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Feb 4 2012

The Self-epublishing Bubble

This article originally appeared on the Guardian website.

The self-epublishing bubble

In August 2011,  Ewan Morrison published an article entitled Are Books Dead and Can Authors Survive?. Here, he tracks the self-epublishing euphoria of the last five months and argues that we are at the start of an epublishing bubble

by Ewan Morrison

The internet is full of ironies. I, for one, could never have guessed that writing about the end of books would generate more income for me than actually publishing the damn things. I’ve been on an End of Books reading tour since August and it turns out that what the internet gurus say about consumers being more willing to pay for events, speeches and gigs, rather than buying cultural objects, is now becoming true.

At the other end of the political spectrum from me, among the epublishing enthusiasts and digital fundamentalists, similar ironies are playing out: there is now a boom industry in “How to get rich writing e-books” manuals, as well as a multitude of blogs offering tips and services, and a new breed of specialists who’ll charge you anything from $37 to $149 to get your e-book into shape.

This all seems like a repeat of the boom in get-rich-quick manuals and “specialists” that appeared around blogs and e-trading. Did anyone actually get rich from writing blogs, you may ask? Well, according to Jaron Lanier (author of You are not a Gadget) there are only a handful of people in the world who can prove that they make a living from blogging: it’s entirely possible that more money was made by those who wrote and sold the how-to manuals than by the bloggers themselves. But who cares, right? It’s all part of the euphoria of digital change, and technological innovation is as unstoppable a force as fate. Reports show that paper book sales are “tanking” – down a massive 54.3% while e-book sales are up triumphantly by 138%. The revolution will be e-published, and we’re all going to be part of it.

All of this e-book talk is becoming a business in itself. Money is being made out of thin air in this strange new speculative meta-practice: there are seminars, conferences and courses springing up everywhere, even at the Society of Authors (a writers’ union which, until recently, was largely against e-publication). Television and radio programmes are being made about self-epublishing (I’ve personally been asked to speak about it on 12 occasions since August). Everyone can be a writer now: it only takes 10 minutes to upload your own e-book, and according to the New York Times “81% of people feel they have a book in them … And should write it”

But all of this gives me an alarming sense of deja vu. There’s another name for what happens when people start to make money out of speculation and hype: it’s called a bubble. Like the dotcom bubble, the commercial real estate bubble, the subprime mortgage bubble, the credit bubble and the derivative trading bubble before it, the DIY epublishing bubble is inflating around us. Each of those other bubbles also  saw, in their earliest stages, a great deal of fuss made over a “new” phenomenon, which was then over-hyped and over-leveraged. But speculation, as we’ve learned at our peril, is a very dangerous foundation for any business. And when the e-pub bubble bursts, as all previous bubbles have done, the fall-out for publishing and writing may be even harder to repair than it is proving to be in the fields of mortgages, derivatives and personal debt. Because this bubble is based on cultural, not purely economic, grounds.

How do we know if we’re in a bubble?

To answer that we have to turn to respected economist Hyman Minsky. Minsky (1919-1996) studied recurring instability in markets and developed the idea that there are seven stages in any economic bubble (the following terminology is adapted from his Financial Instability Hypothesis [PDF]):

Stage One – Disturbance

Every financial bubble begins with a disturbance. It could be the invention of a new technology; it may be a shift in laws or economic policy, or a reduction in interest rates or prices, or the expansion of a market into an area that has not been open before. Usually several factors come together to make the change – and as a result, one sector of the economy goes through a dramatic transformation.

This has certainly occurred with epublishing. Over the last decade, Amazon has undercut the big global publishing houses through a radical new structural approach to storage and distribution and grown so quickly that it forced them to renegotiate their pricing policies. Then in opening up the long tail market and making hundreds of thousands of lost titles available again for resale, it reinvented bookselling. The creation of Kindle led to a new generation of e-readers which, with Apple, launched an economic boom in a previously non-existent market. It has already become a cliché in all media that digital self-publishing is a revolution comparable to the invention of the printing press. That is a lot of disturbance in a short space of time.

Stage Two – Expansion/Prices Start to Increase

Following the disturbance, prices in that sector start to rise. Initially, the increase is barely noticed. Usually, these higher prices reflect some underlying improvement in fundamentals. As the price increases gain momentum, more people start to notice. Speculation thrives.

On first inspection, e-publishing doesn’t appear to fit the model here, as it’s clear that the prices of ebooks are falling drastically (in the week of Jan 1, 28% of the top 100 e-books on Amazon were 99p or under, and 48% were under £2.99). But that’s because we’re looking at this the wrong way round – from the perspective of the consumer. The e-book explosion is coupled with the rise of the e-reader, and the profits there are in the hands of the manufacturers. There has also been a fast turn around in these new technologies from Kindle to Kindle Fire, from iPad to iPad 2; and a brand new market of consumers for these products has appeared from nowhere. The change to cheap ebooks and self-published ebooks is a “change in underlying fundamentals”.

Stage Three – Euphoria/Easy Credit

1. Increasing prices/sales do not, by themselves, create a bubble. Every financial bubble needs fuel; cheap and easy credit is that fuel. Without it, there can be no speculation and the sector returns to a normal state. Speculation takes over and there is a rush to “get in” as newcomers become involved “cheaply” 2. When a bubble starts, the sector involved pushes stories into the media,  and is suddenly inundated by outsiders; people who normally would not be there.

1. “Easy credit” in this case relates to the plummeting costs of digital content. In fact, there is an inverse correlation between the cheapness of digital content and the high cost of e-readers and smart technology. The more ‘free’ or nearly-free content is available online, the more appealing expensive e-reader and iPad technologies have become. Furthermore, “cheaply” here refers to the ease with which someone can now self publish. A decade ago, self publishing could costs thousands of pounds for a mere 100-book print run. Now it is free or almost free.

2. The whole point of self-epublishing is that the market “brings in people who would not normally be there”. Like the promise that we can all have an affordable home with a cheap mortgage, we are being told constantly by digital businesses and the media that we can all be writers and even be successful as writers. Even the tabloids are generating hype, telling the masses that they each can make millions through self-epublishing.  The more traffic there is in self-epublishing the more the hype has ‘evidence’ to support it. According to USA today, “it’s a gold rush…get out there”.

Stage Four – Over-trading/Prices Reach a Peak

1. As the effects of cheap and easy credit dig deeper, the market begins to accelerate. Overtrading lifts up volumes and spot shortages emerge. Prices start to zoom, and easy profits are made. This brings in more outsiders, and prices run out of control. 2. This is the point that amateurs – the foolish, the greedy, and the desperate – enter the market. Just as a fire is fed by more fuel, a financial bubble needs a mass of people involved in mass behaviour to fuel it.

1. Since epublishing started, the race to undercut competitors has accelerated at unforeseen speed. Blogs now give advice to start-up writers, telling them to give their work away for free to gain audience share and get reviews, and only then attempt  to raise their prices. The zooming prices here refers to the zooming down of prices. For example self-epublishers are now giving books away for free – see the Kindle Top 100 Free books. Furthermore, in this ecstatic push to self-epublish, there are hundreds of thousands of new ebooks for which there are almost no readers at all because they have zero visibility.

2. Over the last six months there has been a huge growth in the number of people with no former experience who have entered self-epublishing. Taking myself as a representative slice of the public, I can attest, from recent personal experience, to the following: People I know who have been rejected by mainstream publishers have brought out their first ebooks on Kindle; people I didn’t even know had novels under their beds have done the same; friends of friends on Facebook have announced that they too have novels and short stories available on Kindle, Nook, Kobo, iPad and Sony Reader. Locally, I have seen two new digital publishing houses born from nothing and paying no advances, operating on “spec” writing. And all of these people are self-promoting their work on what platforms they have: Twitter, Facebook and their blogs. All of this is evidence of a “desperation to enter the market”. I know this because I also felt the pressure to try it (and did: I self re-epublished what was my first book).

People who are self-epublishing for the first time are also buying their first iPads and Kindles, so as to better understand the e-pub technologies and to further promote their ebooks. They may be giving their ebooks away for free but they’re spending between £100-400 on single items of new technology – more than they ever actually spent on books in a year.

Stage Five – Market Reversal/Insider Profit Taking

Warnings sound that the boom will turn to bust; that the models on which success is based are unrealistic and overblown. These arguments are ignored by those who justify the now insane prices with the euphoric claim that the world has fundamentally changed and cannot change back. The fact is that insiders have been pulling the strings all along, capitalising on the hype created by the ill-informed newcomers to the market. 

The model of e-book success that’s held up for everyone to copy is based on half-truths. Even those who are seen as e-book stars are actually transitional figures straddling the digital self-publishing and the mainstream camps.

Take for example digital guru, free culture activist (former European director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation) and author Cory Doctorow – an SF celebrity and aggressive exponent of self-epublishing who gives his books away for free under a creative commons license (with optional payment). It turns out that Doctorow isn’t just any old novelist: the subjects he and his characters talk about are file sharing, the digital revolution, digital rights management and the oppressive old gatekeepers of the mainstream. His kudos comes from the fact that we are in a transitional period in which “free digital culture” is still an issue. Ironically, if and when self-epublishing becomes the norm, his subject matter will no longer seem so radical and no doubt his reader base will diminish.

Or take Amanda Hocking, the paradigmatic example of epublishing success, who has made $2.5m from selling her own ebook. Hocking writes about the supernatural and teenagers, and her success is due in no small part to what the industry calls “piggybacking” on a mainstream success. Without Twilight, and the popularisation of the teen-romantic-horror genre,  it is doubtful that Hocking would have a foothold in the industry, or that many people beyond her internet friends would have bought My Blood Approves (retailing at £0.72 on Amazon).

The models of Doctorow or Hocking are misleading to say the least. For the hundreds of thousands of newcomers to self-epublishing to believe that they can become as successful as these role models is a dangerous delusion, and one capitalised on by companies who have an interest in maximizing internet traffic and selling e-readers and internet advertising.

The crisis that’s looming is that while the price of e-books is pushed to almost zero by the rush of frantic amateur self-publishing activity, the established publishing businesses will be forced into life-saving cost-cutting.  Again, this is something from which those who have an interest in maximizing internet traffic and selling e-readers and internet advertising will benefit. For a while, all those new Kindle owners will find it liberating to see the prices of all e-books fall, allowing them to vastly expand their libraries, while at the same time, paradoxically, they will wait anxiously for someone to buy their own literary e-offerings online.

Stage Six – Financial Crisis

Just as the euphoria consumes the outsiders, the insiders see the warning signs, lose their faith and begin to sneak out the exit. Whether the outsiders see the insiders leave or not, insider profit-taking signals the beginning of the end.

Already the stars of self-epublishing are leaving the system that launched them. Hocking signed a deal with Macmillan that gave her a $500,000 advance on four separate books in a series – a total reversal from the way self publishing is done (with zero advances being paid and all work being done on “spec”). The self-epublished author has left the glass-ceiling world of .79 cents e-book sales (to embrace the old mainstream model, believing that it is the only system that can elevate her to a higher profile and bring her into an arena where her books can by “synergised” with tie-in products such as films, TV serials, even toys) and the door of opportunity closes behind her as she exits, leaving hundreds of thousands of self-epublishing authors without a model to aspire to.

Meanwhile the mainstream publishing houses have suffered huge losses and now can only publish authors who seem to offer a guaranteed return.  The entire field of publishing has shrunk, beneath what seemed on the surface like an infinite expansion. Publishers have been forced to launch their own e-publishing sites in the attempt to join in the bubble and gain kudos, but they are too late and are wasting resources, and further undermine their old status as market leaders. They in fact turn to the new model of the self-epublishing “star” to get them out of the doldrums. This is the point at which self-epublishing becomes a hall of mirrors and speculation runs in circles.

And what has happened to all those new authors who were told they could make money from e-publishing? Well, they are working entirely for free (on spec) on the promise of those big 70% royalties on future sales. They write their books, they blog, they net-network and self-promote; they could put in as much as a year’s work, all without payment. So much writing-for-free is going on that it upsets the previous paradigm: people start to ask, why should any writers get paid at all? Why should “professional” writers get a wage or advance, when I’ve had to do all this work on my self-published e-book for free?

And then comes the collapse – if you work for free and have to slash your costs to be competitive – to, say, undercut the vast 99p market by going down to 45p or 15p – then your chances of ever seeing a return on all the free labour you’ve put in diminish accordingly. Add to this the fact that hundreds of thousands of others are competing with you in this pricing race to the bottom and the possibility of any newcomers making any money from self-epublishing vanishes. The bubble bursts.

Stage seven – Revulsion/Lender of Last Resort

Panic starts and euphoria is replaced with revulsion. Outsiders start to sell, but there are no buyers. Panic sets in, prices start to tumble downwards, credit dries up, and losses start to accumulate. The market is forced back to pre-bubble levels, with major destruction to its infrastructure. The “Lender of the Last Resort” may step in to save what is left.

1. After a long year of trying to sell self-epublished books, attempting to self-promote on all available networking sites, and realising that they have been in competition with hundreds of thousands of newcomers just like them, the vast majority of the newly self-epublished authors discover that they have sold less than 100 books each. They then discover that this was in fact the business model of Amazon and other e-pub platforms in the first place: a model called “the long tail”. With five million new self-publishing authors selling 100 books each, Amazon has shifted 500m units. While each author – since they had to cut costs to 99p – has made only £99 after a year’s work. Disillusionment sets in as they realise that they were sold an idea of success which could, by definition, not possibly be extended to all who were willing to take part.

The now ex-self-epublished authors decide not to publish again (it was a strain anyway, and it was made harder by the fact that they weren’t paid for their work and had to work after hours while doing another job – and they realised that self-promoting online would have to be a full-time job.) They come to see self-epublishing as a kind of Ponzi scheme – one created by digital companies to prey on the desires of an expanding mass of consumers who also wanted to be believe they could be “creative”. They also become disillusioned with their e-readers, which are now out of date anyway. And so they return to the mainstream publishers to look for culture. Unfortunately, as a result of the e-book market implosion it is impossible for publishers to push their prices back up to pre-bubble levels (from 99p to £12.99), and so their infrastructure continues to decline. And since they have decided to look for new talent in self-epublishing, they are trapped in the very same bubble that everyone else is trying to get out of.

2. The “Lender in the Last Resort” cannot really step in to save the “investors”, as these are the hundreds of thousands of hopeful and now-disappointed first-time e-publishers. Instead, the government (if we’re lucky) steps in to bail out the publishing industry, and to regulate the digital companies that created the bubble in the first place. Or the government could continue to subsidise these companies, as it does just now, and in so doing create the next bubble.

Of course, none of this might come to pass. Perhaps self-epublishing wont take off, and perhaps people will continue to pay more than 99p for ebooks and paper books. And perhaps hundreds of thousands of new writers will actually taste success. But this, again, is mere speculation.

Jan 17 2012

Facebook Gave Me Writers’ Block

This article originally appeared on the Guardian website.

Facebook Gave Me Writers’ Block

by Tom Cox

For Tom Cox, the creative isolation of living in the country was punctured by a constant babble from social networking. So in 2012, he’s decided to go cold turkey

For Tom Cox, the creative isolation of living in the country was punctured by a constant babble from social networking. So in 2012, he's decided to go cold turkey (photo courtesy of Tom Cox)

To see in this year, I did two things I’ve been meaning to do for a long time: I challenged myself to put on as many coats as possible at the same time during a lull in a New Year’s Eve party, and I deactivated my Facebook account. The coats challenge didn’t work out quite as well as I’d hoped: I ran out of arm space when I got to six, and I’m not sure one – a pinstriped, Yardbirds-style blazer owned by my friend Pat – strictly counted. The Facebook experiment, however, has so far been a success. Ten days in, I no longer reach for the Facebook icon on my iPhone in the night as one might reach across the bed for a departed partner, and, as I approach two weeks of cold turkey, the “virtual phantom limb” feeling that kicked in around day three is dissipating.

I was far from the most active Facebook user I know, but my decision to quit came from a long cold look at just how many hours I’ve devoted to it in the last couple of years, and a strong accompanying feeling that, were I to devote the same amount over the next couple, I would want to put on some spiked gloves and repeatedly punch myself in the nose really hard. No matter how positive you feel about Facebook or Twitter and the ways in which they’ve enhanced your life, it is unlikely that anyone will ever lie on their deathbed and say, “You know what? I’m really glad I spent all that time social networking!” Additionally, I’m starting to write a new book, and attempting to feel more focussed.

It’s easy to picture a country writing retreat and imagine that its sheer remoteness naturally leads to the kind of mental peace that breeds creativity, but these days that’s not the whole story. I live in Norfolk with lots of greenery around me but in 2012 rural life doesn’t mean “isolated life”. One of the hardest things about writing for a living is being at your keyboard and feeling that everyone else is out having a party. Facebook and Twitter make that party non-stop and put it constantly in your house, in your face, in your bag, in your pocket. I can convince myself that the two of them are friends in the background, gently egging me on through my creative hermitry, but by doing so I’m being too easy on myself. I already spend far too much time going for coffees and beers with my real friends when I should be writing.

A sensible way to combat such interference would be to switch my router off for a few hours or download one of the increasing range of software packages that lock you out of Facebook and Twitter – or, like Sean French, one half of the bestselling crime writing novelist duo Nicci French — build a writing shed just out of broadband range. But I’m not sensible, and, after a bout of pre-Christmas creative block, I decided to take more extreme measures. Last week, in addition to deactivating Facebook, I drove from my own rural writing retreat to another, even more rural writing retreat, 360 miles away: an almost impossibly idyllic fire-warmed one-bedroom cottage called The Bothy, half a mile down a muddy track just north of Dartmoor, with no internet and only intermittent phone signal.

With a “new year, new start” mentality, I got down straight to business, and held my laptop up against the bedroom window in an attempt to piggyback onto the wi-fi from the main house where the owners of The Bothy live. Having failed in this mission, and fielded some text messages from friends asking why I wasn’t on Facebook any more, which soon extended into conversations I would have previously had with them on Facebook, I read a book about witches and fell asleep, hoping that the witches would get together in the night with the half-formed witches in my own book and make them more vivid.

The next morning I felt more motivated, but I was also a bit hungry, so before working I drove out to the nearest supermarket, ten miles away. This being rain-sodden rural Devon, and the roads being narrow and flooded, the journey took me the best part of 45 minutes each way, and Richard, one of the Bothy’s owners, very kindly accompanied me in his four by four for the first stretch, to make sure my ailing Toyota Yaris got through the floods.

These are the factors the author seldom accounts for when buying into the myth of “getting away from the world”: the two hours that it might take to find an interesting sandwich, the potential hour waiting on a dark roadside for the RAC. Back at the start of the last decade, when I lived in Finsbury Park, in London, traffic noise and nextdoor’s Stereophonics albums were problems, but a carless existence and plenty of nearby conveniences contributed to a simpler working life in a way I took for granted. Also, the pet cats in London were mostly cynical loners, while Bertie, one of the happy, gregarious ones living next to The Bothy, wouldn’t leave me alone, and I couldn’t quite bring myself to stop laying in front of the fire with him on my chest.

When people talk romantically about dreams of rustic artistry, nobody warns you about this stuff: just like when I moved into my house nobody warned me that a man would come to the shore of the nearby lake and shout “COME ON THEN, LET’S BE ‘AVIN YOU!” at the ducks every morning, just as I tried to write the day’s most difficult sentence.

There could probably be no better place to write than The Bothy, if you were a perfect writer, disciplined in his solitude. I, however, am an imperfect modern one, struggling with an attention span that has been torn into strips by the internet and who likes being around people a bit too much.

I managed to work there in the end, but will probably remember it less for what I achieved and more as the place where I found the discipline to almost properly start my seventh book, and finally faced up to the fact that the true distractions stopping me from doing so at home were not external, but internal: that the rabbit hole universe available to us online is far more of a distraction than any physical “bustle” could ever be and the authors really getting down to the best work aren’t the ones telling you about it on the internet.

In fact, I have an impulse to tweet that right now, but I’ll probably leave it.

Tom Cox’s latest book, Talk To The Tail, is published in paperback by Simon And Schuster this month

Nov 9 2011

Four Marketing Benefits of Social Media

This acticle originally appeared on the website, http://www.searchengineoptimizationjournal.com/.

4 Marketing Benefits of Social Media by Nick Stamoulis


Social media marketing is not a fad. If that’s the excuse you’ve been using to avoid developing a social media marketing strategy it’s time to find a new excuse or finally build that Facebook page. Social media marketing can be as simple or as complex as you want it to be (or as you have time for), but you get out what you put in. 90+% of Americans have at least one social profile, meaning your target market is online and engaging in social networking. Marketing 101- fish where the fish are!

What are some of the benefits of social media marketing?

1. Build brand
Social profiles can rank on their own in the search engines, increasing your online presence. Social profiles are also one more place for you to develop your messaging strategy and connect with your target audience. It’s a place to inject some personality into your brand and let your target market engage with you on their terms. Social networks are the perfect place for breeding brand ambassadors and building lasting relationships with repeat customers.

2. Drive targeted visitors to site
You never want to treat your social networking profiles like the final destination of a potential customer. Your social profile is more like a filter, attracting targeted traffic (that identify themselves as you target audience because they are interested in your brand) and them pushing them over to your actual site/blog. The more targeted visitors your site has, the better chance you have of pushing them to act and increasing your conversion rate.

3. Promote content and get more links (social signals)
The more times a piece of content is shared on a social networking or social bookmarking site, the more valuable it becomes in the eyes of the search engines. From an SEO standpoint, these social signals can impact how well your piece of content ranks in the SERPs. From a more general marketing perspective, the more people who share your content the greater potential reach it has. The average Facebook user has 130 friends which means that if just five people post your content to Facebook it has the potential to be seen by 650 of their collective connections!

4. PR
Twitter has become many people’s go-to source for breaking news. Twitter even created this clever commercial demonstrating the power of “real time” sharing. Social networking has practically revolutionized the way news information is shared. So what does this mean for brands? Social networks allow companies to connect with their audience as a situation develops, meaning you have the chance to tell your side of the story as it is happening. Social networks are also a great place to interact with members of the press. You can connect with journalists and local news sources directly, giving them instant access to a story.

Oct 11 2011

How to Meaningfully Grow Traffic to Your Site/Blog

How to Meaningfully Grow Traffic to Your Site/Blog by Jane Friedman (an article from http://www.writersdigest.com/editor-blogs/there-are-no-rules/digitization-new-technology/how-to-meaningfully-grow-traffic-to-your-siteblog)

It’s a problem that every new blog or website faces in its early days—or every day (!): How to get readers (also called traffic).

There are a few well-worn pieces of advice in this area, such as:

  1. Comment on other people’s blogs. Virtually all comment systems ask you to leave your name and site URL. If you leave valuable comments, people may visit your site.
  2. Link to other people’s blogs frequently and meaningfully. If you link to someone, and you send them
    significant traffic, they’re going to notice! They might link to you
    one day, or pay attention to your work if you’re within the same community.
  3. Add your URL to your e-mail signature, business card, book, etc.
  4. Offer guest posts on sites/blogs with more traffic than your own.
  5. Be active on relevant community sites, which can interest people in what you’re doing, which can lead to visits to your site/blog.
  6. Ask for a link trade, where others agree to permanently link to your site/blog in their blogroll, and you return the favor on your own site. (This is by far a less popular method nowadays; it’s pushy and can damage credibility if you don’t believe in the links you’re sharing. Better for this to happen naturally, over time.)
  7. Be active across social media and alert people when you have a new post. (And/or make sure your URL is clearly listed on every social media profile.)

Your mileage will vary on No. 7 depending on your social media presence, how savvy you are, and if you’re reaching out in the right areas.

But I’m a strong believer in the breadcrumb method, where you have accounts on multiple community sites. That’s because you never know how people might find you, and the more doorways you have leading to your site, the more traffic you will get over time.

Even if you’re not active or devoted to a particular community site or social media channel, you can still appear to be active if you adjust the settings in your favor.

To help explain, let me show you where my site or blog traffic comes from, then explain how that traffic happens.

Here are 5 key, continuing sources of traffic for this blog (No Rules) in the past year—aside from search engines and direct traffic.

1. TWITTER

Both Writer’s Digest and I have active presences on Twitter (130K and 50K followers, respectively). When a link is broadcast that a new post is up, it reaches thousands of people initially, and then thousands more through retweets and mentions.

2. FACEBOOK

New blog posts are automatically fed onto my Facebook personal page, as well as the Writer’s Digest fan page (without any help from me, because it works through NetworkedBlogs). Other people also commonly post links to my blog content on their own Facebook walls.

3. WRITERSDIGEST.COM
There’s a permanent link to all Writer’s Digest blogs on the homepage, and it’s a consistent driver of traffic to No Rules.

4. BLOGGER MENTIONS (and permanent bloggers’ links)
When taken individually, one person’s blog or site may send just a handful of visits per day or week. But when you multiply that effect by dozens or hundreds of bloggers, that’s a huge impact. But you only get to enjoy this dynamic if you’re blogging for the long haul. It rarely happens overnight.

5. STUMBLEUPON
To tell the truth, this is one site where I am not active, and only recently did I even start an account. But over time, this site has started sending MORE traffic my way as my most popular posts are tagged and catalogued. (Right now, this controversial post that’s tagged is sending me a few dozen visits a day from StumbleUpon.)

Some other important sources of traffic this past year have been Writer Unboxed (where I offer guest posts) and Alltop, where this blog is catalogued as part of the writing and publishing pages.

–

Here are the top 5 sources of traffic for my personal site (JaneFriedman.com) in the past month. They constitute about 80% of my traffic.

1. THERE ARE NO RULES (this blog)
This make sense since NO RULES is where I focus most of my time and energy in producing new content. I rarely link to my personal site in my posts. Instead, it’s a static link on the lefthand sidebar if people want to know more about me.

2. GOOGLE (organic search)

The No. 1 search term that brings people to my site is “Jane Friedman.” I am probably attracting a considerable number of visits from people looking for The Other Jane Friedman.

3. TWITTER
Traffic from Twittercomes from 3 areas:

  • from the static URL on my Twitter profile (see above)
  • from the tweets I send with links
  • from the retweets and mentions from my followers

4. DIRECT VISITS
These visits are from people who have bookmarked my page, click on direct links from e-mail notifications, or otherwise type in “JaneFriedman.com.”

5. FACEBOOK
Traffic from Facebookcomes from 3 areas:

  • from the static URL on my profile page
  • from the links I post to my site
  • from the links other people post to my site

Some of my biggest traffic bumps happen when a major Facebook group posts a link to my series, When Mom Was My Age—which shows you the value of consistent series or features on your site/blog.

–

If you look at the long tail of my site traffic—on this blog as well as my personal site—I’m getting a significant number of visitors, over a year’s span, from:

Does it take me any effort to get this traffic?

No. I simply make sure that I use all settings and opportunities for auto-updating, when applicable.

Take my LinkedIn profile as an example. I don’t spend time on this site. But I’m “active.” See below; the top red arrow points to my Twitter updates, which are automatically fed into my profile and provide constantly refreshed information about what I’m doing. I don’t lift a finger.

The bottom arrow points to a mash-up of things I’ve told LinkedIn to report, based on my other activity online.

On LinkedIn, I also feed in my blogs, which appear under my profile summary.

This keeps me active on the site without requiring my time. Look for these types of feeds and settings on every site you use!

This is why I give the appearance of being everywhere at once, while really just focusing my energy on a few things: my professional blog, Twitter, Facebook.

Why those 3?

Because those places give me the most return on my investment of time and energy. Everyone’s results will be different, though, which is why you absolutely must find out where your site traffic comes from. (Use Google Analytics to get started.)

People will find you in a hundred different ways, and it’s more important than ever to have your own site—so you can direct people to your “home,” where readers and community influencers have an opportunity to find out where you’re most active, and choose their preferred means of staying updated.

I can guarantee that after this post, I’ll have a lot of people joining me on Facebook or LinkedIn because they didn’t realize I was there!

And that’s a good thing.