DPP004: Hideous eBook Covers, A Membership Site Idea for Any Niche, and 11 More Ideas
Summary: In this episode of the Digital Publishing Podcast (which you can also find a transcript of below if audio isn't your thing), I cover 13 different topics and ideas from a tip on how to keep yourself from creating hideous ebook covers to a great membership site idea for any niche. The podcast is on iTunes here. It would be awesome if you rated and reviewed the podcast in iTunes. Pretty please. If you’re using something other than iTunes, the podcast’s feed is http://thebacklight.com/feed/podcast/. You can also listen to the episode online by clicking the play button on the player right below this. (If you don’t see the player, click here.) It’s about 23 minutes long. Note that the podcast contains my pick for featured podcast and and digital publishing tool of the week, but I don't include them in the transcript below. ---------- DPP004: Hideous eBook Covers, A Membership Site Idea for Any Niche, and 11 More Ideas Welcome to episode 4 of the Digital Publishing Podcast, which you can find online at DigitalPublishingPodcast.com. I'm Tristan Higbee, recording today in beautiful San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. This show is all about things I see and would like to see in the world of digital publishing, from blogging and ebooks to membership sites and apps. Also covered are things related to internet business and online marketing. Stick around till the end of the podcast and I'll mention my picks for featured podcast and featured digital publishing tool of the week. This podcast is brand new in its current form and I'd really appreciate it if you went into iTunes and left a review. I've got 13 topics to talk about today, so let's get started. Topic #1: This is why Alexa ranks don't matter Alexa is a service that attempts to rank every website in the world according to how much traffic they get. The higher the site's Alexa rank, the more traffic it gets. Site #1 is Google, #2 is Facebook, and so it goes down into the many millions. It's not uncommon to come across blog posts and articles with instructions on how to lower your Alexa rank. The thing is, Alexa is pretty worthless when you try to compare your site to others. Here's an example why. The Alexa rank for one of my websites is currently around 280,000. The rank for The Backlight, which is the blog that the Digital Publishing Podcast is part of, is currently around 180,000. But according to the Google Analytics that I have installed on both sites, the one with an Alexa rank of 280,000 actually gets almost twice as much traffic as The Backlight, with its rank of 180,000. The reason for this lies in how Alexa calculates the rankings. It only tracks visits by people who have the Alexa toolbar installed in their browser. Relatively few internet users have the toolbar installed, but a disproportionate percentage of those who do have it installed are into SEO or internet marketing. Those people obviously tend to visit sites related to SEO and internet marketing fairly often, so the Alexa rank of those websites is disproportionately high. That's why my site that is not related to SEO or marketing has a significantly worse Alexa rank than my site that that's more related to marketing, even though the first site gets significantly more traffic than the second. The real value in Alexa for website owners is to simply track your own progress. If you were ranked at #2,000,000 last month and now you're at #1,700,000, that's great. You know that the general trend for your website's traffic is a good one. Topic #2: Getting people to share your website with others I've been blogging for more than 9 years now, and I started my first website back in 1996 or 1997. And I think I've FINALLY pinned down the single best way to get other people to share your website or blog. The key is to make something, for lack of a better phrase, jaw-dropping. I realize that that's kind of a stupid phrase but before you roll your eyes and say "Duh," just hear me out.
