Statistically Speaking
PR is a trial and error type of field.
What other industry do you know where you can charge a client, yet be frank with them that there are no guarantees their money will yield results?
Few. But, that's also why PR is the step child of Advertising and why you can't charge nearly as much as a PR company as you could if you were an Ad company.
It's hit or miss, at best. And even the best miss, because it's the nature of the beast.
Still, as an author, I'm my worst nightmare as a client. I scrutinize every promo activity to decide if it's worth my time and money as if I were dissecting a worm in Freshman Biology. I'm the type of client I used to grit my teeth at when I was working at a PR agency.
I spend a good deal of time blogging, reading other people's blogs, sometimes commenting (most times, not), blabbing and sharing in writer's forums etc... I do this, primarily, because writing is lonely and the Internet has fast become my version of water cooler talk.
While writers book talk one another often, if indeed I purchased the book of every author I befriended I'd be broke with a capital B. I'm sure other writers feel the same. Still, late this summer, I started to wonder how much of my viral networking was resulting in traction. If not book sales ('cause I have no way of knowing) at least traffic to my site.
Here's what I found:
Googleosity, it Works
A great deal of my hits are from Google searches (75%). And get this, many are actually googling me! Ha, who would have thought? But there are equally as many who are googling other things and end up being pushed to my website because of some key word.
For example, The Book of Luke by Jennifer O' Connell gets googled a lot from foreign countries and they end up on my blog because I have a Ten Questions That Rock on the book. No idea why so many from foreign countries, but I've had visitors from Chile, France, Japan and many other places searching for her book.
Next comes Yahoo with 14%. The rest of the search engine hits are so minimal as to not count.
Waving The Banner
For this second book, I thought I'd try banner ads. So I'm running banner ads on two websites, right now. One just started - so I've gotten minimal traffic. But the other went live November 1st and I've had decent, not great, but a decent amount of traffic from there.
I have no idea what a good click through rate is on a banner ad. But if I took a guesstimate, I'd say in the last month I've had about 20 click throughs from their site to mine. So that's less than one a day.
The question remains, will the click through rate be good enough for me to invest in another banner ad from either? I'll wait out the entire run time and see.
Cyber Tours, Marketing Collabos & Jabber Jawing Online
Okay, here's where I've often wondered - just how much of me running my mouth in the name of cyber networking and collaborating with other authors actually works.
Unfortunately, I've had very little traffic from my involvement with Class of 2K7. However, the cyber stats do not reflect just how much word-of-mouth 2K7 received. Man, at BEA, we were practically celebs. Seems like every other author or librarian we ran into had at least heard of us. So, maybe we were just more popular with the bricks and mortar set.
The Brown Bookshelf, on the other hand, has drawn some good traffic in the thirty days since it launched. The irony being, I'm not even promoting myself with this intiative. Hey...I may be on to something.
I haven't had a significant amount of traffic from my Girlfriend Cyber Circuit touring - but admittedly, I wasn't checking or scrutinizing my stats as thoroughly when I did my tour, as I've done lately. So I'll have to wait until I do my next round, to truly analyze the impact. Since it's specifically a cyber tour, I'm now very interested in the number of click throughs to my site from the Girlfriends blog posts.
Similiarly uncalculated, is whether my chattiness in areas like Verla's Blue Board yields traffic. This is a support group/water cooler type forum for me. I'm not there to promote - well, not primarily. So I've never much paid attention to those who have clicked through from Verla's. I'll start paying more attention, now, though - out of curiosity more than anything else.
Blogging's Killing My Novel
Okay, not literally. But my stats reveal that my website's most popular pages are blog pages. Holy mixed feelings, Batman!
I love that people are reading the blog, but it would be nice to see the About The Book page be the top. "Books" is the 3rd most popular page, but remains a solid 100 hits behind the blog.
I've come to the conclusion that without a weapon or copious amounts of chocolate, I can't force people to the pages I'd like them to visit. But it's fun to play armchair quarterback to myself. Based on these stats, I will consider cutting down on some of my forum visits. Except, they're just so darn addictive!
What other industry do you know where you can charge a client, yet be frank with them that there are no guarantees their money will yield results?
Few. But, that's also why PR is the step child of Advertising and why you can't charge nearly as much as a PR company as you could if you were an Ad company.
It's hit or miss, at best. And even the best miss, because it's the nature of the beast.
Still, as an author, I'm my worst nightmare as a client. I scrutinize every promo activity to decide if it's worth my time and money as if I were dissecting a worm in Freshman Biology. I'm the type of client I used to grit my teeth at when I was working at a PR agency.
I spend a good deal of time blogging, reading other people's blogs, sometimes commenting (most times, not), blabbing and sharing in writer's forums etc... I do this, primarily, because writing is lonely and the Internet has fast become my version of water cooler talk.
While writers book talk one another often, if indeed I purchased the book of every author I befriended I'd be broke with a capital B. I'm sure other writers feel the same. Still, late this summer, I started to wonder how much of my viral networking was resulting in traction. If not book sales ('cause I have no way of knowing) at least traffic to my site.
Here's what I found:
Googleosity, it Works
A great deal of my hits are from Google searches (75%). And get this, many are actually googling me! Ha, who would have thought? But there are equally as many who are googling other things and end up being pushed to my website because of some key word.
For example, The Book of Luke by Jennifer O' Connell gets googled a lot from foreign countries and they end up on my blog because I have a Ten Questions That Rock on the book. No idea why so many from foreign countries, but I've had visitors from Chile, France, Japan and many other places searching for her book.
Next comes Yahoo with 14%. The rest of the search engine hits are so minimal as to not count.
Waving The Banner
For this second book, I thought I'd try banner ads. So I'm running banner ads on two websites, right now. One just started - so I've gotten minimal traffic. But the other went live November 1st and I've had decent, not great, but a decent amount of traffic from there.
I have no idea what a good click through rate is on a banner ad. But if I took a guesstimate, I'd say in the last month I've had about 20 click throughs from their site to mine. So that's less than one a day.
The question remains, will the click through rate be good enough for me to invest in another banner ad from either? I'll wait out the entire run time and see.
Cyber Tours, Marketing Collabos & Jabber Jawing Online
Okay, here's where I've often wondered - just how much of me running my mouth in the name of cyber networking and collaborating with other authors actually works.
Unfortunately, I've had very little traffic from my involvement with Class of 2K7. However, the cyber stats do not reflect just how much word-of-mouth 2K7 received. Man, at BEA, we were practically celebs. Seems like every other author or librarian we ran into had at least heard of us. So, maybe we were just more popular with the bricks and mortar set.
The Brown Bookshelf, on the other hand, has drawn some good traffic in the thirty days since it launched. The irony being, I'm not even promoting myself with this intiative. Hey...I may be on to something.
I haven't had a significant amount of traffic from my Girlfriend Cyber Circuit touring - but admittedly, I wasn't checking or scrutinizing my stats as thoroughly when I did my tour, as I've done lately. So I'll have to wait until I do my next round, to truly analyze the impact. Since it's specifically a cyber tour, I'm now very interested in the number of click throughs to my site from the Girlfriends blog posts.
Similiarly uncalculated, is whether my chattiness in areas like Verla's Blue Board yields traffic. This is a support group/water cooler type forum for me. I'm not there to promote - well, not primarily. So I've never much paid attention to those who have clicked through from Verla's. I'll start paying more attention, now, though - out of curiosity more than anything else.
Blogging's Killing My Novel
Okay, not literally. But my stats reveal that my website's most popular pages are blog pages. Holy mixed feelings, Batman!
I love that people are reading the blog, but it would be nice to see the About The Book page be the top. "Books" is the 3rd most popular page, but remains a solid 100 hits behind the blog.
I've come to the conclusion that without a weapon or copious amounts of chocolate, I can't force people to the pages I'd like them to visit. But it's fun to play armchair quarterback to myself. Based on these stats, I will consider cutting down on some of my forum visits. Except, they're just so darn addictive!
posted by Paula at 1:37 PM
2 Comments:
Thanks for sharing. I too wonder if "getting around" online makes any real difference.
Congrats too on your recent pub date!
I think it makes a difference, just not in the way we'd probably like for it too. Well it's b/c I'm so impatient! :-)
Post a Comment
<< Home