Preston Book Listed in The Open Directory Project
By Andy Heath
Some good news for the day. For those of you that have not heard of it, The Open Directory Project is a directory of sites that is highly selective in whom they include. A few weeks ago I submitted Preston Book to be considered for inclusion in that directory, mainly on a whim because I never expected that they would accept it. To be honest, I felt that the editors that run the Directory simply had unreasonable expectations of what a site should be before including it.
A few days ago, I went to the Directory and did a search for prestonbook.com, and amazingly they had included it! I was so excited because the Directory has a Google Page Rank of 8, and a link from there will make this blog more accessible in search engine queries.
So please join me in this little celebration. It’s a milestone for this blog, and I hope all of you will keep coming back. The readership for Preston Book, which launched in May 2008, has grown every month since then, and I’m working hard to help others find it as well.
RSS Feed
Just some other news, I am currently working out some bugs in producing an RSS feed for Preston Book, and when that happens, you will be able to subscribe to the feed and have all the posts from Preston Book come directly to your aggregator. How to do that goes beyond the scope of this site, but you can get more information on RSS aggregators here. I have not perused this page, but I skimmed it to see if it has what you will need to understand the feeds, and it seems to. I will try to remember to repost this link whenever I am able to get the feed up and running, and then you will be able to use it to have the posts from this site come directly to your Google or Yahoo page.
Other Marketing Strategies
For those of you that maintain a blog, you know well that the simple fact that you have one does not mean that people are going to visit it. I’m sure there are even a number of people that stumble across this one only to find that it is not what they’re looking for and then move on. The further I get into writing this blog, the more I understand the need to gain insight into the marketing of blogs. I have been reading a lot of material on the subject lately, and everything I have read says that having RSS feeds can be very helpful in the promotion of a blog because it makes the blog more accessible to people that are not able to visit it on a regular basis - or simply forget to, which happens. Preston Book updates at least every 48 hours, and one good thing I have done since the launch of this blog is to keep that promise and do an update that often. On the flip side, however, I understand that not everyone has the chance or inclination to come back that often, so an RSS feed will help those people quickly sift through the posts that they want to read and disregard the rest without ever having to remember to visit this blog and while reading their other favorite blogs and news sites as well. All in all, it’s a good thing for this blog’s readers, so I plan to get that done soon.
If any of you have other marketing strategies that you think would work to make this blog more accessible and “findable” to those that would be interested in reading it, I hope that you will write me a note and let me know. I’m always looking for new insights, and I’m sure I have a lot to learn. The fact that Preston Book is now in the Open Directory Project will increase the traffic significantly in the next few weeks, so I think we can all look forward to that.
Other Plans
I’m always trying to think of other things that I can do with this blog. At this point, what I have mentioned in this post is the extent of what I have in the works. I will post otherwise when that changes. I have given some thought to an e-mail newsletter, but that is NOT in the works right now, and I do not expect to visit that possibility until the New Year. One reason is that I a lot of times, e-mail newsletters do not ever make it to an Inbox because of all the spam filters that many e-mail systems utilize now. Writing a weekly newsletter in addition to posting to this site on a regular basis would also increase my workload substantially, though if there is a lot of interest, I will consider it next year.
As always, thanks for reading. Without you, there would be no blog. I appreciate the feedback that some of you have given, even though we don’t always agree on everything. But keep writing. If you leave an email address, I will respond.
