Are You Being Served… by the WWW?

With apologies to the writers of the BBC TV series of the same name, I think this post name is very appropriate. I have discovered a great truth. It's not what you say, it's what you pay that counts.

Much like the saying,  it's not what you know, but who you know, this new saying of  It's not what you say, it's what you pay is by far a more profound little clump of letters than any I have come across in years.

What am I typing about? Well, I'll tell you. In my search for the great god of numbers on sites (remember it was bums on seats, once upon a time) I have, I think, found the answer to getting myself noticed.

It is NOT down to writing witty prose.
It is NOT down to a flashy website.
It IS down to money.

Web Traffic is what I'm talking about and yep, that all enveloping, good old prevailing, thing called money is what makes the WWW tick.

It's actually a bit obvious really, so I guess I must have been doing the rounds with a blindfold on. You see, I write books, eBooks to be precise, and I think I do a pretty good job of it. I'm never going to be an Ernest Hemingway, but then I don't really mind as I don't rate Hemingway that much. What I'm trying to do is sell the fruits of my labour. Publishers and Literary Agents have shown scant regard for my work, so I'm on the ‘go it alone' route and here's where it's getting complicated. Coming up with an idea for a book is easy and so is writing it. What I've found time consuming, annoying and downright frustrating is getting people to buy my work. I've had great reviews on Amazon for my three books, but the sales are pretty small. So, I decided to promote my book myself. Well, how to promote a book? SEO, article writing, back links, front flips and swallow dives… you name it, I've tried it. So, I decided to try straight advertising.

I've paid out the princely sum of a couple of hundred Euros, bucks or quid, depending on your financial leanings, and have now received quite a few thousand hits, indeed 40k in about three weeks. Seventy-five percent of these have ‘bounced', which means they arrived on my site and promptly clicked straight out again. Of the remaining 10k less than half a percent have bought one of my Kindle books. So, the next question is what next? Well I can safely say that buying web traffic only works if your product has a high financial return. If, like me, you make around $1.86 per sale then the cost of the web traffic means you are making very, very little. So what's next is going back to the drawing board and trying again with article writing, back links, front flips and swallow dives. Money obviously talks, but the language has to be understood for it to do you any good.

Copyright © Tom Kane 2012