The Importance Of Google

Since my book came out, people often ask me how I managed to get my book published and how I managed to get into the Dummies brand. In fact I've just given a talk this morning to my local Chamber on the whole book publishing process.

Well, it was pretty much down to Google. A few years ago, I attended a PR course and there are two things that have stuck with me from that course:

1) Journalists like to take the easy option and when up against a deadline to produce an article or do research, where do they go? Google.

2) If they contact you - get back to them immediately.

I'm often contacted by journalists - for the last couple of years I probably get half a dozen calls each year. How do they find me? They search for time management expert/coach and my name comes up on Google - either my website or my Ecademy profile. So they contact me and of course, I get back to them as soon as I receive their email or pick up their phone message, if I'm not able to answer it at the time.

When Wiley publishing were looking to commission the UK Edition of their Time Management book they googled and found me, read my articles and sent me an email to see if I might be interested in writing the book. The result of that initial contact is now up on Amazon and hopefully hitting the bookshelves soon.

Now, I'm no SEO expert and I've learnt an awful lot from many of the SEO experts I have in my network. My website is not necessarily going to win any prizes and there's always room for improvement but it's been enough to get me noticed and after all that's what's important.

I had a call yesterday morning from another journalist - she's calling me back on Monday for input into an article she's writing for December.

I was called in July by a journalist writing an article for BT Upload magazine - I'm in October's edition.

If you have an area of expertise - write articles, be seen, get noticed and Google is definitely going to help.

Website Stats And SEO

Having created my website over three years ago, I've been carefully watching the stats of how many people visit my site, where they come from and which pages are of most interest and of course I want people to go away having either registered for my newsletter or to have downloaded some of my resources. If someone contacts me for a coaching enquiry that's a bonus.

Today I hit a new high for unique visitors to my site. It's gradually been increasing over the last few months and has certainly doubled from the visits I was getting last year. I'm no SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) expert but I have a vast resource of tips and information available to me through my Ecademy network and I've picked up on a few ideas that I've applied to my site. Particularly around the area of keywords. SEO can be a bit of a black art with thousands of pounds being spent on getting company sites to No. 1 on Google with various guarantees for positioning. All it takes is one wrong move or a change to the algorithm and you're off the radar. It's not necessarily the number of visitors or the number of links to your site - it's about what happens when people get there. Are you converting those hits to business?

I'm happy to take advice but I'm not about to change the whole look and feel of my site just to please the search engines. It's generally agreed that a user friendly, readable website geared for the human visitor not the robots and spiders is more likely to achieve it's aim, at least for the genuine visitor. I'll keep tweaking and changing, adding and modifying to see what effect it has and keep those stats rising.

As the Tipping Point mentions, it only takes a small, simple change to result in a big difference.

You can do this in many areas of your business, especially the marketing. If the message doesn't get across the first time, try something else. Do some research within your target group. Make sure you can measure your effort in some way so you can see what works and what doesn't.


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