Is There a Market for Your Book?
Are you thinking about writing a nonfiction book? Possibly about a niche subject that nobody has written about yet? Are you wondering if there’s demand for your book?
Whether you are thinking about self-publishing a book or trying to make a business case to a publisher, there’s a quick way to evaluate the market for your book or e-book:
1) Go to Google’s AdWords Keyword Tool
2) Type in the keyword phrase that best describes your topic
3) Google will tell you the approximate number of times that people search for your topic every month
For example, if you’re considering to write a book about “growing bananas,” you’ll find that almost 2,000 people in the U.S. search for information on this topic every month, yet there’s no book in print with this title.
- Date: 07.19.2010
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Twazzup Launches
By Alicia Dorset
Twazzup is the latest in Twitter search engine options. Launched last week, Twazzup tries to “tries to bridge the gap between Twitter’s real-time search and a more traditional search engine.” Twazzup reports on real-time Tweets in addition to the top Tweets of the day.
Other noteworthy features include assigning authority rankings to users and the ability to define search terms. There are a lot of search engines to choose from when it comes to Twitter, so Twazzup might be the next best bet.
Learn more about Twazzup here.
- Date: 05.05.2009
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Technorati’s “State of the Blogosphere” 2008: From Cutting Edge to Mainstream
By Marian Short
Following its 2007 overview of the blogosphere, Technorati provided a more in-depth account of blogging in 2008. The findings of the current State of the Blogosphere are derived from a randomly issued survey to 1000 + bloggers within Technorati’s 1.2 million registered blogs. Bloggers shared their thoughts about the role of blogging in their lives and what resources bloggers are using in association with their sites.
- Date: 03.17.2009
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Yahoo Introduces “Rich Ads in Search”
By Marian Short
In a bid to reclaim a modicum of search advertising market share from the reigning king, Google, Yahoo is piloting its “Rich Ads in Search” to a select handful of companies, including Pepsi and Home Depot. Drawing on Yahoo’s marketing strength of display ads, the new program will incorporate visuals and video into the text-based realm of paid search advertisements. Naturally Yahoo touted the more visually engaging nature of its Rich Ads, while a Mashable post on the subject announced: “Yahoo returns to its Roots: Annoying Ads.”
- Date: 02.21.2009
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Yahoo Advertising Change
In an attempt to remain competitive against Google Advertising, Yahoo announced last week plans for a new platform, APT, to help simplify the purchase of display ads. APT, formerly known as AMP!, aims to connect key market influencers, including publishers, advertisers, agencies, networks, partners and developers. Full New York Times article here.
- Date: 09.26.2008
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Google now indexes Flash, but text remains best practice for SEO
By Kai Blum
Google announced last Monday: “We’ve improved our ability to index textual content in SWF files of all kinds. This includes Flash ‘gadgets’ such as buttons or menus, self-contained Flash websites, and everything in between.”
Does this mean that the use of Flash will not impact search engine rankings negatively anymore? No, because there’s a difference between getting indexed and achieving a top rank on Google or Yahoo. PDFs are also indexed, but do they frequently come up as No. 1 in search results? Can they compete with highly optimized HTML-based pages? No.
Text sites will continue to beat Flash sites, in my opinion, because of the specific value the search algorithms assign to various HTML elements, especially tags that indicate headlines or emphasis. I doubt that Flash content will be assigned a higher value than regular text. Therefore, indexed Flash content will not improve a site’s search engine rank significantly, especially if competition is strong and if competitors stay away from Flash and optimize their pages with the appropriate HTML tags.
- Date: 07.08.2008
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Name your book with search engines in mind
By Kai Blum
I already wrote about how publishers can effectively sell books through pay-per-click advertising. But, like everyone else who is offering products and services online, publishers should also invest in the other side of search engine marketing: organic/free search results, and name their products accordingly. This will not only ensure valuable search traffic from engines like Google and Yahoo, but will also help with online booksellers’ internal search results.
- Date: 06.16.2008
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Pay-per-click advertising for books
By Kai Blum
Pay-per-click ads on Google or Yahoo are an effective and affordable way to market non-fiction books to people who are actively looking for specific information. This is ideal for small publishers and self-published authors but also works for big publishers and university presses.
A well written pay-per-click ad will let search engine users know that your book exists and lead them to your website or blog. If your landing page content is convincing, you may easily convert them into buyers.
- Date: 05.08.2008
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8 redesign mistakes that can ruin your Google rank
By Kai Blum
Any of the following redesign mistakes can negatively impact your Google rank:
- Change page URLs and other file names (images, pdfs)
- Use different page titles and descriptions
- Replace HTML-based headlines and texts with graphics or Flash
- Make page text changes (content, formatting)
- Change your internal link structure
- Make changes to link anchor texts
- Make changes to alt tags of navigational elements and images
- Change links to external pages
In other words: Stay away from a complete redesign, if your web site is already ranked No. 1 on Google for your most important keywords phrases — unless you have an unbeatable number of quality inbound links. Even then, be very careful not to make any of the mistakes listed above, because on-page optimization is the foundation of search engine marketing success!
- Date: 04.21.2008
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How choosing a physical location can influence Google rank
By Kai Blum
Seventy-four percent of U.S. consumers use search engines to look for local business information, according to Nielsen.
When they use a specific keyword, let’s say “massage” and combine it with a city name, for example “Ann Arbor,” Google will not only display the organic search results and the pay-per-click ads, but also ten “Local Business Results” near the top of the page and “number” them A-J.
The businesses with the most central physical address are usually listed first. I say “usually,” because there’s always a stray.
- “As with all other Google search results, Local listings ranks results based on relevance. Distance is one factor that goes into our relevancy ranking, but there are many factors as well. Sometimes our search technology will decide that a business that’s farther away is more likely to have what you’re looking for than a business that’s closer.”
There’s no doubt in my mind that distance is the most important factor and therefore you should not only use the right keywords when naming your small business, but also choose a central mailing address.
- Date: 04.14.2008
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