800-CEO-READ Blog: Internet

A Book Publisher's Manifesto

For all of you interested in what the future of publishing will look like, Sara Lloyd has begun posting her essay on the topic over at the digitalist (the digital team at Pan Macmillan's blog). Because of it's length, she's posting it in six parts. Today's installment was part two.

From the introduction posted yesterday:

Crucially, we will need to work out how we can add value as publishers within a circular, networked environment.

One of the key perception shifts that publishers need to make, then, is about the book as 'product'. Whilst the book continues to be viewed as a definable object within covers, as a singular 'unit', publishers will continue to limit their role in its production and distribution, and this is a sure fire way for publishers to write themselves out of the future of content creation and dissemination.

This is a conversation we have quite often here. While we were handing out books at an author event recently, a gentleman walking by turned to us and said, "no one reads books anymore"--and, keep in mind, this man was there to see the author of the book speak. It's that sentiment that causes so much panic in our industry about the possible demise of the printed book, and I think that that panic sometimes clouds our vision of the future and what great possibilities it holds. So far, Sara Lloyd's essay has provided a very thoughtful and sober view of the situation. I'm looking forward to the next four posts.

And, speaking of the future of publishing, you can now browse inside HarperCollins books on your iPhone.

5 Steps to Optimizing Your Website

There are countless ways to get the most out of your web site, and even more opinions about the best ways. In Zero to One Million, Ryan Allis offers an evaluation system to determine whether your business idea is viable. Then, he provides strategies and steps for optimizing your online marketing efforts. The excerpt below is from Chapter 10, Step 8: Build Your Online Marketing Strategy.

A note about the author: Ryan Allis is CEO of iContact Corp., a venture-backed marketing and online communications firm that has grown from nothing to over $10 million in annual sales and 80 employees. He is also the Chairman of the web marketing firm Virante, Inc. For more info, visit www.zeromillion.com.

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5 Steps to Optimizing Your Website

The majority of Web site owners have fewer than 10 incoming links to their sites. The search engines view incoming links as verification that your site has quality content. The more related links your site has from other sites (with the underlined clickable text that includes your targeted keywords), the higher your ranking in the search engines will be. Here is a step-by-step overview of this entire SEO process:

1. Select your keywords. Use tools such as the Overture Search Term Suggestion Tool, Google's Search Term Suggestion Tool, and Word tracker to determine which related keywords or key phrases it would be best to optimize your site for. Once you have a list of potential keywords, go to Google and type in those keywords. Then see how many incoming links the top few sites have. You can determine this number by typing in "link:http://www.competitordomain.com." Take a look at whether the first few sites have the targeted keyword in the domain name or in the title, or whether they appear often on their page. Use this information to estimate what it would take to get your site above the current sites in the rankings.
2. Ensure that your site has those keywords on it. Make sure that the keywords you are targeting are on your home page at least five times. Having a 5 percent to 15 percent keyword density for your targeted search term on your home page is optimal. Also ensure that your title tag and image alt tags contain your targeted keyword. Add your targeted term to an H1 header tag for added prominence.
3. Build good-quality content on your site. I call this phase the "content campaign." Either write articles yourself for the site or go through the search engines to find related content. If you find an article on another site that you'd like to publish on your site, send an e-mail to the author, site owner, and/or publisher to request permission to syndicate the article on your site. Present it as a win/win quid pro quo in which you receive good-quality content and the author/publisher receives free exposure and a link to his or her Web site in the byline of the article. I'd suggest having at least 25 quality articles on your site before going forward. Optimize your home page for the two or three most competitive target terms. Optimize your in-site pages for the more unique and less competitive terms. You can also outsource the creation of this content to copywriters, using a service such as elance.com, for about $30 per 400-word article.
4. Build links to your Web site. Without incoming links to your site, it will never have a chance at being at the top of the search engines for competitive terms. Use the research you did earlier on the number of links the sites at the top of the listings have or your targeted keywords to set a goal for how many related incoming links you want to build to your own site. To obtain links, go through the search engines and find related Web sites, then contact the owners of those sites and offer to exchange links. Add their links to your Web site and e-mail them to let them know that you've linked to their sites and would appreciate a reciprocal link. I'd suggest contacting them first via e-mail and then via phone if necessary. In your initial e-mail to site owners, include the URL and description of your site, as well as the location of where their links are and which sites of theirs you are referring to. I'd suggest creating a resources section on your site and placing your link partners in the appropriate category within. You can also build links naturally through press releases or by having great content, a useful tool, a viral video, or an interesting blog. If you have more money than time, you can also purchase relevant links from quality Web sites through a service called LinkExperts or purchase reviews with links from sites such as PayPerPost, ReviewMe, and Blogvertise. Ensure that whatever links you build to your Web site have your target key phrase in the anchor text, the words that are clickable and underlined. Finally, text links are much more valuable than image links, as the search engines can follow text links and associate the link text with your Web site, but they cannot do this for image links.
5. Continue building your site's reputation. Once you have built a few related incoming links, the search engines will find and index your site. If your site is new, it can take up to nine months for Google to allow it to show up for competitive search terms. During this time, continue building good-quality related content and work to build as many incoming links from related Web sites as you can.

Embracing the future of travel guides

The New York Times must be reading our minds because just yesterday Todd and I were discussing the future of travel books, and today there's a great article about what travel guide publishers are doing to anticipate and incorporate changes in the industry.

A few approaches mentioned in the article:

• Specialized guides are available online - you can get an entire guide to pubs and inns in the UK, without the other information available in more comprehensive guides. And, you can get a version that connects to the GPS in your rental car.
• Dorling Kindersley (DK) has made all of the content in its Eyewitness Travel guides available online at traveldk.com
• Lonely Planet plans to have all of its guides online in two years, but currently offers individual chapters available for download at a few dollars each.
• Several publishers allow web site visitors to create and print out or order customized guides. Others are getting their stuff into the backs of airplane seats.

Todd and I were discussing the dilemmas of choosing the right book(s) for your travel needs. For instance, you could create a customized guide to New York City with the maps of certain neighborhoods, history on the art in the museum you're visiting that day, and a subway map with certain stops highlighted. But, Todd pointed out, what do you do when it's 4:00, you're in an unfamiliar neighborhood, famished, and you want to eat at a great New York restaurant? Or, as I pointed out, what happens when you're on the Brooklyn Bridge and you want to know how many years it took to build?

Many travel guides boil down the history and cultural information that comes in handy when you're out and come across something new, something you didn't plan for when putting together your guide. Or you only visit sites in the chapters you've printed, and miss out on something cool right around the corner. Some of the spontaneity is lost.

On the other hand, when you're lugging around an iPod, a digital camera, a cell phone, bottled water, and a couple of kids, do you really want to carry a book? And, chances are, you'll need a couple of books, just in case one works well for, say, transportation, and the other works well for selecting restaurants and accommodations. And then there are the books you pore over before the trip and leave at home when you go...

Several publishers are looking at these strategies as a game plan for if (or when) the print publishing industry collapses.

"'We want to be in a position where, if the business suddenly collapses in five years, we have a plan -- unlike the music industry,' said Martin Dunford, publishing director of Rough Guides, which is part of the Penguin division of the media company Pearson, based in London."

But that big IF isn't looming on the horizon at this time:

"So far, the digital media revolution has been much less turbulent for guidebook publishers than for record companies, which are fighting rampant online copying. Sales of travel guides, while flat in some traditionally stalwart markets like Britain, have been growing strongly in developing countries and in the United States -- despite a weak dollar, which has made overseas trips more expensive for Americans.

Travel publishers sold 14.8 million books in the United States last year, up 11 percent from two years ago, according to Nielsen BookScan. Still, guidebook companies may have missed an opportunity on the Internet..."

Check out the article. I know I'll be visiting DK Travel and Lonely Planet's web sites to see what I can do for a little trip I'm planning.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/03/business/media/03guides.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

Free!?

Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert and author of the recently released Stick to Drawing Comics, Monkey Brain!, has an intriguing op-ed in the Wall Street Journal today. It deals with the complications of providing one's material on the internet for free. He began as an evangelist, offering his comic on the internet for free and generating great results by doing so. He has since become more of a skeptic, having had a negative experience when he put his first non-humor title online for free, hoping to boost sales of its sequel. Instead, that only led his fans to expect the sequel to be made available for free as well. He writes that "for the readers of my non-Dilbert books, I have inadvertently set the market value for my work at zero. Oops." He is also receiving some negative feedback from his fans with his new book. It's not because of the book itself, however, but the fact that the book is a compilation of the most popular posts on his blog, and he agreed to take down those posts when he signed his book deal.

This is the challenge many individuals, artists, and organizations are going to have as the internet continues to change the way we sell our work, our services, and ourselves. How much material should we provide for free to generate the maximum amount of interest in our work, and how do we use that interest in our work to make a living, i.e., gobs of money? Chris Anderson (author of The Long Tail) believes that all information wants to be free, and is even working on ways to release his next book, in print, for free. The name of the book? Free. He believes that offering his work for free is the best way to promote himself, and that has to help him make his living as a speaker. For anyone looking for new business models and creative ways to move forward in the burgeoning new environment of the internet, Wikinomics is very good source. Scott Adams' experiences as a humorist and novelist expose a nuance that is a large part of the Web2.0 debate, and the op-ed is worth looking at. Somewhat ironically, it is not free.

Authors visiting Google

Google has been bringing authors in to speak for quite some time now. They recently shared the videos of the authors' visits from John McCain to Valentino Achack Deng. In the business arena, you'll find these folks and more:

1. James Scurlock, Maxed Out: Hard Times, Easy Credit and the Era of Predatory Lenders
2. Chris Anderson, The Long Tail
3. Max Barry, Company
4. Tim Ferriss, The 4-Hour Workweek

So far there are 68 posted.

The Search

It is very seldom that a book comes out with as much buzz as this book currently has. The book is called The Search. But what is neat is the buzz seems legit. First you have to consider the author's pedigree. Founder of The Industry Standard and co-founding editor of Wired are impressive. Then the book is a finalist for the FT/GS business book award and the reviews are off the charts. So I sat down with it.

This is from the first chapter:

Implications
What do Japanese teenagers think is cool this week? What pop star is selling, and who is falling off the charts? Which politician is popular in Iowa, or New Hampshire, or California, and why? Where do suburban moms get their answers about cancer?...

So what does the emergence of such an artifact augur? What effect might it have on the multibillion-dollar marketing and media industries? Why have the governments of China, Germany, and France threatened to ban search engines like Yahoo or Google, and why might our own national security hinge on plumbing the depths of their databases?...

The answers to these questions are not simple. But I hope to at least address them as I tell the story of search in the pages that follow. Search straddles an increasing complicated territory of marketing, media, technology, pop culture, international law, and civil liberties. Etched into the silicon of Google’s more than 150,000 servers, more likely than not, are the agonized clickstreams of a gay man with AIDS, the silent intentions of a would-be bombmaker, the digital bread crumbs of a serial killer. Through companies like Google and the results they serve, an individual’s digital identity in immortalized and can be retrieved upon demand. For now, Google cofounder Sergey Brin has assured me, such demands are neither made nor met. But in the face of such power, how long can that stand?

I look forward to continuing this book.

More blog stuff

I am sure this is currently flying around the blogsphere but in case you haven't seen it. BusinessWeek is saying about blogs "catch up...or catch you later." As my children would say, "No Duh!" Check the magazine article out.

They also have started a blog

Looking for some feedback...

I was looking through the web stats for March and found a couple of things that surprised me.

First, when you look at the traffic to the main blog here, this is the split in traffic (by pageviews):

RSS - 45,826 (39.2%)
Main Index - 7,820 (6.7%)
Archives - 63,170 (54.1%)

The interesting thing here is that there are more pageviews of the archives than the current stuff. I have heard of a similar phenomenon on other blogs. Sites end up with alot of traffic from Google with people finding things directly in the archives.

I also thought this may be a function of spamming. We don't have many people using the search on the blog (230 requests). We also don't have an overwhelming amount of links coming in. Thoughts?

The second thing that was very interesting is that the Podcasts blog is more popular than the Excerpts Blog (24,417 vs. 18,209 pageviews). We have only been posting audio content regularly over the last six weeks, so it was surprising to see such a surge in popularity. It is clear people like the content and we will continue to support that.

So my question here is: Do you like the Excerpts Blog? Are there things we could do to make it better?

A Possible Future

This is a link to a great flash movie called EPIC 2014 on one possible future for the internet. It was done by some folks at the Poynter Institute for Journalism.

Big Kudos to Brand Autopsy for the post. They have alot more detail on their post.