Viviti Changing to Jigsy

Viviti is one of the free venues to make websites discussed in my book, How to Make, Market and Sell Ebooks All for Free. It’s not the most highly recommended free website company, but it is great for speed and ease of use. This site, ebooksuccess4free jigsy com, was the Viviti site example for the book and is now a Jigsy example because…

…they’ve changed names. Anyone with an existing Viviti account is already 301 redirected to Jigsy. I just got the following email;

Important notice from Viviti.com : Your website URL is changing
Effective March 10, 2011 Viviti.com is rebranding as Jigsy.com. Please visit Jigsy.com and bookmark for your future account logins.

On June 1, 2011 your website ebooksuccess4free.viviti.com will be found at ebooksuccess4free.jigsy.com

To help make this transition as smooth as possible for you and your website viewers a few reminders:

Remember to update your bookmarks and e-mail signatures.
Your accounts recurring billing will now be listed as Jigsy.com on your Credit Card statement.
Your Viviti website URL will be redirected until June 1st. This will be an HTTP code 301 permanent redirect so search engine rank will not be affected.
Users will notice no difference other than the new URL subdomain.
After March 10, 2011 all logins to manage your account will be done at Jigsy.com.
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WordPress or Blogger, Blogger or WordPress? No Longer a Question of Statistics

Article first published as Blogger or WordPress: Do Stats Compare? on Technorati.

Blogger or WordPress, WordPress or Blogger? What’s the best free blogging host? It’s the Coke-Pepsi question that comes up repeatedly in Cyberspace, each with pros and cons. Common opinions are: WordPress doesn’t allow JavaScript or AdSense… Blogger is owned by Google which could boot you if they don’t like the content… WordPress has a better forum… Blogger is easier to use… the arguments go on and on.

When I wrote, How to Make, Market and Sell Ebooks All for Free, a whopping 7 months ago, the deal-clincher was the stat-monitoring with WordPress compared to nothing from Blogger. T’was hard to believe since it’s owned by Google which freely offers Google Analytics. Well, that’s all changed and the debate continues.

Way, way back in July 2010 (man, I’m so out of it sometimes) Blogger introduced this feature and quietly added it to existing blogs. Yes, I didn’t even notice until a few weeks ago. Now I can peruse traffic numbers, which posts are most popular and where people are coming from.

Blogger breaks up the page into four sections: Overview, Posts, Traffic Sources and Audience. WordPress has seven: Visits, Referrers, Top Posts and Pages, Search Engine Terms, Clicks, General and Incoming Links. A comparison of categories:

Overview and Visits- similar for both sites reporting visitor numbers by day, week, month and all-time. Blogger has the extra feature of near-live results for each hour within a day. Not hugely important but kinda fun to see what happens after a post or trying to figure where a burst of recent visitors came from. Advantage barely to Blogger.

Posts and Top Posts/Pages- both report each posting and the number of views by popularity. Advantage neither.

Traffic Sources and Referrers- handled differently as Blogger combines Referring Sites, URLs and Keywords to give a rundown of the ways visitors find your blog. WordPress just lists the referring URLs and puts Search Engine Terms and Incoming Links in a separate category. I find this of marginal value; often they lead me places where I cannot determine a link to my site and even wonder if it’s a spam-bot in action. It’s the Keywords that are most useful, as I get a feel for which search terms direct visitors. Additionally WordPress has an Incoming Links category which only lists four links to my blog (strangely all are from my Blogger blog) which is a tiny fraction of the true total. This mistake could count against WordPress, but really the advantage here is neither.

Audience- Blogger has a feature showing which country, browser and operating system the visitors represent. It seems to be grossly inaccurate since it only lists ten countries for my blog and the least common (Spain) has forty-eight visitors. There must be plenty of foreign visits from Australia, Canada and India to name a few that are suspiciously missing. It’s good to know the browser types and operating software; that Internet Explorer and Firefox are the big players as well as Windows. Also fun to see a few visitors utilized iPhones, iPads and Blackberries to visit. Since WordPress doesn’t offer this, advantage Blogger.

Clicks- WordPress has this category for what links people clicked to go elsewhere. This is smart as the most common clicks tell a blog owner what external sources visitors appreciate. Advantage WordPress.

General- within the WordPress tab of General is a subset for Subscriptions, people who have chosen to follow your blog. Could be a great way to contact others or look into networking possibilities. Advantage WordPress.

Overall, these are fairly equal. If I had to choose, WordPress would have the tiniest advantage in stats though it’s still a toss-up. Because of my love for JavaScript gadgets, I’ll probably remain teetering on Blogger’s side on the fence.
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Writers also Need Breaks; Step Away from the Computer, Put Down the Mouse

Just did the morning routine which begins with checking emails from three accounts. Then I contact buyers of my ebooks (on good mornings when orders came in) to thank and remind them to contact me with questions. Then it’s time to peruse my Google Alerts (just love those things) for where I can find other people’s blog posts and learn from them and make helpful comments. That is such a great way to network and get URL links out there. Then I check my website cpanel and statcounters for visits from certain links and find out where people are re-posting my posts and now videos (that’s cool to see people quoting me) and perhaps contact and thank them.

Now’s the time when I usually either start some writing, editing or computer searching for new info for learning or blog posts or whatever… but today is one of those days… just feel like I need a break… out of my cave (my wife’s loving term for my office)… out of the house (feels like a cave this time of the year)… and perhaps to go skiing.

While it’s probably glorious and warm where many of you reside, we live in the N. Cali mountains and had a few inches of snow. Squaw Valley is 20 minutes away and I’ve only got 7 lousy days on my season pass because all I do is hang out in this cave. (Hate it when my wife’s right.) So today is an example of something I need to do and recommend more often…

Writers, for the sake of your sanity, the sanity of those around you and the sanity of the world in general… every now and then you absolutely must schedule a get-away-from-the-computer-day.

This photo from April 09 at Homewood CA with Lake Tahoe in the background. Anyone have other great suggestions for when the snow melts?

Stats 1 month after Uploading to Retailers

Okay, it’s been one month since I uploaded How to Make, Market and Sell Ebooks – All for FREE to several different online retailers. Let’s go through a quick summary of how that’s going.

Smashwords.com. There have been 42 sample downloads and 3 sales. One customer has already reviewed the book with 4 out of 5 stars, so that was cool. I wish the sales were higher, but maybe that’ll come in time. Fortunately the ebook was accepted into their Premium Program which means it’s being distributed to Barnes&Noble, Sony, Kobo, Amazon and Apple this week. That’s the best reason to publish with Smashwords! Thank you, Mark Coker. I sure hope someone reads my ebook on an Apple iPad soon.

Scribd.com. The sample 35% of the ebook has been viewed 265 times. Just last week I was notified of 1 sale, which actually was a surprise because I thought scribd readers were die-hard freebie types. I’m also happy with the views since I’ve had samples of my novels on scribd for 6 months and they’ve received only a hundred more views. Perhaps the latest How to book will surpass them next month in less than 30% of the time.

MyEbook.com. Supposedly, the ebook there has been viewed 643 times (the sample 35% anyway). There have yet to be any sales. A part of me is highly skeptical of the views number because it seems to gain around 20 views every single day even though it’s been 4 weeks removed from the top pages of latest released. How could it keep getting so many daily views without ever generating a reader comment or a sale? I have to say, I suspect there may be something going on at myebook.com and so I’ll keep an eye on this.

Amazon.com. It took a while before it went live so this is the only site where it’s probably been closer to 4 weeks than a month. The only stat they provide is for sales (and returns) so I can only report 6 sales so far in 4 weeks. Not horrible but not nearly what I was hoping for. One of the problems might be because there are no reviews yet. I wanted to do this entirely with strangers which means not asking friends, family or associates to leave any reviews anywhere. (That’s actually a great way to jump-start some sales but I thought my customers might appreciate this approach). So perhaps in the following months if good reviews come the sales might rise. We’ll see.

Youpublish.com. This site was actually a second thought, but I’m glad I put it there. It still has no ratings though the sample has been viewed 227 times and 1 sale has resulted. Not bad. Again, perhaps if some good reviews came in it would help with sales.

My Own Websites. (Here and at Webs.com and at Viviti.com) I like it when sales happen directly through these because I get 100% of any profit, even though most of the other venues are pretty good at 70% or more (Amazon currently at 35% but going to 70% in July 2010). I don’t know exactly how many visitors have been to the sites since the stat keeping is a bit rough, but I estimate approximately 750 visitors resulting in 6 sales.

Google Rankings. It appears I erroneously reported a page one Google ranking earlier this month. Perhaps my surprise helped me overlook the fact that Google must have keyed in my IP address and sites that I had previously visited. I swear my mentions were true for page one, but after I cleared my browser of cookies, temporary files and visited pages etc, I lost the page one ranking and currently don’t show up until page 8 (yikes) for a search term of “sell ebooks.” It’s the Amazon listing of my ebook, then followed by Myebook’s listing on page 9 and PRLog’s free press release. It’s okay because “sell ebooks” is a highly common search term with massive competition, averaging 12,000 search inputs per month and high advertiser competition. Plus I’m the new kid on the block. As long as I keep doing this program, that page ranking should drop each month slowly and surely. This isn’t a get rich quick thing, more of a pacing with persistence wins the race.

Just in the past few days I uploaded several videos on Youtube (see one of them here), so next month I’ll have some comments on how that’s going.

So what are the final monthly numbers? 17 sales which isn’t what I wanted but an okay start. Only one review so far so perhaps more to report next month.

The best thing that’s happened is that I’ve received 2 thoughtful emails from customers who told me how much insight and helpful information they found in the book. That they were just starting out with marketing their own books and the info really helped. That’s really the best reward of all.

My Youtube Video for Selling Ebooks

Okay, I’ll be the first to admit I’m no pro when it comes to making Youtube videos, but I needed to do it partly as an example of free things available to market and sell ebooks and because it will draw attention to my ebook and free websites.

I believe as long as the video is half decent, it will help people understand what the ebook, advice and websites are all about. So hopefully it will bring attention to things available to make, market and sell ebooks – all for free. At the very least it will serve as an example.