Algorithms, and How to Get One Million Hits On Your Blog. Louis Shalako.

Looks like I picked the wrong day to stuff them keywords...

Louis Shalako

A recent story (BBC I think), noted that Google had diddled the algorithms and killed a lot of traffic to established websites. My latest story has a grand total of 25 reads or hits.

Over fourteen years, the site has garnered 961 k hits. My first blog post wasn't very good.

It took a week to get a handful of hits, some of which might have been indexing bots or even my own reads, which can be managed through the site. But this is why I think people quit blogging. They have a dozen or so stories up, and they don't keep it up because it looks like it isn't working. Looking at the big spikes in the graph: someone adjusted their algorithms and I got 60,000 hits from France in a few months. (Page bottom). The next big spike, came out of nowhere, and traffic was unusually high at a time when I really wasn't doing much with the blog, although I routinely repost old stories. I routinely repost online serial content, including Heaven Is Too Far Away.

I'm the only guy I know who does online serial fiction. I was probably the first, and possibly the last, to serialize a manuscript before the book was even finished...

Once you have the content, (and my blog is close to 1,200 posts), you can recycle it in various ways. You can also update the links, fix a typo, add photos, etc. I hope to have one million hits sooner rather than later—I had hoped by summer, but things have definitely slowed down, for whatever reason.

When I get a million hits, I'm going to call up the newspaper—

I have scraped my own blog for a new ebook or short story. An example would be One Million Words of Crap, available for free as an audiobook from Google Play. 

Lately, I am replacing Smashwords links with sites that are still up and running as ebook aggregators, yes; I have paperbacks and audiobooks as well. I found out about Smashwords on Facebook. As I said, when I repost a story, I can update as well. I can take out dead links and add in a new one.

Smashwords and Draft2Digital have merged and the books will surface over there in a month or two.

Scary shit for beginners.

When you go to edit an old story on Blogger, the interface might show the code. People take one look at that and it’s “…fuck. I can’t do that—”

Well, just so you know, for the first six months, I didn’t even know what a tag was. The site can be a bit glitchy at times, but just keep hacking away and you will get it. When formatting, it's hack, hack, hack, then preview. Save, then hack some more...confidence is everything, and patience is everything else.

On the upper left, click on ‘compose mode’ and its back to the old familiar interface. Just a quick pro tip, I compose in a Word doc and that way I can control the font size. There are just a lot more tools in the doc format. I prefer 13-pt Times New Roman. I copy and paste from the doc file.

It was at Genrecon, held at the Sarnia Library in 2009 where I met Douglas Smith. I cornered him for a minute and introduced myself and all of that. He is the one who suggested a couple of things. One was to join Facebook. The other was to try a free blog from Blogger. And we all know how that went.

When I signed up for Facebook, one of the first things I said was: “Whoever invented this is a genius.”

And I was right, too.

The blog is fairly flexible. You can change themes, change colours and fonts. Click around on all the buttons in order to figure out what to do. The widgets are handy, as you can see from the right-hand column. I had to fight for quite some time to get Google to take ads off of the blog. They were telling me that I had some kind of problem with the blog, and they weren’t paying me for blog hits. I said, if you’re not paying for blog hits, please take the ads off of my blog. I will never see a penny of it anyways. In fourteen years of blogging, they owe me $25.88 and the threshold for payment is $100.00. If you’re in this for the money, you might want to prepare for a little disappointment…and a few spammers in the comment section.

'Compose mode' is a lot more civilized.

Their help pages are impenetrable. I couldn’t make heads or tails of what they wanted me to do, and I did provide feedback, more than once, to exactly no response whatsoever.

You can stuff keywords into your posts, but a handful of tags will do nicely.

You might read Active Versus Passive Blogging.

The best thing you can do is to produce regular, interesting, helpful and informative content. Entertain the people. Sing for your supper. As for myself, I do enjoy the work, and that is always something.

Right. And if I die, and if Google gets to keep my $25.88, then I guess that’s what the service was worth. In other words, not much, but the actual blog is what you make of it. My most popular story is Ghost Planet, with over twelve thousand reads...over ten or twelve years. I won't stick in a link for that one. If you would like to take a look at it...you will have to Google it.

(Tricky, Louis. - ed.)

(Yes, but it might also work.)

And, in the meantime, it is a useful promotional tool.

#Louis

END

Click on the image to enlarge.

From the BBC: Google's New Algorithm.

The website of Douglas Smith.

Louis has some art on ArtPal.

See his works on Google Play.

Thank you for reading.

 

 

 

 

 

Active versus Passive Discoverability.

Louis Shalako

Active discovery is when a product is actively promoted.

Over the last twenty-four hours, our blogs have garnered 784 hits. It’s a bit startling to realize that in the same period, we sold one ebook via Google Play, for a grand total of $0.31. At the same time, according to Google analytics, we earned $2.32 from our blogs.

At one time, it was our sense that a blog would have to get about two million page hits, before the author would see a $100.00 cheque from Google. That’s obviously not true, because we just theoretically earned $2.32 for only 784 hits.

What happened, was that somebody obviously clicked through on one of our AdSense ads. 

Those ads are contextual. If we’re talking cars, like Ian Cooper on his blog, Google presents readers with automotive ads.

If Dusty Miller is talking about love, romance or just plain sex, Google presents ads the most appropriate that they can find for the category.

Passive discoverability would be when you publish a blog post and do essentially nothing.

There are other things you can do. If you have an opt-in email list, those subscribers would automatically get a post in their inbox every time you wrote something. That one’s a tough call. If you only write once a week, it might be a good idea to begin building such a list. Presumably, the subscribers to your blog would also be interested in the contextual ads, because it’s in their category, and they might be more likely to click through. If you write a lot, if you write on any subject under the sun that turns your crank, the email list might not be all that useful.

At the present time, Shalako Publishing, Long Cool One Books and Larga Fresca Uno Libros don’t have a subscription email newsletter. We’ve never been entirely sure what to put in it. 

That’s one reason.

By actively posting our blogs on Twitter, we got a half a dozen retweets. This brings us page hits from unique users. It’s not the same thirty to seventy people coming back all the time. It brings a bunch of them in a short period of time, and this creates a kind of heat or velocity in algorithms. Google’s payment algorithms are pretty much top secret, but the more active the account, the more weight it may carry in terms of the blog.

From personal experience, a passive blog might bring in a few page hits in a day based solely on content and SEO/specific searches by key word or subject.

For an unknown author, writing fiction or industry observations, how-to or informative content, getting readers and reads takes a little more active approach.

Here’s an article on active versus passive blogging.

Passive discoverability and active discoverability go hand in hand. What is interesting and mysterious is the relationship between the blog, the social media we post a blog on, and the fact that we did sell a book on Google Play last night, which we can tell from our analytics/speadsheet on that platform.

The thing to do there is to change the link in the ad once in a while. Promote Google Play for a while, then do iTunes or Amazon, or any other platform where the books (or other products) are sold.

With Google blog widgets, we can put our own ads on the page along with Google’s. Smashwords now has an html widget, easily pasted into any blog or website. Zach Neal has one on his blog.

If the reader can click through on an Adsense ad, they can sure do that with our ads too. In terms of passive discoverability, a good cover, a good blurb, interesting titles, in genres and categories that people want to read, the usual rules still apply.

Over the course of time, the blog has a lot of material. Google’s own ranking system values or optimizes for authorship, uniqueness of content, activity, and of course the sheer number of people visiting the site.

END

Those Pesky Pen-Names.

Morguefile.

by Dr. Emile Schmitt-Rottluff



I’m in the mood for a rant but I’ll leave that for another time.

Those pesky pen-names. It doesn’t take very long to realize that with four or five pen names, something is going to suffer. One pen name has been publishing stuff every two months or so.

Well, he’s got nothing on the go right now, because all of his time is spent developing the social networks for all those other names. None of them can possibly be as active as he (I) used to be on Twitter, where I used to tweet out relevant links, the sort of thing my audience might be interested in. But now I have five different personalities, who might tweet out to five different audiences. Those audiences require unique content to fit with their needs or expectations. Just finding and reading that stuff before it got tweeted out would be a big enough challenge.

The bigger any one audience gets, the more attention it merits and the more time it takes to serve it well.

I can’t really write one generic blog post and put it up on five blogs. For one thing, the opportunity presented by five different audiences is a stupid thing to waste, and secondly, it might not make much sense in terms of that particular pen-name. My erotica writer would have no reason to blog about the state of the economy, and her audience can find far better stuff elsewhere anyways.

What happens is that I tend to devote so much time to getting each and every one up and running. But then results begin to skew. My erotica writer has almost a thousand friends on Facebook. Yet another pen name has struggled to get a hundred, another has maybe two hundred, and the latest one has yet to get his first half-dozen. All this doesn’t even really ask or answer the question of whether being on a social network actually helps to sell books or any other product.

The conventional wisdom seems to be that it does, and some of the biggest names in the business are on social networks, blog regularly, et cetera.

The erotica writer gets dozens of friend requests a day. She confirms them unreservedly. She gets that chat box opening up as soon as she does something that registers and pops out on the wall. She can’t talk to three or more people at once, every time she goes on there. That one is a source of frustration, and yet she gave away eighty-seven copies of one title from Smashwords this month and we haven’t seen that with any of our other names, at least not for a while.

The analysis is fairly simple. She clicked on someone that was presented to her, and they are from another culture. And they told two friends…

A white woman, a pretty one, is more than they can resist. In their culture, there is restricted access to women, who would never be tagged, ‘available.’ Or worse, ‘single.’ That’s an untouchable person for a respectable young man over there. They have arranged marriages, or strong restrictions of a faith-based nature on the relations between unmarried young people.

You want to be careful who you talk to and how you talk to them in that culture.

Why did she click on that person or type and group of person/people? For one thing, setting up a new pen name needs a new e-mail address to set up on your publishing and social platforms. There has been no traffic through that e-mail address. The pen-name has no friends and family, no contacts, no list. When you skip through that part on Facebook, when opening up a new account, it presents some hurdles. There will be a list of ‘do you know?’ sort of people presented on Facebook. Being young and eager for success, I think she just basically started off by clicking unthinkingly on a few names and now we have to live with the results.

Now, trying to produce new products for five pen-names, with new titles coming at regular intervals, is another challenge. In addition to five blog posts a week, there is the need to create new material.

Inevitably something (or someone) is going to suffer. On the plus side, a couple of the pen-names are selling small numbers of books. One author gave away eighteen books and has not sold a copy on any platform, and as for the newest one, so far nothing. He’s had eleven samples on Smashwords and is linked in one library, which may or may not translate into a sale sooner or later.

Now, Smashwords founder Mark Coker regularly states that Smashwords authors will sell ninety percent of their books through the Premium Distribution Catalogue. My guys have been making it in with no problems although some minor fixes, which I found myself without waiting for the human vetters.

Once all those new titles, ten or eleven of them, dribble down through all the distribution channels, the next challenge is when, or how often, or especially how, to promote each individual author on each individual platform, whether it’s Kobo, Barnes & Noble, or iTunes, whatever.

One of the things I can safely say is that I have never sold a book in Japan, or in Brazil. The challenges of exploiting the distribution system as it exists right now are many, and all we can do is to continue experimenting and of course making new books, new stories and new products.

If a person had a professional or traditional publishing deal, they might be asked to go on social networks, or to blog regularly, or just feel it is a necessity. So I don't think the challenges are unique to any particular approach.

Other than that, the stuff you just read is a hell of a lot better than some stupid old rant.

Right?

Right.

Running pen names.

Setting up pen names.

How to set up a pen name.