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Newsletter July16

Greetings from Mel Keegan and the team at GLBT Bookshelf!

It’s Great News and Not-So-Great news this time (don’t panic: All is fixable), so we’ll hit you with the good news first and then get to the “call to arms” later.

The Great News is that Project Google is showing excellent results. You can now Google “GLBT” … no “books” or “bookstores,” or “bookshelves” involved … just “GLBT” … and there we are page 1, #4. We still need to beat the generic catch all term of “gay books,” but remember -- Google doesn’t crawl every site every day. Give it another week or two, and it’s a safe bet we’ll be there.

Search engine traffic is now accounting for about 1 in 5 visitors to our door … and here’s an astonishing statistic, when you remember that as a Community we’ve had our oars in the water for about six weeks: “exit links” tracked by StatCounter show that there’s a potential book sale going through approx. every 15 minutes, around the clock, 24/7. Yes -- that’s 100 potential transactions per DAY being generated by this wiki, after six weeks, and with only about 25-30 of us having bothered (HINT!!!!! And we’re coming back to this later!) to post our back links to the site, which send visitors here from your own sites!

We need to quadruple this trade: four times more visitors, generating a potential sale every four minutes. And we can probably do this by (!) quadrupling the number of backlinks sending visitors from everyone’s websites … here.

Now, we’ll drop the other shoe, and explain why the majority of Community members who have not yet linked back to the wiki, *must* make the effort.

Visitors to the wiki have to come from somewhere, and usually you’d hope for the search engines to send up to 80% of traffic. Now, the wiki has already been optimized to the point where there was only one real technique left to address. We actually set out to tackle this, with a credit card to hand. It was going to be the 50 - 250 Top Directories on the web, which would tell Google clearly who we all are, what we do, and where we can be found…

Sorry guys, the directories won’t touch us with the proverbial 10-foot pole. Why? Wellll … it’s like this. Writers and readers on the wiki are, by and large, “erotica friendly” -- but alas, erotica is classified under the “P” definition by the major directories. As a quick cruise around the Categories will show, the wiki is now about 75% erotica. Sizzling adult fiction and art are driving it. This is just how it is -- this is what readers want, so this is what we provide. However, the downside is that the high-traffic, influential directories are under no obligation to do business with us. The wiki content is classified as “adult,” and these directories won’t touch it. Reputable directory submission services tell you the truth up front, before charging you money: “adult” content will get the submission rejected.

So. Scratch this strategy. Now: find an alternative.

The alternative is simply this: the Community doesn’t *need* the directories … so long as we pull together *as* a Community. And to this point, a surprisingly small percentage of members are actually putting this into practice. We have about 270 members in total; about 120 people have pages online -- some are readers and reviewers, some are writers, some are artists or publishers. By monitoring the referring links, we know pretty much exactly where ALL the wiki’s visitors are coming from …

Not counting Google (which sends us 1 visitor in 5), there are only about 25 sources. Digest this: we get about 270 unique visors a day, every day, on average. And to date, only 25 of us have gone out there and put up links *to* the wiki.

We had hoped that 250 directory submissions would fix this problem, and we were majorly bummed an hour or two ago, to discover this is a “non-starter,” due to the very nature of the beast.

There’s only one solution: The links MUST come from the Community itself. YOU have to supply them. The link you make opens the traffic flow, and as we’re seeing, sales are the ultimate result. We need 4x - 5x more visitors, and the fact is that there are enough of us already to do it … if everyone got behind this. We have the potential to generate up to 3,000 sales per week, with our existing membership -- but it won’t happen without links.

So here’s the plan: LINK BLITZ! And this means *you,* especially if you didn’t participate in the last one … and if you’ve been a member less than three weeks, you might be scratching your head saying, “What the heck’s a Link Blitz anyway?”

A Link Blitz is the best free advertising that money couldn’t buy. For a period of 72 hours … three days from the time you receive this newsletter … as many of us as possible (and there are 270 of us!) blog, tweet, chat, post, email, update websites, make groups, comment on forums, start threads, post to FaceBook, update MySpace … anything at all that can carry a link pointed at the wiki, plus the critical keywords, “GLBT” and “gay books.”

If every one of us did just four things, the wiki would have 1,000 *more* links -- !! Right now, we’re getting about 270 unique visitors per day, with a comparative handful of links. You know what 1,000 more links will do for us?!

So -- let’s do it. LINK BLITZ, people! Free advertising, where the targeted quality of these links yields traffic that’s massively in excess of anything you could buy. Put it like this: the traffic/visitors/business/readers we stand to receive from a full-on Community blitz could be as great as the result of a campaign which cost many, many thousands of dollars.

Phew. All said. Now -- back to the good stuff!

We’ve been at work on the Book Category pages, and you’ll notice that there have been some great developments. First off … the Categories for Romance, Contemporary and Erotica have had to be split into A-K and L-Z listings. We had no idea that EditMe (the engine driving the wiki) had a 180,000 character maximum per page (including transparent code), and we learned this when several pages maxed out! Shows you how busy the wiki is now … how marvellously featured.

So we’ll be back at work splitting the loooooong Category pages in the coming week. Also, we’ve been adding another sales tool:

http://bookworld.editme.com/BookCategories

and

http://bookworld.editme.com/BookCategoryHistorical

…we’ve added Amazon Carousels, not for any one reader, but for the Category covered by the page where the Carousel appears. This is a terrific widget that really makes books jump off the page. Have a look, see what you think. We’re about to add such widgets to the other Categories.

How do you get your books into a Carousel? The initial Carousels are being created as a Thank You to those people who have helped to build the wiki -- contributing cash, or help for their co-members, and/or creating the very links which are sending us the traffic! Believe us, “all is revealed” by the stats behind the scenes at StatCounter! The easiest way to get into the Carousels is to (!) be an active member in the Community. Help others; post backlinks; make a donation --

(If you want bang for your buck, and donations just don’t do it for you … consider buying some advertising for your books. There’s good advertising space going all over the wiki. By monitoring which pages are loaded most often, we can tell you that there are four absolutely premium spots: The Homepage (sorry, it’s just about booked out -- the right side column is the last place with space available for months) is obviously the page most-loaded, but The Reading Room, Titles A-Z and Authors A-Z, plus Book Categories … these are *very* well trafficked pages.)

So, the easiest way to get into a Carousel is just to participate in some way. Note to folks who *have* participated and don’t see yourselves in the Carousels yet … be patient! We only started doing this a couple of days ago. It’s going to take weeks to get it all up to speed.

And now, to answer a question that must have been on your mind for weeks: When are we going to have a Campaign?!

Answer: (drum roll; cymbals crash) Kitty Night is next week. We’re ready. The wiki is a wonderful resource. It’s now a healthy size, growing fast, with something for everyone.

So -- urgent call for writers who want to be in The Reading Room: this is a great way to be noticed, grab attention, audition. Do you need help getting your materials up? We’re here to help, in the next week!! There are currently only 14 titles in the Reading Room, and we’d hoped for many times more than this before the first Campaign launched. However -- the rest of the wiki is ready … it’s showtime. Drop us an email, let us help you get your best stuff into The Reading Room in time for the Campaign!

Just what that advertising is going to be all about, we’ll be thrashing out in the coming week. So … if you have some Hot Tips as per advertising, now’s the time to let us know. A big-time, properly promoted Press Release is likely (the kind of PR that’s promoted alongside the big boys), plus some banner advertising, and possibly a venture into print media advertising. For example, supposing we managed to get ourselves into The Advocate?!

For now: LINK BLITZ! Next week: Kitty Night. It’s lousy news about the Directories, but the fact is, so long as we behave like a Community, we don’t really need them. So -- let’s be a Community.

Cheers,

Mel Keegan