When I was writing "The Leftovers Handbook" my
Father in Law expressed the opinion that I was more like to be a success if I
wrote some porn and it turns out he was on the right track; I believe "50
Shades of Grey" may have sold even more books than mine. Now that I am published I occasionally, only every
half hour or so, check how my book ranks on Amazon and sometimes it is doing
quite well but I'll tell what sort of books are doing really well, possibly
right up there with porn - dieting!
Especially the 5:2 type diet.
Perhaps I could write a book combining all three, hmm - something to
think on. I must be careful though. When I was writing "Lush Ice Cream without a Machine" I did some research on the competition and found that a
book called "Tits and Ice
Cream: Because Everybody Loves 'em!" was published by Windupbird
Publishing at the end of 2011. Looking for it now it seems it didn't do well and
the publication was later abandoned! I
have tried to find a picture of the book's cover for your delectation but to no avail so here is a
photo of an ice cream from my own ice cream book - which requires no machine,
not much time or effort, no having to mash the stuff as it freezes and you can
keep your clothes on. Mighty fine
recipe, even though I say so myself!
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Easy Peasy homemade Blueberry Ice Cream
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I have noticed
(observant or what!) that the cunning or even inadvertent use of certain words
can really increase visitors to my blogs.
A fairly obvious one was the mention of naked men in my last post; I had
a feeling that might help. More
surprisingly was the vast number of visitors to my blog about a delicious
traditional apple dessert, Devonshire Apple Dappy, a while ago on Sudden Lunch. I soon realised what had happened as explained here.
So, my point is, keywords, tags, metadata
and tits can all be useful tools to promote one's blog! I use Google Adwords where one can research keywords to see which are likely to have the best effect. This is the result of today's
search ...
... from which you will see that,
surprisingly given the choices, "diet" is the most frequently searched for
term this month, both globally (the first column of figures) and locally (the
second column). "Dappy" isn't that high on the list but it worked for me, mind
you that was 18 months ago and maybe the world has moved on since then.
Once you have chosen your keywords make
sure they appear a few times in your post, use them as labels or tags and it is
also a good idea to title your photos with a keyword before uploading. I had actually called the above chart
"keywords" but having had another search changed it to
"google" which was searched for online a magnificent 923,000,000
times in the last month and so should be a good keyword to use! As another example; the ice cream picture
above was originally named "blueberry ice cream" (8,100 searches on Google this month) which I have just shortened to "blueberry" (2,240,000
searches this month).
Another good idea ...
It is possible to change the title of a
post after publication. This being the case I publish with a highly searchable keyword rich title and then, immediately, change it to something more friendly and
appealing. The first title is the one
that appears forever in the URL to that post - this one was originally just "Google Diets" but I thought it might be more intriguing if I added "rude words", is that cheating do
you think? Of course, people looking for
porn or Dappy probably move straight on but they may just find something of
interest. They have to eat too you know, keep their strength up!
