Archive for July, 2011

What is my website’s popularity?

Want to find out how many people are viewing your website? Or even who put links back to your website from their personal sites? I got a few little places and tips you can use.

Google Analytics
This is the best one yet to view how your website is doing with popularity (do you like me?). You have to copy/paste some code to your website, but it’s worth the bit of effort.

WebStatChecker
WebStatChecker is pretty cool as well. Just type your domain in, and click on the underlined hyperlink number for the Yahoo Backlinks. But for Yahoo Backlinks, the below method will pull the same results.

Advanced Search Operators
You can use this method that’s in all of the major search engines. For example, in Google search box, I would just type: linkdomain:zhollis.com, and it will give me a list of sites who have my site linked on them. I can type it in Yahoo, Ask.com and search.aol.com. But for Bing (this is also MSN search engine), I had to actually enter and search for my site name FIRST, then press the “Advanced” option menu. It used site:zhollis.com, which I didn’t want; so I did -site:zhollis.com (see the negative sign says “exclude”, meaning “Don’t look for this”) and also retyped zhollis.com to see if it will displays sites containing zhollis.com without finding my actual site. It looked like this [-site:zhollis zhollis.com]. It didn’t bring up much 🙂 .

HeadKeys
Headkeys gives you an idea of the popular Key Words your website is using that people will search for and possible click to come to your site. Not sure how this will help, but it might tell you how strong your site is with the key words people normally search for.

Reverse Internet
Reverse Internet can give you some ideas of who is linking back to you as well.
It didn’t show much for my websites though. But I tried a different website and it displayed a lot of information. So that’s why I’m listing it on my blog.

That’s about it. Go ahead and try some stuff out and see which ones work for you.

Happy Narcissism!

The Book Cover for The 9th Symbol is here!!!

Yep, my 4th book is here…in the flesh! You can check out an excerpt pdf-flash flip page and the Book Trailer here at my website.

Here’s the first sketch for the cover. I really liked it, and I liked the wishing well in the back, but I didn’t think that people would notice that it was a “well” and not a flower pot.

OH! CLICK THE PICTURE TO GET A BETTER VIEW! 🙂

So I asked my Cover Designer to change the well to look like the picture I have in my Book Trailer.

9thsymbolcover-sketch2

Then color was put into it. But I needed her hand to have her gold ring and the key bobbing in the water of the well had to be gold and the balls on the well had to be gold. A lot of “had to” but the image goes along with the novel.

Then with all excitement abound….the final!

9th-Symbol-Web-Res

And that’s it! HURRAY!

My Cover Book Designer is awesome as always!

So, I did all of the other publishing stuff as well for this book, but only for the eBook portion to start off with. I’ll work on the paperback later. I’ve already got it book formatted in MSWord for print, just got to put it in pdf and upload to CreateSpace and Lighting Source. …But later.

Stuff I had to do for The 9th Symbol
1) Format for Smashword
2) Format for Kindle
3) Created the pdf-to-flip file
4) And of course the Copy Right and I had my ISBN number already ready to go.
5) Oh yeah, and I got it edited as well.
6) Updated my webpage, uploaded to Smashwords and Kindle, embedded my YouTube videos, and went back several times to redo stuff that I’ve forgotten to do. 🙂
7) Now currently waiting for Smashwords to approve my file so it can be distributed to Barnes & Noble Nook and other eBook sites…. That’s gonna take awhile. I’ll let you know when I’m finally approved.

While going through my steps above, I had to refer back to My Own Steps to Publishing and all the different websites and stuff to do. I even had to update this site as I went along to make it current.

See the previous post for Irid’s Book Cover design steps.
See previous post for Ruby, Flesh and Heart Cover design steps.
See the previous post for The Made Cover design steps.

Oh yeah! Happy 4th of July!!

Who are the Sons of God?

Of course I have to put my two cents in for the

BIG AND SCARY 2012 AND THE END OF THE WORLD!!!

So, I did some digging around and found the story for the Sons of God (which, I think, is related to the 2012 Mayan Calendar).

There’s one book that explains exactly who the Sons of God are, and I’ve summed it up for you in context with the Nephilim, X-men and the Cookie Monster.
Sons Of God
Yep, got more theory/thoughts posted up, from me the “Heathen” (heh. heh. as some call it, but this research has actually strengthen my faith, and I’m just telling it as written. Not making anything up accept my opinion of what it means…and EVERYONE is putting their opinion on what all this means). It’s all about that mysterious question and a story that not that many people have heard about.

Take a look when you have a few days of time (it’s long too, just like my other thoughts about the past, Adam and Eve and Stephen King 🙂 ): Who are the Sons of God?

If you want to comment on what I said, just post it back here on this blog post.