Quick and Dirty Book Promotion Tips, or How to Be an Author in Today's Publishing Environment
1) Change your traffic measuring tool
- For years, I've been using something called Statcounter. It's free and a lot of us used it for our personal sites when I was at PC World. It also has a very clean, simple interface. Tech support is great. It's the little guy, the independent bookstore, of traffic measuring tools
- I recently started using Google Analytics and something called AWStats, which comes with my Network Solutions Web hosting service.
- Google and AWStats show much higher numbers for Page Views. (Google and Statcounter are comparable for Uniques.) Which numbers would you pitch to an agent or publisher?
2) Join a Facebook Like-fest or a Twitter Follow-fest.
- There are a bunch of sites and forums where members will Like you or Follow you if you follow them.
- For example: World Literary Forum, several groups on Linked In, and there are some on twitter, such as team follow back.
-The best way to find new ones is to find someone who isn't a celebrity and has a load of followers -- see who they're following. I saw some average Joe's with 30,000 followers. (Tell me a publisher isn't going to drool over those numbers.)
3) Ethical Question: Will you be able to look at your self in the mirror tomorrow morning?
When you get a fat book contract -- of course you will!
4) What will you say when you're in front of Congress, under oath?
- "I did not have sex with that girl."
- "I never took steroids."
- "I never goosed my platform numbers"
- "Everyone else is doing it."
1) Change your traffic measuring tool
- For years, I've been using something called Statcounter. It's free and a lot of us used it for our personal sites when I was at PC World. It also has a very clean, simple interface. Tech support is great. It's the little guy, the independent bookstore, of traffic measuring tools
- I recently started using Google Analytics and something called AWStats, which comes with my Network Solutions Web hosting service.
- Google and AWStats show much higher numbers for Page Views. (Google and Statcounter are comparable for Uniques.) Which numbers would you pitch to an agent or publisher?
2) Join a Facebook Like-fest or a Twitter Follow-fest.
- There are a bunch of sites and forums where members will Like you or Follow you if you follow them.
- For example: World Literary Forum, several groups on Linked In, and there are some on twitter, such as team follow back.
-The best way to find new ones is to find someone who isn't a celebrity and has a load of followers -- see who they're following. I saw some average Joe's with 30,000 followers. (Tell me a publisher isn't going to drool over those numbers.)
3) Ethical Question: Will you be able to look at your self in the mirror tomorrow morning?
When you get a fat book contract -- of course you will!
4) What will you say when you're in front of Congress, under oath?
- "I did not have sex with that girl."
- "I never took steroids."
- "I never goosed my platform numbers"
- "Everyone else is doing it."
1 comment:
"Google and AWStats show much higher numbers for Page Views."
Hi Randy,
Came across your post and just wanted to share some information.
Awstats is a log file analyzer - this tracks all activity on your server which includes lots of bots, crawlers etc. So a log file tracker should always record more hits than an online tracker (such as StatCounter or GA).
Online trackers track all activity on your site (not to your server).
StatCounter tracks both javascript and non-javascript hits. GA does not track any non-javascript hits.
(Many older or non-smart mobile devices are non-javascript)
So in descending order of which service should track most hits:
(1) Awstats should track most hits (all activity to your server)
(2) StatCounter next (all activity to your site - js and non-js)
(3)GA should be lowest for hits (all js hits to your site - non-js hits are not tracked)
It concerns me to hear you say that GA is tracking more page views than StatCounter - as outlined above, that should NOT be the case.
Some possible causes might be StatCounter not being correctly installed on all pages of your site OR the analytics code may be duplicated on some pages.
If you need any assistance with this, please just let us know.
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