DON'T FORGET

• Your Web presence is an adjunct to your writing, not the other way around! Don’t spend more time on your site than you do on your manuscripts. Don’t give yourself so many sites to maintain that you can’t keep up with them all. Your readers will find you even if you only have one. They don't want to have to look on five different sites to find up what you're up to any more than you want to maintain five different sites.


• Getting a lot of “hits” doesn’t mean anything unless they’re the kind of hits you want. Consider where you want your traffic to come from.
  • Put up a free Sitemeter to see how long each person stays on your site rather than how many people come. This will also allow you to see where your hits are coming from.
  • Avoid webrings because you can't control what other sites will be on them.


• Google is your friend…but a fickle buddy at best.
  • You can't control where you rank, so try not to worry about it.
  • You can control what words and phrases you use, so think about how you want to be found. Want to know what words show up most often on your site (and therefore are likely to be found by Google?), try TagCrowd. (TagCrowd will also look for what words you use most often in an entire manuscript, which can be a bit scary.)

 

1. Home
2. Before the Contract
3. After The Contract
4. K.I.S.S.
5. Resources
6. Don't Forget