Link wheel

A few weeks back I had a call from a man who is the admin for a website called BookClub Reading list. I had forgotten all about signing up for this.  In my usual disorganized fashion I had not kept a written record. In any case he needed me to fill out more forms on the site that he referred to as a 'press release'. Before getting on to the main topic of this blog I will say that Bookclubreading list is a list of authors and books who make themselves available to book clubs and not the virtual kind--these are real flesh and blood people who are looking for good books to read. So far I have not been contacted but maybe...

During the course of our conversation Chris brought up a marketing tool that I was completely unfamiliar with. The link wheel. Simply put the link wheel is a series of blogs designed to point toward a main site in the middle of the circle. Of course for me this main site is www.wolfmoontrilogy.com. Since he is also an author, all of his blogs point to his book as well--The God Complex--each blog takes a particular subject from the book and expounds on that. Then this blog links to another and so on around the wheel. The links go only in one direction. On the bookclubreading site is a youtube video of Chris talking about the link wheel. If you can't find it, go to this youtube link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqWE8Usi5Os. I found that his link wheel is different from others I've looked at and makes more sense to me in terms of marketing a book rather than some other type of marketing.

On the Bookclubreading list is a link to a google search tool in which you can search for a certain phrase, let's say 'godsanddeities' since that's one I've chosen for my link wheel. This tool will tell you how many times a month or a year people google that phrase and also what the competition for that phrase is--you want the competition to be low.

And so I bought six domain names through hostforweb since they seemed to be the best price per year...each domain cost me $12.95 or somewhere in that range. According to Chris, these blogs should be static and be done through a hosting site rather than blogspot or wordpress. That sounded right to me and so I spent two full days trying to set up one blog. I contacted support and then I contacted support again. I asked my husband to come and take a look since he's way more computer savvy than I am--he shook his head.

Giving up on my hostforweb domains, I spent a couple of hours setting up the first two blogs through blogspot. Simple and easy. I used the closest I could come to my original domain names which I had researched for the most google hits. Four more to go! I've decided to keep the domains--I may need them in the future. If you are familiar with the Wordpress interface, by all means go the hostforweb route but for now I'm sticking with blogspot.