value that they can take away right now, for free. Solve an immediate but urgent problem, and the prospect will love you, and quite possibly return to buy one of your paid offerings. Why? Because you helped them out, and established some trust, that’s why.

No “secret” techniques that “they” don’t want you to know, and will “virtually” create wealth “overnight” (quotes deliberately added). No empty promises, neither. The credo of the 21st century marketer is real value and earned trust, not hype and hysteria. Get out of the damn stone age, people!

If you’re just joining us, I have been running an experiment over the last few weeks evaluating some rumours that Google is punishing blogs that employ a do-follow plugin with lower positions in the search engine results. I don’t mind telling you that it’s been a bit of a roller coaster ride as my target article surfed the ranking waves from day to day, but the end result is not quite what I expected. You may want to read the first two articles, “No Follow, Do Follow, What?” and “No Follow Do Follow Update”, before continuing on here.

Here are the Cole’s Notes, taken almost exactly from my own notes:

The target search phrase for this experiment is “Netvibes Ginger”, in quotes for exact match, without quotes for broad.

Tuesday: “I Haz Ginger, and it is Cool” is ranking at #77 in the Google SERPs

Wednesday and Thursday applied some Social Marketing strategies to the article.

Friday: Article has dropped to #90… ? Apply some more SM strategies….

Sunday: article has cratered in the SERPs, crawling in at #160 for broad match, and #86 for exact. (All previous rankings reported were for broad match) To quote (my son): WTF?

Tuesday night: return techne-eikon to a no-follow blog by disabling the do-follow plugin.

Wednesday, around noon: I Haz Ginger is ranking at #25 for exact match, and #23 on broad match.

Monday: More gains, rising to #13 broad match, and #16 exact.

Wednesday: Restarted do-follow plugin (this would be Wednesday, February 13)

Which brings us to today, slightly more than a week later, Thursday, February 21, 2008: The target article is ranking at #22 for the broad search “Netvibes Ginger” (sans quotes), and #23 exact (with quotes).

If my results are even remotely typical, it doesn’t look like Google is using the presence of a do-follow plugin as a factor in it’s Search Engine results. That’s good news for those of us who wish to reward commentors with a link back to their site. At this point, I will freely admit that I wanted Google to fail this little test of mine. Based on the early results, I even expected it. I tend to distrust mega corporations like Google, Microsoft, and the like. As I proceeded with the experiment, my head filled with scathing vilifications and pithy comments as I shredded the evil corporation for punishing your average, everyday nice guy blogger. But that’s not the way it is, so my poisoned pen must remain in its drawer, at least for today.

All that aside, I am actually happy to know that do-follow bloggers are not going to suffer for having the do-follow plugin on their blogs. I had already determined that once the experiment was over, t-e would remain a do-follow blog irrespective of the results, as I completely agree with the ideals behind the movement. So there it is, then: with a complete lack of fanfare I must declare that, to the best of my knowledge, Google does not allow the presence of a do-follow plugin to affect its search engine results.

Here are some more resources for no-follow and do-follow for you to, er, follow:

Andy Beard’s comprehensive list of do-follow and no-follow plugins for a variety of platforms. No matter which way you swing, Andy’s got the good for you.

Michelle MacPhearson recreates an interesting experiment testing whether or not no-follow links provide any link juice. She also provides some excellent links on the topic, a must read for anyone interested in getting better rankings in the SERPs.

I know, I know… I said I would update my experiment in a month, but the results demand that I update sooner. If you haven’t read the first article in this experiment yet, pop back a week and read “No Follow DoFollow, What?”, then come back here to find out what has happened so far.

Welcome back

At the time that I decided to disable the do-follow plugin, Google was ranking the Netvibes Ginger article at #90 in the SERPs. By Wednesday, the article had rocketed up to #25 on exact match, and #23 on broad match, a jump of 65 positions! That’s 6 pages closer to the coveted front page of Google!

Unfortunately, I may have diluted the experiment a touch… You see, I went on a blog cleaning rampage, and in the process deleted any and all irrelevant posts from t-e, including a dozen sponsored posts. As you may be aware, Google frowns upon sponsored links, and has been shown to slap blogs that have them, so when I removed them I may have inadvertently put myself back in the Almighty G’s good graces.

I say may have, because I’m not entirely convinced (more on why in a moment) that the sponsored posts had very much to do with it, but in the interests of good research, I have to consider the possibility. So here’s the plan: As of the Monday night following the reinstatement of no-follow, the Netvibes article was ranking in the Google SERPs at #13 for broad match, and #16 for the exact term “Netvibes Ginger”, making for a total leap forward of 8 pages. As of right now, I am re-enabling the do-follow plugin.

If it’s dismissal was part of the leap forward, then turning it back on should cause the article to slide back down the results pages. In fact, that’s exactly what I expect to happen. Here’s that why I mentioned: You may recall that last Friday I had a guest poster here on t-e. Teeg wrote an article called “Web 2.0 for Small Business” for me. She also dropped a link from her blog to mine in an unrelated post. To be clear, this was an in post link, not in the side bar, or a comment, but a topical and relevant link back to techne-eikon.

According to Google, the link doesn’t exist. Period. I am getting no Google juice from Teeg’s mention, or from a couple of other incoming links that should be showing up. The other thing that I want you to notice here is that Teeg’s site (SUComments.com) is a do-follow blog, and does not have any sponsored posts. In short there is no reason that I am aware of that would cause Google to discount the link, save the do-follow feature. Hence, I think that enabling the do-follow here will cause me to get slapped as well.

So techne-eikon is once again a do-follow blog, and we will see where we are at in a week or so. While we wait, please feel free to leave a comment. What do you think? Is Google slapping us for wanting to share, and play nice with each other? Should they be allowed to get away with it if they are? You tell me

This article is a guest post by Teeg, of SUComments.com

The first thing to remember about web 2.0 is that the web is no longer driven by whatever businesses decide to put up a website. At one time, the programmer was king, and businesses were forward-thinking if they created a web presence. Now, just about every business you can think of has a website, including the construction company working on our local mall?!?

Yesterday’s websites were huge, clunky thinks, which they could be, because most people had slow internet connections. Once someone got to your page, you knew they would likely read the content, if for no other reason than they were waiting for the next page to load. With connection speeds that could take a minute and a half or more per page, yesterday’s web design called for having a lot of different content on one page, much like a newspaper or some magazines.

When internet connections got faster, people discovered the joys of visiting page after page looking for their favorite topics. Websites that wanted to catch the attention of these users soon discovered that yesterday’s layouts weren’t working. People weren’t forced to sit and read a long page while they waited for the new page to open, they could hop on a page, see if it caught their interest, and hop off. Today, the average visitor spends less than 2 seconds on a web page. That means that you have about 1 second to catch and keep their attention. For a website designed for today’s visitors, think presentation instead of newspaper.

Have you ever watched a good presenter? He doesn’t put his whole speech up at the beginning of the program and leave it up the whole time. Instead he brings a pile of slides or power point pages, and presents 3 to 5 pieces of information on each slide. This is the perfect example for a business website. Consider each static page you create (pages like your About and Contact page, Directions to your business, and any other pages where the content remains static) as a new slide. Does the page grab your attention for 1 second? Do the important facts on the page stand out? Is there little enough information that the visitor won’t get overwhelmed and leave? Finally, and most importantly, do you grab their attention enough that they will want to click through to the next page?

This is one of the most important parts of todays websites. If the presenter gets up and tells you what the presentation is about and it doesn’t hold your interest, it’s unlikely that you’ll stay for the rest of the speech, especially if there’s something better you could be doing with your time. The internet is like a huge conference, where all the speakers are presenting at once. If I don’t catch something on a page that’s important or interesting enough to hold my attention, I’ll go to the next presenter. Even if you’re selling a product or running an off-line business, if I don’t catch a piece of information that sets you apart from the others, I won’t stay.

If you want to try this for yourself, I suggest using StumbleUpon as the easiest way to quickly visit a lot of sites with similar content. Using a web search also works, but then you’ll have to keep coming back to the search. Either way, look up a topic, or choose a topic on SU to look up, and start looking at pages. Give yourself just enough time to see the page and click the stumble (or back) button, and continue until a page catches your eye. Now look back at your website and imagine you’re a visitor coming to it the same way you just visited all the other websites. As a stranger, would you spend time on your page? Or would you go back and look for something different?

Teeg is a StumbleUpon expert, having held a Top Stumbler position for several months, before moving on to write SUComments.com, where she provides valuable insight and advice for the beginning Stumbler.