The seventh item on my vaguebooking list was “07. Seven new topics”. These are new “subject areas” that I want to write about on my blog.
Pop culture is likely one of them, although it might be more narrow than that, maybe “pop culture intersecting with the news”. I didn’t comment on Jian Ghomeshi or Bill Cosby’s news items when they hit, but I loved watching people post and take sides, often looking like internet trolls in comment forums except they were posting the same comments on their own social media feeds. My take is a bit different and is primarily about the law, and the court of public opinion vs. the court of justice or law. I may yet blog about it.
Equally, I love the law. So much so that I couldn’t become a lawyer. I’d like to take a subject area and blog about that, but I haven’t yet found my niche. It may very well harken back to my days at law school when I was working for the Ministry of Education in B.C. and focus on the law, schools, education, and children. I haven’t quite decided yet. But there’s an itch there that I’d like to scratch again.
In the realm of writing, I have three areas that are of interest to me. First and foremost is the changing nature of the business model of publishing. I’m very much in the world where “everyone must choose their own path”, and I may turn my attention again to the world of disrupted publishing. Second, I think there is a lot of general information out there about marketing of books in the modern age, but not a lot that gives a comprehensive list of “here’s everything you COULD do, choose wisely”. I started work on this at one time and would like to go back to it. Finally, I also think there is a ripe area for a different slant on books and publishing, and that’s measuring the performance of libraries. I did some research and even some preliminary writing about three years ago but never brought anything to fruition. I think libraries are going to come under increased fire in the digital age, and while they have a strong role to play, I don’t think many of them are telling the right story or using the right yardsticks. When they tell their story initially, they act as a community centre; when their funding is threatened, they claim critics are burning books and destroying literacy if the library goes the way of the dodo. The balance is off, and maybe I can find something I can contribute to the conversation.
In a similar vein, I’m wondering if I have something to say about charities. I feel that much of the rhetoric out there is a bit one-sided, or at times, diametrically-opposed two-sided. I know, for example, that there is not much out there giving people insights into different types of charities. I also have some questions for myself that I want answered on local basic human needs programming and the most effective means of contributing donor dollars.
Finally, I do reviews for books, movies, TV and music, or at least my website says I do. I’ve been a slacker-doodle for my reviews, and I want to get back into them. I am not yet ready to commit to exactly what the other six categories will look like when I’m done, but I know this one pretty well. So, I commit to:
On a discussion forum that I’m on, someone was noting a pet peeve of theirs was people who commit to doing a guest blog for their site and then flaking out with little or no warning.
I find the thread really interesting as it combines a bit of “professionalism” with “netiquette” with “marketing” with “writing”. In my day job, I deal with a lot of young professionals / millennials who have very different expectations of professionalism than some of us old fogies, and while this wasn’t specifically the sub-theme, in some ways it relates, at least in my mind.
We have a mental model of how people interact, and a lot of it is still stuck in the world of the tactile. Face to face, shaking hands, etc. And yet as the world globalized, we came to realize as business people that other cultures do NOT have the same expectations / roles in their rituals as a lot of us westerners. We even have a bunch of racist stereotypes hidden in business guides that resulted from these culture wars about how the “japanese” or the “chinese” do business, written as offensively to some business people in those cultures as some of the “poor blacks who find solace through music” stereotypes that permeated America for some time. Yet the reality was that our perceptions of how to do business changed — maybe not shaking hands is not a sign of disrespect, for example.
Like with globalization, the net opened up the world but this time to virtual commerce, and if we stop for a second, we’ll realize that if we offer guest blogs, then our blog is essentially an e-commerce site in that we’re offering to “sell” a guest some blog space in barter exchange for them writing a blog entry (plus some extra bits). What do the hosts get out of it? Content for our site, more visitors, an enhanced community network experience, and the knowledge / satisfaction we helped another author. What does the guest get? Visibility on our site, potentially more visitors back to their site, networking, and, umm, the satisfaction of writing an interesting blog on someone else’s site perhaps plus hopefully (!) some sales.
Now, if we look at netiquette (which is the reality of our online transactions, NOT the ethereal protocols we have in tactile world), we realize that on average overall relationships tend to be vastly more anonymous, more transactional than long-term, and most important of all? Far less secured — and I don’t mean in terms of access to credit cards. (And please, I’m talking about overall relationships, please don’t e-mail me to tell me how you met this really interesting person in Sweden 10 years ago on the net or your husband or your wife or found your long-lost 12th cousin).
If you offer me your book through Amazon, and I buy it, that’s pretty “firm”/secure because it is a simple transaction. If you offer me a spot on your blog, and I accept, that’s pretty soft. I know, I know, if you’re being professional, it shouldn’t be, but this is the online world. It’s more like an “option to buy” than a firm “purchase order”. Why?
Because if I’m the guest, I still have to do something to make the transaction happen. If we go back to the Mad Men world of hard advertising, “always be closing”, “telling isn’t selling”, etc., the transaction is still “pending”. We haven’t closed the deal, we just have an agreement in principle. In the real tactile world, people pretend that is pretty firm most of the time. Yet, as with say FutureShop or a car dealership, the minute that “customer” walks out the door without signing in blood, the reliability of that “deal” drops to the level of “possible lead” or maybe even “dead wood”. And after tons of conversations, dealers at both stores know that an agreement in principle is not the same as a sale.
The virtual world is full of people making commitments / over commitments / disorganization / websites launching with great fanfare by individuals and after ten posts going silent. Ask yourself — are you updating your own blog as often as you thought you would? Are you even keeping your commitment to yourself????
Add in the fact that your faceless entity on the other end who agrees to write a blog for your site may be (a) fully employed on the side, (b) busy, (c) afraid of failure, (d) deep in writing, (e) dead, (f) a complete flake, (g) changed their mind, (h) broke and can’t fix their laptop to access the net to read your e-mails, etc. and is too embarrassed to tell you any of those explanations. And then add in the fact that you have an agreement in principle, not an actual sale, it is not surprising when they don’t all deliver.
But a lot of that is our upfront expectation. At work, I obviously shouldn’t be expecting our millennials to be jumping up and down at the thought of last-minute overtime but I equally shouldn’t be expecting them to even accept it at all — some won’t. And that isn’t unprofessional, it is just a very different view of the employment relationship. One that differs from my “traditional” one. Not better, not worse, different. Because they are a completely different “customer” / “transaction partner” than I’m expecting / wishing they were, and I shouldn’t rely on them as if they were of the same “mental culture”.
What does this mean for those running sites asking / offering other people the chance to provide content in exchange for providing that content? Or dealing with businesses that offer e-services to us? Assume that not 100% of all “pending transactions” will close when you want them to, or at all. And have backup options ready to go in case they don’t.
For the writing world, magazines and publishers do it all the time — if the writer doesn’t deliver that front cover story or final chapter on time, they go with another cover story or fill the window with another author’s book. They’re prepared for their partners to perhaps not deliver, and have deadlines far enough in advance that they can substitute other material if needed.
Why aren’t we prepared like that? After all, we’re the ones that didn’t close the deal. And isn’t THAT unprofessional of us?
And for those of us hoping to participate as guests, the advice is simple — honour your commitments as if the deal has already closed, and you’ll stand out from the crowd of netiquette slackers whose commitment is more net-ready than world-ready.
Further to my two earlier posts about Search Engine Optimization and authors, I found an interesting article over on “The Book Designer” by Joel Friedlander that has six tips for SEO improvements. Of the six, four of them are a bit unusual (first two and last two) and worthy of consideration.
The first (anchor text) is actually helpful for others to use for you — get them to use some text and the name of your sitedomain in their actual link (i.e. click on “this great site about books at mybooksite.com” rather than click “here”). However, you can use it in your own in-site links too. The second (link juice) is also about how other, more popular sites link to you.
The third and fourth (title tag, first paragraph) are standard fare and I’ve covered in more detail earlier.
The last two (link out, link deep) are about giving links to more information or resources on the topic. You have to be a bit careful with those as you start to look like a link farm if you don’t have a lot of other text to go with it, but some good information.
Check out his article (linked above) for much more detail…
About three weeks ago, I posted my entry about search engine optimization (SEO), with a focus on how it was applicable to writers’ sites. I typed it up, proof-read, hit “Publish”. And less than a day later, good old Google lit up the tech blogs with confirmation of their implementation of tweaks to their Search Engine algorithm. The update, nicknamed Panda, is basically a result of a lot of “bad” things I talked about in my earlier post — spammers figuring out enough of the previous algorithm that they could fake their way to better rankings. Google’s goal is still the same — the most relevant, quality sites should rank first. However, if outsiders figure out the way to game that search, then Google starts to lose relevancy and market share (anyone remember Alta Vista search engine?). So Google monitors what sites do. And then adjust their algorithm to fight the tricksters.
In this case, the analysis available on the web of the changes is pretty extensive. CNET, for example, ran 2000 of the most popular searches before and after the change. And compiled an analysis of which sites’ rankings were affected.
Generally speaking, content farms were reduced in rank. These are sites that basically scrape their content from elsewhere on the web and just replicate it on their site — unlike news aggregators that credit the original source, a lot of scrapers don’t. And often they just mirror their sites in different forms (or scrape each other!) to boost their rankings — essentially trying to get more points by having more content on their site. However, the Panda changes basically take those types of sites and reduce the number of points they get from having multiple, low-quality articles that nobody wants (the sites make money by giving you a little bit of content on a lot of topics and a lot of ads when you visit).
But the tweaks are not perfect — some legitimate sites (i.e. non-scrapers) also got caught by the changes. Like the British Medical Journal, for example. Does this matter to them? Probably not — if someone searches for the BMJ, they’ll find it real fast. On the other hand, if the latest article about dermatitis doesn’t show up first on a general search related to dermatitis, BMJ isn’t going to stay awake at night worrying they slipped in the rankings.
By contrast, if the people who sell ads for scraper sites see their rankings slip, then the number of visitors to their site will slip, the click-through rates for the ads on the pages slip, and their commissions slip. So they need to update their tricks to make sure people are finding their sites, and that WILL keep them awake.
What does it mean for you as a writer? Almost nothing. You still need original content on your site and the right keywords. What MAY affect you though is if you have a lot of material on your site that is just a link to another site, or is a reposting of other material, even videos or news items…your site may start to look to Google’s spider bots like an aggregator, and you could lose relevancy points.
But do you care? Oddly enough, the answer may be no. While that seems counter-intuitive, think about how people get to your site. Most likely they clicked on an URL from another blog, or they searched for your name, or they searched for a phrase like “Books by Jane Author”. As with the British Medical Journal example above, you’re still going to come up pretty high (probably first if your URL is your name).
Rankings are therefore only relevant if you have a lot of other content on your site that you want people to find — like, for example, if you write a lot of blog posts about forensic studies. If you see this as a key marketing hook (i.e. “Come for the knowledge, stay for my books!”), then you should care somewhat. But unless you are the foremost expert, it’s going to be hard to crack those first few pages. For example, if you search for the term “mystery book”, you get a whole lot of sites that sell mystery books. But the rankings don’t produce an individual author’s site until #15 or #16 — http://www.robertburtonrobinson.com — and it looks like one of the reasons he ranks so high is that he has posted a lot of short stories online (i.e. original content). [** Note that I just repeated the search, this time logged into iGoogle so it knows how to “localize” my results, and RBR came up a whopping third this time! Wow!]
For the rest of the Panda algorithm, you may be interested to know that Amazon came in third in CNET’s test, no real change — just further confirming, if you’re selling books, that Amazon is the first stop on a global search engine train, regardless of what Apple, Barnes and Noble, or Smashwords tell you. There is a small caveat to that great Amazon ranking though — Amazon ranks higher on the CNET search as it now sells almost everything from soup to nuts, which means it has more products to match searches. B&N or Smashwords are only going to rank in that global search on items that had to do with books. So not really a fair comparison (as a writer, you don’t really care if people can find TVs at Amazon, just your book, but well, that’s the way the cyber marketplace works. Think of it as “diversification on steroids”. It also improves Amazon’s diversified revenue streams and ensures their longevity, plus their ability to leverage resources for advertising (reportedly $135M last year. And with Amazon announcing this week that they will soon start selling Kindles in Walmart stores (i.e. people won’t have to order it online anymore), expect Kindle and Amazon’s sales to grow even more!). In non-localized findings for “mystery book”, Amazon shows up 4th, GoodReads 6th, Barnes and Nobel not until about 27/28th.
So what else do you need to know about SEO? In my previous post, I neglected two areas of the algorithm.
One area is “registration” and “hosting” data. This essentially means you get more points if you are a registered owner of your domain rather than using a generic hoster like MySpace, Facebook, or on a blog spot. Technically though this is mostly covered by having your own domain name, it just ups the ante a bit to make sure you’re also the registrar for the site (think of it like your ISBN for your books — are you the publisher? or did you publish through Smashwords or Amazon and THEY’RE listed as your publisher? The former gets you more points for your URL.) So if you have your own domain, register it yourself and feel free (where possible) to stuff your registration details with your keywords. Not a huge issue, but take the points if you can; if you’ve registered elsewhere, don’t sweat it.
A second area is more about style. When you write a title for a book or a magazine article, you often try to be a bit quirky or unique — which works in print because when people see it, they already have the context. So an article entitled “What we can expect in 2012” in an article in Business Week is very different from a book with the same title in the Paranormal section of the bookstore or an article with the same title in an issue of Entertainment Weekly. But as a reader you don’t care, it’s easy to tell those three apart. But on the web, particularly in a search engine, the context is often lost — those three titles would be considered equally relevant to a search on that phrase. As a result, SEO gurus refer to a related area as microcontent, and suggest making your page titles more explicit. As a practical example, if your site has pages with books on it for sale, don’t call the page “My books”. Call it “Books by John Doe” instead — give the Search Engine the context of what is on the page if it only looks at that page. You also get more points if the page title STARTS with your keyword rather than just appears in the title — so if your key word is “murder”, then “Murder and Mayhem” gets more points than “Mayhem and Murder”.
Looking at the title for this blog entry, I had originally just written it as “SEO update”, as the context was clear. However, applying the microcontent rule to be more explicit, and to help my rankings in search engines, I’ve changed the title to be “SEO Update on the Panda algorithm and microcontent”. Now, technically I should say just SEO techniques or Panda algorithm or microcontent as the first word. But, microcontent is one aspect of content management, and I’m more comfortable with the title I’ve chosen — you balance editorial concerns against SEO each time you write anything for your site. This just makes that balancing more explicit.
So, I disappeared for most of a year with the arrival of my son. And after I got a whole host of movie reviews up on the old site, DRUPAL started giving me glitches. It never looked quite right, so I opted to just ditch worrying about it.
But in the last few weeks, I’ve thought long and hard about what I really want the site to do and how I want to approach it, and finally came to some basic realizations.
My hoster is fine if I don’t muck around with databases.
If I avoid heavy databases like MYSQL or MSSQL, that takes a whole whack of content management systems out of the equation. Including MediaWiki which I actually managed to get working closer to what I wanted, even though it was using a database. But in the end, it was still too complicated for what I wanted to do, and not worth the overhead.
If I look at “light” CMS packages, there are only a couple that really stand out as worth testing. So I did test them, and right now I really like GPEASY. Admittedly, the documentation is not huge, but my needs are simple. And the guy who created the package and who runs the website forums is REALLY helpful with answering questions.
I managed to start with a FaceBook-like theme, and tweak it almost beyond recognition in colours, etc., and still have 98% of the original code untouched. And best of all, it has a really good online editor that allows me to paste text from a simple editor or just type from scratch, along with lots of little formatting options. Still glitching with the 1.5 line spacing after each paragraph, but I’ll work on that over time.
I also need to ditch a second logo that is showing up, add in separate colours for the background of top and bottom, edit the sidebar, rename the blog, and edit the footer. Then on to Movie Reviews!
