For book/ebook authors, publishers, & self-publishers

Romance and Illness - Who Knew it Was a Hot Topic?

I blog for my ministry, Rest Ministries; it's more of a way of having a casual voice with my audience. As the ministry has grown, I've become more of someone in the background-- marketing, writing books, promotions, etc. and so I use my blog to still stay in touch with people.

So I haven't really looked at my statistics. I am not a "hot blogger" and though it would be nice to get some fabulous keyword and jump to #1 on Google (like I've been taught in my formal internet marketing seminars) I'm not holding my breath.

But I just got onto Feedburner to glance my statistics. And these numbers surprised me!

The first column is the date, the second it the subscribers for that day.

Date	Subscribers	Hits
2008-01-14	53	259
2008-01-15	53	285
2008-01-16	2989	298
2008-01-17	1441	303
2008-01-18	54	421
2008-01-19	2862	381
2008-01-20	108	352
2008-01-21	271	360
2008-01-22	45	396

3000? Then 1400? then nearly 3000 again? I quickly looked up what I'd blogged about that day and guess what? It was the days I posted my articles that I said were free to reprint.

So before I did a little happy dance, I wanted to make sure I knew what a "subscriber" really was. Feedburner says this:

What is a Subscriber? How does FeedBurner tally them?

Subscribers is an approximate measure of the number of individuals currently subscribed to your feed.

How is it calculated?

FeedBurner’s subscriber count is based on an approximation of how many times your feed has been requested in a 24-hour period. Subscribers is inferred from an analysis of the many different feed readers and aggregators that retrieve this feed daily. Subscribers is not computed for browsers and bots that access your feed.

Subscribers counts are calculated by matching IP address and feed reader combinations, then using our detailed understanding of the multitude of readers, aggregators, and bots on the market to make additional inferences.

Okay... so it looks like those numbers are legit. So far I've not found any announcement on Feedburner tripling their numbers accidentally or anything.

So what did I write that was so amazing? I was just as curious as you so I went and looked! The posts are titled:

Romantic Ideas for Chronically Ill Women to Romance Her Husband (Jan 16)
When Your Wife is Ill and the Romance Ain't Happening (Jan 17)
A New Twist on Prednisone (Jan 19) -- not sure if this hit a news feed somewhere or people with Google alerts clicked or what. It may have been the 16th and 17th catching up. The 19th was a Saturday, so maybe people at home were catching up on their reading?

One thing I know for certain is that my efforts to write articles on a more consistent basis, and use the Unique Article Wizard (see the link on "My Faves" at my blog) I am definately gaining some new visitors. Just 24 hours after I released these 2 articles, with the keywords I was targeting, I was holding the top 35 slots on Google out of 50 (yes... amazing, isn't it)

So... you never know. Promoting your book is always a work in progress and oftentimes one big experiment. Today I discovered that something I thought "just may work" is actually working. And that is a good thing.

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Lisa and Joel Copen have a variety of experience in founding a nonprofit that receieves over 80,000 visitors per month, music and sound editing, web design, and book marketing and publishing. They look forward to your ideas to make the series of ebooks on book promotion a practical tool to help you sell more books!