Analyzing Websites

Learning how websites work and how to best reach your target audience takes time and research. I believe I’ve managed to attract my initial target audience, authors, to Guerrilla Marketers’ Cafe but the integration of readers to the site hasn’t been that effective. It’s either a matter of restructuring the site to meet the needs or splitting the site in two entities to achieve the goal.

Redesigning will have to take place with CSS ,which I’m not familiar with, in order to simplify the site navigation since it has too many things going on. Trimming down on the site’s navigation will help the visitor finds its way around the site and what it has to offer.

My goal is to be able to expose all the books properly and providing a site for readers to not only view the books but to review them and find out about book signings and author special promotions. The Featured Author interview would go on that site as well. By having a site dedicated just to readers will free Guerrilla Marketers’ Cafe to authors looking to learn in detail how to market their books. I could set up some kind of Content Management system on it to provide even more than we already do.

The next two months will be crucial in this analysis and transition in order to offer the level of quality service I want to offer authors as well as readers. If you get a chance to visit the site let me know your thoughts about it and what you believe would be the best thing to do. The ideal situation would be to find a student website designer willing to take on the redesign as a project.

Tug of War between the Writer and the Promoter

 

Now I know why succesful writers take about two years or more between books. It takes a lot of their time and effort to market and promote their books for them to start working on another right away.

I have a few ideas that might develop into books in the future but I’ll need more time to reflect upon the themes and develop the content or characters to flesh out it out.

Right at this moment, in an effort to push myself to write fiction, I signed up with NaNoWriMo 2006. The challenge to write 50,000 in 30 days is monumental, one that I might not achieve but I’ll do my best to write every day of the week and that will help my discipline.

As I continue to promote Simplicity – Richness of Life I’m learning that by posting short excerpts of the book on my blogs generates sales. I might start writing some articles and submit them to article banks online and see how the traffic to my site improve and maybe the sales of the book as well. I think it is a timely theme especially now when we are approaching the holidays. People live at such a fast pace that they don’t even wait for Thanksgiving before they start thinking about Christmas, as soon as Halloween is over the stores are playing the Christmas songs and the displays are filled with merchandise. I don’t know about you but I don’t like to be in a frantic state and enjoy one day at time.