Promotion, Promotion, Promotion – Part 2 – Weighing Air

 

One of the details that an indie writer who wants to promote his work has to take into account is how effective each particular promotional website IS!

Let me tell you, there are a LOT of websites out there who are more than happy to shout about your book – whether or not they do it for money or mutual promotion or just for the fun of it.

Only question is – how loudly can any given website shout?

At first glance it seems a little bit like weighing air – but there IS a way to calculate how effective any given website is.

Let me tell you about ALEXA.

ALEXA is an Amazon owned company that ranks the websites of the world, rating their ability to consistently reach global customers.

That is a pretty simplistic way of explaining it – but it sounds a whole lot better than saying that they “weigh air”.

So today my book HAMMURABI ROAD was featured on readcheaply.com

Now I went into this with my eyes open.

I knew that ReadCheaply.com was a small and still-growing company and it did not cost me anything and I am still just trying to get the hang of this whole process.

HOWEVER, if I had swung on over to Alexa I might have had a better idea on how effective this particular website can be.

The way Alexa works, basically, is they rate each website. The lower the number the more effective the website is. The more hits it gets, the more time viewers spend on it, the wider their customer base – all of these factors are taken into account.

ReadCheaply.com is ranked 757,199 on the Global rank and 211,819 on the US rank.

To give you a better idea of how ReadCheaply.com sizes up to some other promotional websites let’s take a look at a few on ALEXA.

BookBub – which is well known as being one of the most effective promotional websites out there ranks at 18,478 on the Global rank and 4837 on the US rank.

Pixel of Ink – another well known promotional website ranks 78,466 on the Global rank and 20,578 on the US rank.

StoryFinds – a Canadian-based promotional website ranks globally at 542,920.

Bargain E-book Hunter – another promotional website ranks globally at 365,555 and 221,412 on the US ranking.

Now, obviously I am not going to sit here and try to rank ALL of the promotional websites because that might take all week – but this is something you might want to put to use the next time you are trying to decide where to put your promotional dollars – especially when you are trying to choose between two or three particular websites.

Keep in mind that these rankings are like Amazon rankings in that they change regularly, depending on how many people are visiting any particular website.

Hope that helps give you folks a better idea on how to weigh air.

Remember – we are all in this indie-pub boat together.

Row for shore.

yours in storytelling,

Steve Vernon