29 days to go in my 30 day challenge.

I can’t say I was pleased with today’s work. The Squidoo lenses still confuse me a bit. It took over two hours but I did manage to get the main lens up for 58 Ways to Find Money for Your Business and the two supporting lenses. Here’s the link for squidoo link.

Over Time was more of a challenge. I finally just used the blurb on the back cover and put one lens up under the sports and recreation category. I then revised the blurb to be more romance friendly and chose the arts & literature category.

I’ll add to all the lenses in the next week, but at least they’re up.

Most of the lenses I saw were loaded with products that were related to the topic. At Squidoo you can choose to receive the commission on the sale of any product you have linked or you can donate the commission to a charity. Squidoo also receives part of the commission as well.

Squidoo is supposed to help in a number of ways. A lens provides a back link to any website that is mentioned and linked in that lens. So every time I put up a new lens it’s another link. One of the categories that Search Engines rank sites on is the number of one way “back” links the site has. The more quality “back” links the better.

Another advantage is that if someone searches using a key word I’ve included in the len, the search engine may bring the lens up.

Tomorrow I will look at the key words and how they’re used in the websites themselves. Meta tags Here I come.

Dee

Dee Power and Brian Hill are the authors of 58 Ways to Find Money for Your Business, Business Plan Basics, several nonfiction books, and the novel Over Time Money, Love and Football: All the Important Things in Life. Visit their website

Today is the first day of a 30 day experiment.

Have you heard of the show "How to Boil Water" on the food TV network? A complete novice at cooking is led through the steps of preparing meals by an expert chef. BUT the chef can only give instructions, can't assist her.

The complete novice at Internet Marketing would be me.

I’ve wondered, with all the buzz about social marketing, search engine optimization, websites, blogging…, well the list goes on and on, is Internet marketing worth the time and trouble if you’re an author? Will it help sell books?

So I've given myself a goal: 3000 unique visitors in 30 days resulting in 100 sales.

Right now I have two websites (well actually I have more but these are the two I'll be working on.) One is about our novel, Over Time, http://www.OverTimeTheNovel.com. It gets about 30 visitors a day.

The other is http://www.58WaysToFindMoney.com, and sells a business oriented report (not quite long enough to be a book). It's less than a month old and receives 20 visitors a day. The sites are very different in all sorts of ways. Over Time is fiction, a hard copy book, and priced less than $15.00. 58 Ways is strictly business, an ebook, nonfiction and priced at over three times more.

I'll be concentrating on a new different Internet Marketing technique every few days, while keeping up the work and maintaining what I've learned and done previously. This will be a challenge there is no doubt about it.

For example today, and probably tomorrow, I will be concentrating on setting up lenses through squidoo - thank you Tiffany Dow for Social Marketing on Squidoo

Tiffany recommends that you set up more than one lens and tie them together. So I will be putting up some humorous lenses “Ask Ms. Money: Advice for the Fiscally Forlorn” for 58 Ways. I’m not sure what I’ll put up for Over Time yet.

Next might be myspace, maybe social bookmarking - not even sure what that is - key words, optimizing for search engines, radio interviews, press releases, copy writing, web design, landing pages, squeeze pages and stuff I don't even know about right now. By the end of 30 days, hopefully I will have used at least 15 different IM techniques, maybe more.

I chose two very different sites and products, because I want to demonstrate that Internet Marketing works for both, or doesn’t work, or works for one better than the other.

Beginning stats:

February 24

Overtime - 30 visitors, Google Page Rank 4/10, amazon rank 1,525,221

http://www.58WaysToFindMoney.com - 20 visitors, Google Page rank 0/10, amazon n/a

Thanks again Tiffany, your Social Marketing on Squidoo was great.

Dee Power

Dee Power is co-author of The Making of a Bestseller
Overtime, the novel, and several other nonfiction books.
Coming soon - Your Ebook: From Cyberspace to the Bookstore Shelves