Hey everyone, I just wanted to get on and say that I won’t be updating the Blog and Podcast as regularly for a little bit. With Summer approaching my time is going to be incredibly limited. I have taken on more than usual for this time of year. I want to still focus on my writing and programming amidst my wild schedule, so that means my blog is going to be slower to update. I’ll still stop in from time to time with updates and fun things I’ve found. I am about done with another website to share with you guys.

I will be updating my activity bars on the front page while I work. The last set of edits for THE FOREST AWAKENS is coming along nicely! While I’ve been plotting the next book I was planning to write, another has crept into my interest. So now I’m plotting two books to see which I want to work on next. I think this new idea would be much faster, so it might win out.

I’m also pretty active on Twitter, so if you want updates you can find me there!

Today is a very blah day in the Leonard household. I thought a little blog post about accomplishing the first of my 2010 goals would make me feel a little bit better. My super-nerd obsession with MUDs is the focus of today’s post.

I’ve told you guys about the little text-based online RPG I run, called Lands of Draknor. Well for the new year David (who is also the narrator for our podcast) and I decided on 3 big changes we wanted to add. The first, which we finished up this week, was a brand new creation system for characters. It’s very cool! I’ll post a screenshot soon and talk more about it!

Hopefully today ends up better than it has started. If anyone wants to try the game, we have a free client to play from!

Samantha has sold a number of new banners from our Etsy shop. She’s gotten so good at photoshop that she pretty much does all my graphic design work. She really has an amazing eye for art. If you didn’t know, she makes jewelry, so go check out her website. I wanted to share her latest creations with everyone. Click on any image to see the full size.

I’m a big ‘ol dork if you guys haven’t noticed. But my nerdness is stretched to the extremes with the text-based RPG I run. Oh yes, I don’t just play it, I run it. The programming, the building, etc. It’s great fun, much more depth the a lot of other games even without graphics.

I’m definitely not the only dork in the barrel though. I have a few people that work with me on it. I’ve even corrupted Samantha to it. *gives an evil little laugh*

Well today we released David’s (who narrates my podcast stories) new MUD client that he wrote entirely in JAVA. It’s so incredibly cool! I had to brag it up, he’s gotta be the best programmer I know. He taught himself JAVA so he could make this thing. A very talented guy.

This makes me happy in the geekiest way possible. Today I finished setting up the brand new install of SUSE Linux 11.1. I found some amazing tutorials online, and even though it took a little time, I finally got it working. That isn’t to say the victory is mine alone. My good friend David, who does the podcast readings every week, as usual kept pointing me in the right direction. A useful guy to know!

So now I can host all my fun websites, my MUD, and we even got phpMyAdmin working so I can do my own MySQL development on the machine. I’m eager to get back to working on the online writer’s guild website. I’m really looking forward to getting some beta testers on that soon.

Now we’re getting to the fun stuff. Tracking your statistics can become a serious obsession. I try to fight it, but I love knowing where my traffic comes from. On a side note, September already has my highest unique monthly visitors, and there is still a lot of time left! Yes, I haven’t beat that obsession yet… Anyway, let’s get into it.

I want to start off with something to consider, I once asked literary agent Jenny Rappaport of LitSoup if you should mention your website statistics in a query. Her response was no, unless you have more than 40,000 unique visitors. I admit, my jaw dropped a little. If you look at most first-time authors, very few of their novels sell even close to that number. But I got over my grumbling (I cannot brag that number) and started thinking of the basics of it.

First, when you are tracking unique monthly visitors you have to understand that most of those visitors are bots. If you don’t know what bots are you can search around, it’s a bit beyond the scope of this article. To put it simply though, think of search engines. They use bots to scour your website for keywords and Meta tags. They return the info and that helps (or hurts) your search engine ranking. So if you have 40,000 visitors, more than likely you had less than 10,000 real visitors.

Second, how many of your visitors are actually going to buy your book? If you have 250 regular visitors, can you bet on half of them buying it? We would hope for more than that, but this is a tough market.  So I think it’s another thing to consider.

On the same page, I’ve heard other agents and assistants say they’d like to see at least 2500 real visitors. that seems like a much more fair number. But again, that would be well over 10,000 unique monthly visitors in most cases. This is why most blogs and websites (and businesses) disappear in the first 3 years. It’s tough to build a following.

Alright, so there is some back story on why you should watch your traffic. Let’s get into how you can watch your traffic. I will keep this relatively simple. There are a few free tools that you can use. If you want to go all out, you can pay money for it, but most people don’t have to. If you are a published author, literary agent, etc. then you can consider it, but even then I might try the free options first to get a taste. I’ll go over each pretty briefly, if anyone wants a more detailed article about a particular service, just request it in the comments below. I’d be happy to do that.

Google Analytics

I’m going to be an unpaid advertisement for Google in this post. When it comes to free online software, you just can’t beat them. This gem is something every website or blog owner should have. Yes, bloggers, there are plenty of Google Analytic plugins. Go check them out!

This one may take you a week or so to figure it out in full. The amount of information it can give you is worth exploring though. The most basic feature will track your daily visitors, and it will compare those visitors to the number you got in the last 30 days. So at any time you can go see if viewers are going up or down. What does that tell you? Well, think about what you’ve done in the last 30 days. If you had a spike in visitors, I’d say you did something right. Of course if it went down, figure out why and stop doing that. If you don’t learn from your mistakes…

It does other cool things as well. You can look at your viewers on a world map and even click on countries to look at specific states and even what cities people came from. That’s perhaps my favorite feature. I like that I have visitors in Brazil, Belgium, Canada, and the like. And hello if you’re reading this! A couple other things to watch are where your traffic comes from and what pages people are visiting the most. For instance, I know Twitter brings me a lot of traffic, so I’m probably not going to stop using it soon.

Google Feedburner

This is for you bloggers out there, or podcasters, or anyone else that set up an RSS feed. Feedburner is actually very cool. What you do is forward your RSS feed through their servers. Of course, this is just another way Google stays at the top of the search engine game. But unless you have a problem with the power of Google, I’d still use it!

Feedburner will take your feed and break it into sections. It can show you how many people are subscribing to your blog, which is fun. I’ve certainly enjoyed the steady rise in subscribers I’ve had in the last couple months.

Web Host Statistics

These get more into your actual statistics. If your hosting company doesn’t offer it, you should think about moving to another. They are a dime a doze. The one I linked to above I use with all my clients, and this website too. This is also where you get more into the numbers that are bots. Most good hosting companies will show you which of your visitors were bots. While it says my website gets more than 100 visitors every day, a lot of those are bots.

Hosting companies will give you other information too. Such as bandwidth usage, unique daily/monthly/yearly visitors, traffic sources (where traffic comes from), and things like that. I mentioned this in the last article, but it’s important so I’ll mention it again. Your hosting company should also offer you free SEO submissions to help bring more traffic.

Social Networking

I’m only going to mention two things here. Because they are the only two that I have any experience with for tracking on social sites. Surely there are more if you check whatever you use the most.

• Facebook Fan Page – This has a built in system that will keep track of how many people are checking out your page.
• Twitter – I found a website called HootSuite that is a Twitter management site. One cool thing about it is that they use their own “short urls.” If you use them, it will keep track of how many people click on your links. For instance, I’ve found when I post links about writing, I get a whole lot of views for them (as should be expected considering my followers). I’m sure other Twitter sites do the same, but I’m not sure which.

© 2009 Robert W. Leonard

Next Monday will be the last article in this series. If anyone wants me to continue after that I’d be more than happy. Just jot down what subjects you are interested in via the comments below. And make sure to check back tomorrow for the latest Tuesday Night Storytime, part 5 of Mr. Snaggle’s Oddities. Things are really building up!

I’ve been hinting at this project for a few days now. It’s is exciting because I don’t often get to build websites with a fantasy theme. The owner of Paladin Signs chose me for my interest though. He saw my website and thought I would do a good job with the one he was thinking about. We’ve only begun the actual building of the website, but I have these fun images to share with you guys.

The first is a copy of the logo and header that they designed. I like it, it’s easily identifiable and it stands out in my mind. Which hopefully means that it will stand out in their customers’ minds. The second is a crop of the background they designed. I love it. I think the image of the knight approaching the castle is simply fantastic.

I can already tell this is going to be a fun project to work on.

This is part 2 of my article series on web marketing. For those that don’t know SEO stands for search engine optimization. That’s what you’ll be reading about today.

If you missed last week’s post, click here.

There are lengthy books about this subject, so to pretend I could explain it all in this post would be foolish. I can, however, get you looking in the right direction. And by the way, if you would like a good book on this then take a look at this top-10 list of them.

So then let’s begin shall we?

Meta Tags

These tags are designed to tell search engines what to display when people find you. The description is usually a couple of sentences about the site. This is something that should be obvious so people know what to expect. Just think of the last time you were annoyed because a site was nothing like you were searching for. You don’t want to do that to your visitors.

Keywords is exactly what it sounds like, the things you want people to find you for when they search online. This website has ones related to fantasy and web design: fantasy, high fantasy, web designer, etc.

Meta information should go between the <HEAD> tags on your website. It should look something like this:

<head>
<meta name=”description” CONTENT=”What your site offers.”>
<meta name=”keywords” CONTENT=”Relevant keywords”>
<meta name=”revisit-after” CONTENT=”15 days”>
</head>

Weblog Plugins

A lot of people these days don’t actually run a full website. If you just run a blog, that doesn’t mean you have to learn advanced PHP to take advantage of SEO. There are many plugins out there that will handle all your needs for you. It’s kinda like magic, but much less cool.

I use this one for WordPress. But you can find plenty by searching for “SEO plugin <type of blog>.”

Hosting Submissions

A lot of hosting companies, like the one I use, offers SEO submissions free of charge. They’ll let you submit your site as much as once a day. I try to do it at least once a month.  As they say, consistency is key.

Actual Content

This is the real kicker. Everyone wants the coolest graphics and the latest Flash on their website. The problem is that nothing written in either of those is found by search engines. I hope this changes in the next couple years, but I’ve been hoping for the last couple too… You do have the option of using the alt tag with images of course. It is good practice, since things inside this tag can be found.

Your actual content should be considered as well. Remember that what you write can also be found on search engines. This can work both for and against you. You may re-consider saying something when you think of the audience. On the other hand, it’s not always a bad thing to talk about trends and popular subjects. People search for those, why not let them find you?

Be Friendly – Comment on Blogs

You hear complaints about this all the time. I’ve done that, I comment on tons of blogs, but nobody ever clicks back to my own. This happens for a number of a reasons, but the most important to me is the quality of comments. Most people go to a blog and post “great post, thanks for sharing.” I’ve even been guilty of it. What about that comment would even make the blog owner respond, much less their viewers?

If you aren’t interested in what they have to say, go comment on another blog. It’s as simple as that. People will have to find your comment interesting before they will want to read more that you’ve written.

The other big thing I see is people that are pushing themselves way too hard on someone else’s blog. If I am going through comments and see someone not only link back with their name (which you SHOULD do), but also add another link to their blog at the bottom of their comment, then I get annoyed. I promise you that I’m not the only one. Even if it only links to your blogger profile, accept that and move on. If you don’t list your website on your profile (all of them!), that’s your own fault.

© 2009 Robert W. Leonard

Because the last article was so long, I tried to narrow this one down. Do you guys prefer it to be shorter or longer? I tend to like more info, but I’d love to hear what readers prefer. Also, make sure to check back tomorrow for the latest Tuesday Night Storytime episode, part 4 of Mr. Snaggle’s Oddities.