Charles Hodgson

TWUC – Managing Your Online Presence

In my piece in the Writers Union newsletter I mentioned Google’s own SEO resources. Here are links to those:

• Google’s Webmasters/Site owners Help > Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
• Google’s Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide (a PDF for download)

I also mentioned a number of measurement tools:

• Google Analytics for websites
• Quantcast also for websites
• Feedburner can both measure your RSS audience and administer an email distribution of your blog posts.

TWUC blogging posts

The following 8 posts were originally written to support The Writers Union of Canada 2008 panel session Raising Your Public Profile.

Writers Union panel on blogging

This is the first of a series fo eight posts I’ll be making duplicating emails sent to the Writers Union of Canada listserv in the run up to the Writers Union AGM.

I’ve been privileged to be asked to be on a panel at the AGM that will discuss raising an author’s public profile with blogging.

I thought I’d do a little advance profile-raising myself by sending out a series of short emails touching on some of the things that are likely to be discussed at the panel. I hope this will give some insights to writers unable to attend the AGM as well as bring AGM attendees to the session already pumped for the discussion.

I’m a new member of TWUC and my first book hasn’t been out a year yet, so why am I on this panel? The reason is that I’ve been podcasting for 3 years and that has lead to some great opportunities that are illustrative of the power of blogging for authors.

I’ll start the discussion at a beginner level: why a website at all?

Can it still be true that some authors don’t have their own web presence at all? If a potential book buyer hears about you on the radio or from a friend, they EXPECT to be able to look you up on the internet. What do they think if they can’t find you?

They may be able to find you in an online bookstore like Amazon or Chapters, but unless you have strong sales at Amazon any result that comes up on Google will be ranked far back in the pack. For better or worse increasingly “look it up” equals “Google” and most people won’t look further.

My next post will look at why a blog is even better than a web page.

The panel session is titled RAISING YOUR PUBLIC PROFILE and takes place at 1:15 on Friday May 23. I’ll be joining Cynthia Good and Rick Broadhead on the panel. The registration deadline for the AGM is April 16.

Blogging part 2

Further to the Writers Union of Canada AGM panel RAISING YOUR PUBLIC PROFILE

I got feedback from Penny Kome on my rhetorical question

“can it still be true that some authors don’t have their own web presence at all?”

She reminded me (so I’m reminding you) that Union members have access to their own member web pages on the Union website, although not all take advantage of this.

My last post said I’d address why blogging is better than a static web page.

Of course there are two sides to that and in one way a blog is worse than a static web page; it takes more work.

Your objective should be that people can find you on the internet. Beyond that your goal should be that once they’ve found you they feel some kind of attachment to you.

Blogs are better than static websites for these two reasons.

First of all Google gives your website more prominence in its results if your content is regularly being refreshed. That means you have a better chance of showing up on the first page of Google results.

My blog at podictionary.com is updated with new material 4 or 5 days a week. I just typed my name into Google and the first two results link to my websites. Out of ten results on that first page, six of them point to material by or about me.

Not bad when there is a film actor and a rugby player by the same name.

The second reason that blogs are better than static web pages is that it allows your audience to get to know you and your work in a more intimate way. They feel a more personal attachment to you because they hear from you regularly.

There’s a third reason why a blog is better. It both reinforces your Google ranking and audience attachment.

Most blogs allow for readers to comment. What’s been called “web 2.0″ is all about interactivity on the web. You write something, your audience writes back. There is more fresh content for Google and more of a feeling of involvement for your fans.

I said blogs were more work, that’s what I’ll touch on next time.

This blog post is a duplicate of one of a series of emails I’m sending to the Writers Union of Canada listserv in advance of the Writers Union AGM panel session RAISING YOUR PUBLIC PROFILE taking place at 1:15 on Friday May 23. The deadline for AGM registration is Wednesday April 16. I’ll be joining Cynthia Good and Rick Broadhead for that panel.

Blogging part 3

Further to the Writers Union of Canada AGM panel RAISING YOUR PUBLIC PROFILE

Running a blog is harder than setting up a website. But it’s easier in some ways too.

It’s harder because you have to do the work of maintaining it with regular fresh material. A blog that hasn’t had a post for months is arguably worse than a static website. It’s obvious to new visitors that it hasn’t been maintained and it certainly isn’t keeping any audience attached with regular missives. Also, it’s likely that your last post—what visitors first see—wasn’t itself explicitly designed to capture attention and make people love you, which is what a static web page might hope to do. I mean, if it was your last post for months you were probably losing interest.

This means you have to have both the discipline to keep up a regular blogging schedule, and the ideas to keep posting material that will be interesting to your readers.

This relates to what you choose to blog about. Ideally you want to drive book sales so you should chose things to write about that would be attractive to the same people who would be attracted to your books. In my opinion blogs that are like publicly accessible diaries are only appropriate if you want an audience restricted to close friends, or if you have a huge public profile already (in which case maybe you don’t need a blog).

My book is about words and etymology and specifically the words we use for our bodies. I chose to podcast and blog about the etymologies of common words. In doing so I didn’t regard my writing as just being given away for free. I hope to be able to repurpose and later sell some of the reservoir of writings and audio recordings I’ve produced.

Using my imagination I might suggest as an example, perhaps a murder-mystery writer who runs a blog and weekly or biweekly could put up a piece discussing a single kind of plot device, perhaps comparing how they used it with some other famous author (I made this up so I don’t know if it would work). Maybe if you have characters that live on from book to book the blog could be a fictional personal diary for them.

A blog requires dedication, it’s a bit time consuming and taxes your creativity. But I also said that a blog is in some ways actually easier than setting up a web page. That’s what I’ll talk about next time.

This blog post is a duplicate of one of a series of emails I’m sending to the Writers Union of Canada listserv in advance of the Writers Union AGM panel session RAISING YOUR PUBLIC PROFILE taking place at 1:15 on Friday May 23. I’ll be joining Cynthia Good and Rick Broadhead for that panel.

Blogging part 4

Further to the Writers Union of Canada AGM panel RAISING YOUR PUBLIC PROFILE

If a blog is harder than a static web page, how can it be easier?

Genni Gunn asked me how much technical expertise authors need to get into blogging or podcasting. My answer was:

“How long is a piece of string?”

What I mean by that is that while you can get pretty deep into the technical side, you don’t have to.

Free blog hosting services like WordPress.com, Blogger.com, TypePad.com and LiveJournal.com keep financial inputs at zero and are designed so all you need to do is write. Compare that to setting up a website where you likely need to pay a monthly fee and either cobble a design together yourself, or pay someone else to do it.

<plug warning>Of course you could use the Union’s free web page</end of plug>

The technical barrier to entry for podcasting is a bit higher than just typing out a blog, but for a few hundred dollars in equipment and a few days learning it is completely achievable. I made the decision to start podcasting, learned what I needed, wrote my first script, read it into a microphone and posted my first episode all within about 12 hours. I started with a monthly cost of $5.

In 2005, the year I started podcasting, Oxford Dictionaries declared “podcast” to be the word of the year. In 2006 podcasting was partially eclipsed by YouTube.

The barrier to entry in producing a video blog is another step higher than podcasting if you want a polished product. But almost every cell phone these days has a camera in it that can take short movies and it’s easy to upload these to YouTube. Although I personally might want to upload material that has gone through some editing and refining, the ethos of YouTube makes uploading raw clips the norm. YouTube isn’t strictly a blog but it is a form of web presence and it’s free too.

Because I’m comfortable with technology I may have invested more time into the technical side than some choose to. That’s one of the potential downsides of blogging.

Next post, before I tell you all the wonderful things podcasting/blogging has done for me, I’ll tell you the downside.

This blog post is a duplicate of one of a series of emails I’m sending to the Writers Union of Canada listserv in advance of the Writers Union AGM panel session RAISING YOUR PUBLIC PROFILE taking place at 1:15 on Friday May 23. I’ll be joining Cynthia Good and Rick Broadhead for that panel.

Blogging part 5

Further to the Writers Union of Canada AGM panel RAISING YOUR PUBLIC PROFILE

There are lots of good things that have happened to me because I became a podcaster and blogger, but there is bad news too. Today I’ll talk about the dark side. Next time I’ll pull out the brag sheet.

I began podcasting because I wanted to build an audience for my book before it came out. It didn’t really work out that way. My book sales haven’t been great.

I also found that although I may have gained a large following in the podcast space, they don’t transfer very much to the blogging space.

When I podcast I am posting an audio file in MP3 format. Google doesn’t know audio in MP3 format from nothing. So although I had hundreds of episodes out in cyberspace I had no Google presence. To get that I had to start posting my transcripts, which meant I became a blogger.

I mentioned in an earlier post that blogging is interactive and that Google values your text as well as the text of people who comment on your blog. Because I’d built up thousands of listeners very few of my audience were sitting at a keyboard when they heard my episodes and so my blog comments were almost nonexistent. Many were listening as they commuted or while walking the dog.

People used to one medium don’t move easily to another. This shows in the book sales but another example is that I found when I was featured at Apple’s iTunes store it brought in thousands of new listeners, yet when I got on the front page of the Life section of USA Today it only brought in a few hundred.

Unlike many authors I wasn’t educated in the arts or English. I’m an electrical engineer. As a consequence I really need my spell-check, copy editor and friendly grammarian. Putting fresh text out there every day without another pair of eyes on it first, with an invitation for readers to comment means I get a fair number of public corrections. I try to accept them with grace.

Podcasting has been around long enough now that most people know what it is, or think they do. But that doesn’t mean that a majority yet actually listen to podcasts regularly. Becoming a podcast listener takes more commitment is some ways. You don’t have to have an iPod but many people don’t know that. Listeners have to dedicate time to listen, they can’t just run their eye over an article to decide if it’s worth spending time on.

To watch YouTube or read a blog all you need is a web browser but there isn’t really an equivalent defacto portal for podcasting the way there is for video in YouTube. Apple’s iTunes is the defacto portal for podcasts but it isn’t accessible by web browser, you have to download and install iTunes software and that’s another barrier to my audience.

Although I’ve started to try to make money directly on the blog and podcast through advertising, this revenue stream is still only a trickle .

Perhaps the biggest warning I can give about blogging or podcasting at a professional level is that it takes a lot of time.

So to recap:

• popularity online does not equal book sales
• popularity in podcast form does not equal popularity in blog form
• podcasts of themselves don’t attract Google
• podcast listeners don’t sit at their computers while listening so their feedback is reduced
• technology and perception issues block audiences in podcasting
• revenue models for podcasts and blogs are immature

Next post I’ll take a cheerier tone.

This blog post is a duplicate of one of a series of emails I’m sending to the Writers Union of Canada listserv in advance of the Writers Union AGM panel session RAISING YOUR PUBLIC PROFILE taking place at 1:15 on Friday May 23. I’ll be joining Cynthia Good and Rick Broadhead for that panel.

Blogging part 6

Further to the Writers Union of Canada AGM panel RAISING YOUR PUBLIC PROFILE

Last post was all bad news about podcasting and blogging. Today I get to show off.

My podcast has had four million downloads and thousands of people listen to my voice or read my words every day. I’m getting within spitting distance of 200,000 impressions per month (an impression being a download, a pageview, a subscription email sent etc.)

I’ve gotten coverage in dozens of print publications and hundreds of websites and blogs.

My podcast led to an original audio book contract with Macmillan.

I met and developed relationships with many kind people in fields related to the work I’m doing including world leaders in lexicography and etymology.

My podcast is being hosted once a week on the Oxford University Press blog.

In the same way that people feel a greater connection with radio personalities on CBC because they know them by voice, I feel my listeners are more dedicated than blog readers might be. Any day I’m feeling down I can look up the listener comments posted at iTunes and get my ego stroked. Read on, the following are from people who were NOT paid to say this:

” Only two or three short listens and you’ll be completely enamored by this charming man who comes to your iPod like a friend.”

“Brilliant: I never tire of Charles Hodgson’s endearing presentation. This podcast is a real joy.”

“Excellent source of Knowledge: This podcast provides 150% of the RDA of knowledge and is a great way to bypass the work involved in researching the etymology of words. Additionally, when explaining word history to others you appear to be very knowledgeable and well read thereby increasing your virtual IQ. I listen every day.”

I told you today I’d brag.

Because my podcast is now also a blog I am building a blog-reading following as well. Perhaps these print oriented people will be more likely book buyers than the audio oriented people.

People who’ve visited my website have filled in listener surveys giving me the kind of information that advertisers like to know about a potential audience. I’m pleased to say that my audience represents a very desirable demographic.

So that’s the good news. Next post I’ll tell you about something called SEO.

This blog post is a duplicate of one of a series of emails I’m sending to the Writers Union of Canada listserv in advance of the Writers Union AGM panel session RAISING YOUR PUBLIC PROFILE taking place at 1:15 on Friday May 23. I’ll be joining Cynthia Good and Rick Broadhead for that panel (moderated by Ray Argyle).

Blogging part 7

Further to the Writers Union of Canada AGM panel RAISING YOUR PUBLIC PROFILE

I told you some downsides to podcasting & blogging and I told you some reasons that make me keep doing it. If you begin to get serious about blogging after a while you should also begin to think about SEO.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization.

It boils down to doing some things to make Google see your blog more clearly and rank it more highly. It is a mistake to try and design your web presence for Google. Google won’t buy your books. Design it for people. Google is such a successful company because they are so good at getting their search technology to like what real people like. So write your blog for real people.

But once you’ve done that there are a number of other things that, if you’re aware of them, should make Google even happier. I use WordPress for my blog. But I don’t use the free WordPress hosted service. They also provide free software that I can run on my own host’s servers. That other host costs about $7 a month. What that buys me is the ability to plug extra modules (called plugins) into the software to do more than the free service allows. Some of these make it easy to do SEO.

One of the things this allows is addition of more appropriate post titles and keywords for Google to find. Some companies pay money to choose keywords but a simple approach for you to use is to choose words appropriate to your content that lots of people use to search with in Google but for which there are fewer websites out there that contain the keyword. More searches plus fewer competitors means more hits on your site.

Here’s an example:

Imagine an author who writes murder mysteries. I looked up the two key words “murder” and “plot” in separate Google searches. These searches tell me (in the upper right corner) approximately how many web pages there are in the world with those words on them. That’s how big the completion is for each word.

I then used a Google tool called Google Trends (at www.google.com/trends) to look up the same two words. The result at Google Trends shows which word is searched on more frequently.

I can see from these combined results that the word “murder” is a more valuable keyword than “plot” since there are twice as many Google searches on “murder” but there are actually fewer websites that contain the word “murder.”

Another thing that Google likes is links.

If your blog contains links to other blogs and web pages, especially ones that relate to the content of your blog, Google gives you more credit. So as you type, link words in your article to other bloggers and websites.

Similarly if other bloggers and websites link back to you Google is even more impressed. This is called “link love” and I’m going to give you a practical example of it next post.

This blog post is a duplicate of one of a series of emails I’m sending to the Writers Union of Canada listserv in advance of the Writers Union AGM panel session RAISING YOUR PUBLIC PROFILE taking place at 1:15 on Friday May 23. I’ll be joining Cynthia Good and Rick Broadhead for that panel (moderated by Ray Argyle).

Blogging part 8

Further to the Writers Union of Canada AGM panel RAISING YOUR PUBLIC PROFILE

I said last post that today I’d give a practical example of “ink love.”

Link love is the boost you get in Google ranking due to the fact that your blog links to other blogs and websites, and especially when others out there on the web link to you.

How to encourage link love?

I heard about a blogger who went to a conference and was fortunate enough to be good at drawing. He sought out other bloggers at the conference and offered to draw their caricatures.

He then posted his drawings on his blog.

Of course the bloggers who were the subjects linked to his website and gave him link love. He linked to theirs to show who the caricature was of, returning the link love and making Google love everyone more.

And here’s my offer of link love to you.

My podcast is a word-a-day podcast. I’m going to be brining my audio recorder to the Writers Union AGM and I’ll be happy to record any author who wants to say something along the lines of:

“This is Your-Name-Here and one of my favorite words is…”

Then in the months to come I’ll generate podcast episodes around some of those favorite words and include book plugs and links for the author concerned.

Authors unable to attend the AGM can participate too. I have a podcast voice mailbox at (860) 967-3847. Just be sure to leave enough information that I can find your book to include an image and a website to link to you.
I can’t promise to fit in each and every author plug, it’ll depend on numbers. But I have done something like this before with good results (see fantoosh and linoleum). You can check at the podictionary website to be sure your word hasn’t been covered before; use the “Headword Search” tool in the right column.

This blog post is a duplicate of one of a series of emails I’m sending to the Writers Union of Canada listserv in advance of the Writers Union AGM panel session RAISING YOUR PUBLIC PROFILE taking place at 1:15 on Friday May 23. I’ll be joining Cynthia Good and Rick Broadhead for that panel (moderated by Ray Argyle).