How to Think Strategically About Your Web Presence – Once And For All

Yeah, the whole web presence-PR & marketing-build your niche-keyword positioning-Google adwords thing is enough to make you want to puke, especially if you don’t really want to have to deal with it in the first place. You’ve got a day job fercrissake, you just want to write novels, and where in the fine print did it say you had to deal with this crap anyway?

Unfortunately, as soon as you inch closer to becoming a published author, “this crap” becomes a part of the deal. It’s not even good enough to wait until you’ve sold a book anymore…you need to start working on this crap before you sell.

There are millions upon zillions of articles and how-to’s out there telling you what you should be doing and all the neat things you could be doing. There’s hundreds of ways you could be blowing money on marketing doodads, schemes, books…oh, there’s hundreds of eBooks on marketing out there!

But none of them tell you why you should be doing it, or even if their particular way of doing it suits your individual arrangements, model of business, or you as an anchored author, who writes your particular brand of fiction for the audience that you write for. And none of them, until now, have probably ever stopped to give you a strategy for dealing with it all.

Do I sound like I speak from experience? Alas, yes. Far too much of it. All at the reasonable price of just $19.99 a hit…and too many hits at that. I didn’t learn my lesson the first time, or the third. It took too many hits before reality began to sink in. I’m hoping to spare you some of that today.

The point of your web presence

So what is the point of your web presence? Have you ever thought about it beyond the need to have your name pop up if someone types it into Google? No?

If you’ve done any sort of marketing research or reading about on-line marketing, you’ve probably come to the alarming conclusion that on-line marketing is about capturing email addresses and making sales via long, long, long one-page websites. And you’d be dead wrong, because the marketing experts you’re consulting are focused on marketing information products, not fiction.

So let’s cut to the chase.

I’ll use an analogy for you that will help you think about your web presence strategy. For fiction authors, your web presence really should be set up like a web – a spider’s web. You’ll have sightings around the web, design to draw readers to the centre, where you sit controlling the core: Your site, and your sell pages.

The Core

Your site is self-explanatory.

Your sell pages are those pages where your novels are available directly for sale, including your publisher’s site and/or Amazon and/or Barnes & Noble and/or Chapter/Indigo, etc. In otherwords, any online bookstore, including e-book stores such as Fictionwise.com, eBookReader.com, where your books are for sale to readers.

You may chose to keep up with all of the above, or not. I personally always keep my publisher’s pages in my core, and Amazon, if they’re available (as I get Associate fees), but I don’t keep up with the rest – I can’t. Just keeping up with Amazon, when you have a few books, is more than enough work.

Your site and your sell-pages are joined at the hip, with buy-links and shopping cart software. If you wish, you can even set up your own site so that you can sell your books directly from your own site (if your publisher and internet host allows it), which further industrializes your core for your readers.

But don’t take this to mean that the whole point of drawing readers to your core is to make sales, because it isn’t. Certainly, the reader needs to be able to buy the books if they want to, so the books need to be available from your core once the reader gets there. But the whole point of the core, once the reader reaches it is to:

keep the reader there as long as possible until
you’ve made them feel welcome enough to want to come back and
formed a relationship with them

Once you’ve formed a relationship with them, they’ll get to know you better and turn into true fans – “true” fans in the Kevin Kelly definition of the word – and buy your books on a regular basis.

So your core had better be:

As sticky as possible
As non-commercial in feel as possible
Be very high in content and value as possible (which may seem like the same thing as (2), but isn’t)
Provide some way for the reader to make a commitment to you as an author
1. Newsletter
2. Blog RSS feed via email
3. Buy something from your website
4. Make your website their home page or download software, theme pages , desktop images, or other freebies etc that you’ve made available
5. Combinations of the above.

Then all you have to do is set up “sightings” all over the web that draws the reader into the core in the first place.

Sightings

The sightings could be anything and everything, and this is where the strategic thinking comes into it. You chose a new method of marketing only if you think it will help bring traffic to your site, or your sell pages: Social networking, book marking services, micro blogging, author marketing services, blogging, RSS feed services, re-feed services, author newsletter services….really, the variety and type of “things” you can do to draw attention to yourself on the net are potentially endless.

There’s also a lot of marketing, PR, and networking services out there, and some of them make some incredible claims (“we have 350,000, 000 people subscribed to our list and we’ll make you $20,000 overnight!)

Whenever you’re contemplating a new idea, if you can, measure the potential impact against what you want out of it (that is, how much traffic it’ll bring back to your site), instead of what they think you want out of it (sales, sales, sales) and make a decision based on your own criteria instead of theirs.

This is where you can mix and match, trying out different things to see what brings the most traffic to your site. Most site hosting services provide traffic stats that indicate referrer site traffic, so you’ll know who is sending you the most traffic. Marketing is a trial and error process – even the professionals use this method. Keep good statistics and discard what doesn’t work for you.

Breadcrumbs and attrition rates

And this is where it can get interesting, because you also have to allow for human nature and attrition rates.

I’m a huge Jeff Dunham fan. So is my assistant. And I’m pretty safe in telling this tale because I know that despite the fact that she knows I have a blog, I know she’ll never read this post, because she’s just not the sort of person to every scratch her curiosity bump, like me. And it’s this difference in people that will kill off a lot of traffic to your site.

Let me explain. Both me and my assistant originally (and separately) discovered Jeff Dunham on You Tube – friends showed us one of the Peanut clips. I laughed myself into almost into a hernia, curry-combed You Tube for all I could find on Peanut, Jeff Dunham, did some more research, discovered Jeff Dunham on Facebook, then his website, bought the DVD, and learned he’s touring and now have tickets to go see him live this month…and just can’t wait.

My assistant, on the other hand, knows the puppet is called Peanut, but didn’t realize the guy holding the puppet was called Jeff Dunham – even though the name is in the small print to the right of the video window, and that he had other puppets…or a website…or a Facebook page…or that he was touring. It’s all publicly accessible information, available with about thirty second’s worth of Google work, if you take the time. If you’re curious enough to follow up. You have to have that itch though, and many people just don’t have the itch.

This is going to happen to you, too. You can pepper sightings all over the web, but it doesn’t mean everyone who sights you is going to follow you back to your core. The attrition rate is incredibly high. How high? About 51%, I’ve estimated, but there’s no real way to tell, because you can’t measure the number of people who see your “follow me” sign and don’t follow it.

The stat I’ve given you I’ve estimated based on Anchored Authors. There’s an article here, “How to Astonish Yourself into Writing More Often” that offers a free Books-a-Year calculator, with just one click. Now, the article itself is one of the higher ranking articles overall, specifically sought out by authors combing through the archives. The calculator is the backbone of the idea driving the article, and offers a useful, practical way to motivate yourself to write more often. Yet only 49% of the people who read the article actually click through to the spreadsheet.

Depressing, huh?

You just have to make sure your number of sightings is correspondingly high. Your sightings will get stale, too, so you’ll have to keep working on updating them, and seeding new ones. It doesn’t have to be an overwhelming operation though: If you schedule a couple of hours a week to systematically work through all your sighting spots and check and update them, they’ll stay fresh and relevant. Here’s a time-saving suggestion: If you use KeePass Password Safe as a directory of all your web presence locations + logins + passwords, you can work your way through the list faster. Use the mobile version of KeePass and carry it on a USB stick, and you can whip through the list whenever you have a few minutes at a computer. Or just get PortableApps, that comes with KeePass installed.

That’s it in a nutshell. That’s what your web presence is all about for fiction authors, and every marketing tactic you employ on the net should be measured for how effectively it will support this strategy.

First appeared on Anchored Authors in April/May, 2009

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