Monthly Archives: April 2012

How To Be A Best Selling Author

How To Be A Best Selling Author On Amazon

Brad Gosse, a “self published best seller”, used some remarkable methods to get his new book ‘Chronic Marketer’ to #1 in all relevant categories on Amazon and into the top 40 on Amazon’s main best seller list. You can read his excellent tips here, but before you do that, take note of how best selling authors have been achieving success for centuries.

Plots and Plans

Whatever you write about, fiction or non-fiction, you must have a compelling plot or plan. For fiction, this is easy. You have Shakespeare for a start. Choose any of the standard plots from there and you are away. Mix them together and you can’t go wrong if its intrigue and surprise you are after.

For non-fiction, there is only one way to break through, and that is ‘step by step’. People are inherently lazy and in our society of abundance, we have more free time, and we get lazier with it. That means you have to spell out exactly what to do if you want people to like and recommend your book.

Write Write Write

The most successful authors write. Period. They are driven by it and for it. If you are the sort of person who has plenty of ideas, but never start (or start and never finish), then hire a ghost writer instead.

The more you write, the more you can publish. And the more you do that, the better you get at it and the more your words (and message) get out.

Use the free publishing platforms to do it. A successful author is a successful author because that’s what they do. One novel will not make you a successful author.

Persevere

Much the same as above. Don’t give up. If you give up, then that makes you a non-author! What do you want to be?

Set a Deadline

Above all else. Set yourself a deadline. It must be doable though. Don’t miss that deadline. Shipping, as Seth Godin says in his excellent book Linchpin is the difference between success and failure.

Not all successful authors do this of course, but to be an author means you write books. Not one, but many. Are you an author? Get writing and become one.

Tell Everyone You Know

Write the book first, then tell everyone you know. Friends, family and acquaintances. Join every social network you can find and setup a Facebook fan page so you can connect with your readers.

Get copies of your book out to all these people. Printed copies via Print on Demand (POD) publishers like Lulu.com if you can afford it, or PDF if not). Get feedback from them and rewrite sections if necessary (but always listen to your heart first – it’s your book).

Once you are happy, go ahead and publish it.

Go Global

Get it translated once it starts selling. There are numerous sites to get this done. Always test out potential translators (and only pick native speakers). Send test pieces, then ask other native language speakers what they think. Look at the feedback. Don’t pick the cheapest.

Being a Best Selling Author to Build your Business

If you just want to publish a book to advertise your expertise or life story to enhance your business, great. It is good marketing. If you feel you cannot write it yourself, then use a ghost writer.

Are you going to give it away or sell it? Placing it on Amazon at a premium price gives it value. It wont cost you any more to produce it, whatever the price (using POD services such as CreateSpace or Lulu) so your prospects will feel they are getting something of value, and you will be enhancing your credibility.

This is just one of many ways to improve your prospects. If you want more, sign up to my Inner Circle for free (fill in your email in the form top right). I will help you get there.

Negative SEO

Negative SEO Industry

Well, that appears to be exactly what has just happened. And as a result, an industry that was always very much on the fringe is starting to become big business – yes: the Negative SEO industry.

Imagine what you could do to a competitor if Google decided that some of the links to that site were considered spammy and actually reduced or penalised the value of that site? How much would it cost to outsource some cheap black-hat SEO company to totally trash your competitors? You can buy thousands of instant links from many sources online right now (just search for ‘cheap backlinks’).

The feedback is getting louder and louder on this one. Take a look at SEOBook‘s excellent post to see some real examples of this.

They will open your eyes to something you may find you have no control over whatsoever. It is of course not proven (and can never be so long as search algorithms are kept secret) but the evidence is pretty convincing.

http://www.seobook.com/negative-seo-outing

How Do You Get Your Bounce Rates Down?

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Bounce rates chart image One of the most annoying metrics used by SEs (Search Engines) are bounce rates. The higher they are, the less well you will do.

What is a Bounce Rate?

Someone searches for an answer to a problem, or for some further information to help solve a problem. It could be as simple as ‘cheapest iPad’ or as complex as ‘how do I build a nuclear power plant’.

The SE brings up a list of likely pages and the searcher clicks on the most relevant looking result.

If the page they land on is not relevant they leave and search again.

They have just ‘bounced’ off the page. And that page will get flagged as ‘not relevant’ for this search. That means in future, an SE is less likely to bring that page up in the results for that term.

Are all Bounce Rates the same?

No. A bounce rate is determined by the search that took the searcher there. If a page is about ‘how to setup a Facebook timeline’ and that is exactly what the searcher was looking for and what the SE brought up in the search results, then it is probably that the searcher would stay and read the whole page. Great. Result right?

She came, she saw, she left!

Well, not necessarily. If the searcher then exited that page back to the SE to look for further information, or was just simply satisfied already and did something else, then we are back to bounce rates again. She came, she saw, she left!

But what we don’t know (because the SEs are unlikely to ever tell us) is whether the time spent on one page counts for more than the number of people hitting the page then exiting the site.

Plain common sense tells me that all those incredible brains in SE land must have thought of this, so we can assume that length of time on a page (and on a site) has a big part to play when used in conjunction with bounce rates.

We do know that the length of time on a site is important (it is one of the key metrics shown in Google Analytics for example), but as I say, what we don’t know is how that relates to bounce rates.

Non-search Bounce Rates

Here’s another scenario. Someone lands on your page through some direct link (i.e. not via a search). If they exit the site (and the statistics are being tracked through an SE) then the bounce rate of that page will increase. But in this case it is not tied into a search term. There is no relevant relevancy for the statistics! Think about that.

How to reduce your Bounce Rates

So, on to the ‘what to do about bounce rates’ part. It is all down to site navigation. Whatever page someone lands on, and however it was that they arrived there in the first place, always give them some good reason to continue reading.

At the end of each page, add some relevant links. Ideally these will be links to further pages in your site. But you can also include an external link or two if they are useful and relevant.

The most successful site in the world in terms of SEs is Wikipedia. Look at the number of internal and external links they have. They must be doing something right.

Here’s something you could also try. Give your readers a choice. Do this on your main traffic pages. Rather than go straight into the detail when they land. Write an introduction, then give them a choice of how to continue reading. For example, on a glossary I compiled, I give readers the choice of going to the A-N section or the M-Z section. My average bounce rates dropped from 90% to 46%. That also meant my overall site bounce rate reduced.

It doesn’t matter which way you look at this. If your bounce rate goes down, it is a good thing.

Gaming the System?

It could very easily be argued that this is gaming the system. Trying to cheat somehow. Well, I guess that may be true, but wait a minute. The easiest way to find things is to categorise them. To use some kind of pigeon hole and place things in there.

Connect them with easy to choose links and you get a useful system. It is what a dictionary does. It is what Wikipedia do. Organise your site so it connects together with shorter articles if necessary. Join everything up so your reader can more easily navigate your site and choose what they want to read.

Taking my own advice on Bounce Rates – NOT!

I could have done the same thing here. But I wanted to give you all the information in one go. If this page fails because some SE algorithm decides its bounce rate is more important than its content, so be it.

Please leave a comment below and let me know what you think.

How Do You Get More Customers For Your Local Business?