Small Press Blog

What do you do with those extra domains?

I own extra domains that I am not currently using. The total that I own is about 150. Yes, I said that right. Why do I have so many? If I think up a domain name, I buy it. Good domain names are hard to find, but they are cheap. Most are related to high schools, colleges, and academics.

So lately I have begun to use those domains. I have put up temporary text that will feed readers into my website.

If you look at this online high school website here: Alaska Online High School, you will see that it is a single page. It mostly refers you to my main website. Why have I put this up?

Look at some of the elements (and elements to come):

1. I provide a link to my main website.
2. I provide anchor text to my main website.
3. I provide links on my Blogroll.
4. I even have a Google Adsense ad.

What you don't see yet is the new banner picture across the top that will replace the current one. The new one will be an advertisment for my next book.

So it has now become a big advertisement for my business. I am in the process of putting more of these up. I am curious as to the efficacy, but I think it is a good move.

Should I Write for Exposure? (Part 1)

As a general rule, I am not a big fan of writing for free. I wouldn't ask my doctor to work for free. I wouldn't ask the person who collects my garbage to work for free. I rather think that people who are offering "exposure" and not cash are running a scam. Perhaps a legal scam, but a scam nonetheless.

And yet you see this sort of opportunity offered in many different places. As in: "While we can't pay you, we do offer you exposure that might result in..." This has only increased as the Internet has increased.

I do understand that many of these publications have little cash with which to pay writers. Fine, if you don't have money, write it yourself. That sort of exposure for writers is not really exposure. Exposure is being published in something that someone actually reads. Obscure websites are rarely that.

Now, there are a very limited number of sites where you write because you are part of that community. Science fiction fans have built up some nice sites along those lines. Yeah. This isn't that. I understand why someone might do that and enjoy it.

I am talking about sites that are clearly commercial endeavors, but which refuse to pay for commercial work.

However, there are very limited places where I will occasionally right for free. All of these places have significant website traffic that gets folks to come to my websites. Two of them are here and here. Notice, though, that these are sites where I went, signed up, and wrote articles that point toward me.I get traffic and share in the Adsense. These are not some faceless email that promised me riches through lots of exposure. 

Some time back, I wrote a couple of articles for a website that is very large in my field. I did that for free. These articles include links to my online high schools website. These links result in noticeable and significant traffic each month. Also and importantly, I can trace those links to actual money earned through Google Adsense.

To recap, writing for free with the idea that it helps your bottom line almost immediately? Good.

Writing for free for exposure? Bad. 

Accidental Success

I have done some things that have been successful. I have done some things that have not been so successful. Today I discovered some accidental success.

I have written a significant number of articles for Hubpages.com. I have found this to be quite successful because most of the articles are targeted specifically to my writing niche and include multiple links. I am able to:

1. See how many folks click on those links and come to my sites; and
2. How much I make through Google Adsense because they share the clicks with writers.

Interestingly, my #1 article is not about online high schools. It is about the Kindle. To date, I have had over 5,000 readers. That is significantly more than my next most popular article. You might be wondering why that is (because I was).

Here's the deal: Hubpages has serious Page Rank. Having articles on a site with such high page rank is a very good thing for you (no matter your topic). As it happens, a while back I wrote an article about Amazon's Kindle. And here's my accidental success:

1. Go to Google.
2. Type in: What is a Kindle?
3. What do you see?

What you see is that Amazon's article is #1 on the topic. Look below that. Yes. Tom's article is #2 on the entire Internet for that search question. And what you should know is that many people type questions into Google.

Accident. Completely. It's even, I suspect, making me a few dollars (because I know I get Adsense money from Hubpages because I track it as a channel).

Imagine if I had done that, but used a question that relates to my primary writing area. As it happens, I have imagined it and within the next few days I will have few articles up using that same question format.

Learning from my success. What do you learn from your success (and from your failures)?

Should you start a Facebook Group?

Well, should you? Please don't tell me that you are not on Facebook. As of today, February 28, 2009, Facebook has an Alexa rank of 5. That's 5 on the entire Internet. Why would you not want to be on a site that is ranked so high when, let's face it, most of our own sites are nowhere near that high?

Small Press Blog, by example, has an Alexa ranking in the 700,000s. Best Online High Schools is in the 300,000s. The point is to piggy-back on their high page rank and increase your contact opportunities.

Do not start a Facebook group for your book. Do start a Facebook group for your topic. No one beyond your mother is going looking for your book on Facebook, but, if the topic is right, many will come looking for your topic.

Starting a Facebook Group is a very simple process. All that you need to do is:

1. Go to Facebook.
2. Set up an account (if you don't already have one).
3. Click on the Group button (the "two heads") at the lower left side of your Facebook page.
4. Click on Create a New Facebook Group.
5. Name your group and give it a description.
6. Select the group type.
7. Click on Create Group.
8. You are done!

Importantly, make sure that you add all of the contact information that you can. Here is a chance to make sure that they have your email address and a link to your book website, your blog, or your sales page. The whole point is the contact opportunity.

+++++
This afternoon I wrote an article over at Hubpages about starting a Facebook Group. You can find it here: Should you start a Facebook Group?

Are you worried about Page Rank?

Okay, so everyone has a website. It's either a writer website, a book website, or a companion website, but a website nonetheless. If you don't know yet that Googe Page Rank is important, you do now. Page Rank shows how much value Google believes a particular website has. The more value, the higher the ranking. So, for us publishers, it means more people come to look at our books. That's a good thing.

If you went to this site, ThomasNixon.com, you would see that it has no Page Rank. The sad thing is that it used to be ranked at 5 less than six months ago. Unfortunately, due to a clerical error on my part, it should have been forwarding somewhere and it was not. So, unfortunately, it gets to start over.

Here's my weird one, though. As loyal readers know, my other major website is Best Online High Schools. It has had a Page Rank of 4 for quite a while. Not awful, certainly, but I had been working to convert it to a PR5 without success. Oddly, at the beginning of the month, without explanation, it dropped to PR2. That is so not good.

After I had finished crying, I attempted to figure out the problem. In 2007, a large number of websites had their PRs dropped. I looked around the Internet and that was not the case this time.

Next, I looked at my statistics. Yes, the last couple of months, the site's numbers were lower, but that is a purely seasonal event with this website (as in people don't look for an online high school during the holidays).

I looked at its ranking information on this site and it was showing a drastic drop-off in a number of key statistics for no reason that I could tell.

What did I do? I resubmitted the SEO information to Google. As of today, it has jumped back to 4.

My guess? The last time Google "spidered" the site, it missed something. Re-submitting it, Google found what it had missed.

Either way, as you can well imagine, I am glad that it is back where it was. Have I lost traffic to my site? I don't know, but should I discover anything, I will let you all know.

Have you been placement-targeted?

If you are like me, in addition to your publishing efforts, you make money by providing some sort of website service that uses Google Adsense Ads. A somewhat newer feature of this service is placement-targeting.

This is where an ad publisher decides, for whatever reason, that your website exactly fits their target audience. They then bid on Google to specifically place the ads on your website. This is different than the traditional Google Adsense program where who shows up in your Google ads is all rather arbitrary and based on bidding against others (but still with no guarantee of a particular website).

A few weeks ago I noticed that I was starting to get more ads on my Best Online High Schools website from one particular company. This company uses display ads that take up an entire "bank" of advertising space.

What has this company decided? They have decided that my website is significantly important enough that they should have their ads on my site as part of their overall advertising campaign. Google says it this way:

If an advertiser bids to run placement-targeted ads on your pages, it's because they've determined a match between what your users are interested in and what they have to offer. Advertisers can create customized ads for the sites they select, allowing them to directly message your users in a highly targeted way.

Is this a good thing? Well, for K12.com,* the company in question, it most certainly is because they are able to advertise all of their schools as opposed to each school advertising individually on the site.

Is it a good thing for me? I am not sure yet. At this point, the targeted-placement ads are making less money for me than the regular ads. But, and this is an important but, their is only one company targeting my site at this time, so it is not surprising that it makes less. However, they do take up a lot of ad space because it appears that they have higher priority than other types of Google ads.

I will be watching this closely. There is a way to have them advertise on the site less, but I want to see how it plays out first.

*And I, of course, thank k12.com for placing advertisements on my website. Much appreciated!

Yes, I'm cool redux

It seems like I am writing far too much about my "stuff" lately, but there it is. Something interesting as of yesterday. For the keywords, "online high schools," I am now in the top spot on the entire Internet.

How long will that last? It's hard to know. I tend to battle it out with About.com (both their distance learning and adult education sites). Typically, they win. They are large, well-funded, and owned by the New York Times. I am not.

All that being said, I can tell you how I got there:

• I wrote articles for About.com, eLearners.com, ezinearticles.com, and more.
• I posted in forums at Degreeinfo.com, Degreediscussion.com, eLearners.com, more.
• I work every day at building up BestOnlineHighSchools.com (which creates more pages on the site which creates a larger web presence which...)
• Whenever I mention my book, I mention the website. Whenever I mention my website, I mention my book.
• And so on.

You get the idea. However, most importantly, I try to offer something of value.

We're #1!

Downstream I mentioned that I was now ranked #2 for the keyword search, "free online high schools." Well, as of 10:35 on April 4 in California, BestOnlineHighSchools.com is now ranked at the very top. I am actually beating out About.com.

Trust me, that is probably a temporary blip. Still, it's nice and all. However, About.com is huge and should regain the lead quite soon. Given that the article on About that makes it all the way to the top was written by me, I don't mind so much.

So, is it worth it to write topics specifically to generate traffic? I think the answer is yes. I do think you need to be careful. There are some schemes out there that are geared toward paying you if you post about a product. I think that is a poor choice because it is obvious what is happening and  your credibility goes down the drain.

You still must provide a useful product.

Mission Accomplished? No, but good results.

My last post discussed using certain phrases to attract traffic. When I typed in the phrase "free online high schools" last week, my website was not even listed on that first page of Google hits.

Now, please go to Google and type in:

"free online high schools"

and you will notice one thing. My Best Online High Schools site is now listed as #2 for that search term! Do you think that will result in higher traffic? I do.

By the way, who's #1? Good question.

#1 is an article about online high schools that I wrote for About.com.

This does work. Persistence does work.

Should you post for traffic?

In addition to this blog, I have another one over at my Best Online High Schools website. I added the blog and the forum to that website a few months after it got going in order to increase traffic.

Let me assure you of one thing: When I have more traffic on that site, I sell more copies of my book. When I have less traffic on that site, I sell less copies of my book. This teaches me that driving traffic is a good thing because I make more money that way.

Here's my question, though. Should a blogger select topics specifically because they want to drive traffic in their direction and they know certain terms will work better in Google?

My answer is absolutely. However, the posts have to be of interest to your readers. It has to be information that they want to read.

For example, I have been blogging over there about free online high schools. I know over the next several weeks there will be many posts related to that topic. I know that the Google gods will appreciate the effort and reward me.

Here's the catch: The most common question that I get asked is about whether there are free online high schools. I know that my readers are very interested in that topic. That is what makes the choice acceptable.

There are people who use all sorts of pornographic terms, some you can see and some you cannot see (but which are there nonetheless), in order to get Google traffic. I think that is wrong for any number of reasons, not the least of which is that you should be able to trust that what you are searching for is what you will find.