I’ve got a website for my business, and obviously we’ve got a website for The Little Blog Of Muder. I’ve got a website for the author side of my business as well, and a website for another business that I own. If you have a business, you probably have a website. You designed it using complicated software, or you paid big money to a professional company to lay it out for you, or…you had your fifth grade daughter design it and it looks better than all of ours.
I’ve written about websites on this blog maybe three times, because they facinate me. How much good do they actually do? Judy has one. Casey, Jeff, Heather, and Sharon all have one…and C.R. keeps claiming that someone is working on building him one. And once you have one, then you have to maintain it. You need to find ways to keep it fresh, and constantly try to elevate its position with the search engines. You have to check it regularly to see if something has changed, or if it appears dated. And you have to check to see how many hits you’re receiving and where they’re coming from.
And then, you’ve got to wonder if it’s worth it. We’re told that computers rule the world. That people do over fifty percent of their shopping on the web…that they research everything before they buy it by looking it up on the web. But who knows?
I added the 30 second movie of Stuff To Die For to my website and the hits went up. Can I track that to more sales? No. But you can go to Amazon’s website and see what your ranking is. You can see how many librarys have your book in stock and how many copies are checked out and how many are on-hold. Do you believe that? They all have websites. Almost every library in the country can be checked on-line. And you can find out if you’re on any best seller lists by going to the Independent Mystery Book Store’s website ( (I’ve been in the top 10 twice in five years), the NYTimes list, the Publisher’s Weekly list…all of them have websites.
Important, or a waste of time? I don’t know. I’d like to think it’s an extension of what I do. That if people like my product, or my book, then they’d like to know a little more about the product or the person behind the product. I’d like to think that maybe people DO research products…people…books, before they buy. And websites help.
This morning there were hits from San Jose; Placentia,CA.; Lafayette, Lousianna; Cape Coral, Florida; Miami; Olympia, Washington; Knoxville, Tenn; Boston; Picayune, Miss; Fairfiled, Iowa; Columbia, S.C.; Charlotte, N.C.; and Ottowa, Kansas to name a few. Who are you people? Did you find anything worth looking at…did the website help?
And so we keep trying for new ways to market our products. And today my company is building a website for another company…and I’m not even sure what I’m doing with mine.