AudioLiterate

Seth Godin is one of the hottest authors of books on marketing today. He understands that the Internet has changed the way that humans communicate with each other and that this has changed the game for marketing and advertising.

Godin was involved in the online world early on. He pioneered online marketing with Yoyodyne. This website featured contests, games and scavenger hunts to market its sponsor’s products to visitors of the site.  With his online marketing background, it is only natural for Godin’s books to be available in digital audiobook format at Audible.com.

Godin’s new online marketing perspective is introduced in his book, The Purple Cow. Here Godin suggests people find traditional advertising boring and tune it out. They are only going to pay attention to something truly remarkable: something like a purple cow. In this age of the Internet, marketers are going to have to strive to stand out or they will remain invisible. At Audible.com, listeners gave this book four stars out of five in the areas of overall quality, performance and story. This book is a must-listen for those who are trying to find their way in marketing on the Internet.

Another Godin audiobook available at Audible.com is The Dip. In this book, Godin explores the idea of quitting. He argues that winners know when to quit and escape from a project that is a dead end. However, winners also know which projects are worth sticking with when a temporary setback is reached. It is this ability that separates winners from losers according to Godin. Audible.com listeners gave this book over four starts in the categories of overall quality, performance and story.

Godin’s All Marketers Are Liars is a lesson in authentic storytelling. His claim is that all marketers try to weave a story about their product that makes sense in the life of the customer. However, if this story goes too far with its promises, then it will turn people off to the product. This audiobook is also available at Audible.com

Linchpin is anther Godin audiobook featured on Audible.com. In this book, Godin exhorts us to be leaders in our organizations. He believes that we should all try to make ourselves indispensable by becoming so essential to the organization that we are a part of that it would not function without us. We should all strive to be linchpins that hold the entire organization together.  Audible.com users rated Linchpin four stars out of five in the areas of overall quality, performance and story.

Audible.com is the Internet’s leading provider of digital audiobooks featuring more than 100,000 titles available for download, including books, magazines, radio shows, podcasts, stand-up comedy, and speeches. Listeners can download audiobooks to their iPod, iPhone, Android, Windows Phone, BlackBerry, Kindle, and 500 other devices. With Audible’s new apps for iPhone™, Android™, Windows Phone, and Kindle Fire listeners can browse and download audiobooks wirelessly directly on their mobile device.

Now you can join Audible.com for Just $7.49 and receive a credit good toward any of the audiobooks mentioned in this article or another audiobook of your choice. This introductory rate of $7.49/month is available for the first three months of your membership and then you can choose to continue at $14.95 per month.  In addition, your subscription includes the following member benefits:

• Get 1 audiobook each month
• Save 30% on all audio every day
• Receive advance notice of exclusive sales and promotions
• Enjoy a complimentary weekday audio subscription to the New York Times or The Wall Street Journal

Here is a link to one of my new sites, How to Connect Mac to TV.  Hope you find it useful?

So, it’s been nearly three months since the site was launched.  Content continues to be added every day and there have been a few design / coding tweaks to make things look a bit slicker and run a bit smoother.  However, over the last month and a half or so, the site has been plagued by the dreaded ‘Google Dance’.  While the true Google Dance of old is no longer with us – Google now index their sites constantly – it is still a term that’s used to describe the immensly frustrating period when a site jumps up and down in the search results for your keywords.  For a few days we’ll be on page one for “the hunger games audiobook” for example, and the next couple of weeks we’ll be on page 55 for the same term.  Apparently (and I hope this is the case) this sort of activity isn’t uncommon in the first few months of a site’s lifespan.  I just have to console myself by adding more content and hoping that things will level out in their rightful place in due course.  I have to do all this whilst fighting the temptation to constantly stare at Google Analytics, praying for a sign of an upward spike in search traffic.

They say a picture paints a thousand words, so below is a screengrab of the search traffic for AudioLiterate.  As you can no doubt appreciate, these graphs can be pretty disheartening.

As a way of getting over the Google Dance blues, I’ve also been paying quite a lot of attention to the creation and marketing of YouTube videos for the audiobooks.  This has actually filled the gap in traffic quite nicely.  I’ve now manged to rank one of my videos (again for the keyphrase “the hunger games audiobook”) in position one of page one on Google (above Amazon even!).  Just this one video is bringing in 50-100 unique visitors per day which is great.

Below is a graph showing the traffic that I’ve been getting from the few YouTube videos I’ve promoted through the channel www.youtube.com/audioliterate

I’m pretty happy with the way things are going overall.  The site seems to be being received very well by everyone who stumbles across it.  Just got to keep plugging away and hopefully the site will come out of this dreadful Google Dance soon!

The Hunger Games Audiobook

I thought it was time I wrote another update post on AudioLiterate.

Growth has been nice and consistent since launch, bar a tiny hiccup which occurred last week.  Last Monday all search traffic took a sudden nose dive and panic ensued. I was worried at first that we had been penalized by Google for something; which would have been strange seeing as we’re doing everything we can to abide by their quality standards – completely original content, natural linking etc. As it turns out, I now understand that this dip in search traffic was all due to an update to Google’s algorithm – Panda 3.3 to be precise.  Search traffic resumed to normal after a few days and seems to be on the rise, which is great.

I’m still trying to load up as many audiobooks as possible per day and writing original summaries to go with them.  This is the laborious part of it all, but it all adds up to making a great content rich site.  It’s also important for me to keep an even balance of public domain, streamable audiobooks vs. free trial, premium audiobooks.  I’m about 1.43% of the way there with my target for public domain titles and 0.15% for the premium, contemporary titles!  So, a LONG way to go!  Hopefully though, it will all pay off and traffic will grow in parallel with the growth in content?

The site seems to continue to be getting positive coverage on blogs and social media.  This always boosts morale and makes the often tedious content uploading more bearable!

I’ll be back with another update when there’s more to report.

Hopefully the Panda won’t be visiting me again any time soon!

Many thanks to Justin at Make Use Of for giving us a lovely big write up!

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/stream-listen-free-audiobooks-browser-audioliterate/

Fantastic to see that great coverage continues to roll in for AudioLiterate.  This morning it was a pleasant surprise to see that we had a feature in site of the day in Belgium’s biggest weekly news magazine, Knack.

Thanks goes to Astrid Wittebolle, who found us and gave us a nice writeup.

You can view the original article here (in Flemmish) or here (in English run through Google Translate).

Hopefully the story will get picked up elsewhere and on other blogs?  Fingers crossed!

We’re happy to have just noticed that Best of the Web (BOTW), one of the web’s oldest and most highly regarded directories, has not only picked up on AudioLiterate, but some nice editor has also featured us as one of only three ‘Editor’s Top Picks‘!

This is awesome news and really encouraging!  Should also hopefully do wonders in terms of SEO?!?

Wasn’t expecting to get reviewed so early on, but to my surprise I found this video over on YouTube.  Thanks to http://educationaltech-med.blogspot.com for the review!

Well it’s been about 20 days now since AudioLiterate was launched and the content is starting to fill out nicely and all the bugs seem to be ironed out for now.  I’m managing to add about 10 new titles per day, but I hope to increase this as I get more into the rhythm of it.  Traffic has been building up steadily and lots of people are interacting with the site and downloading the free audio books.  I’ll get back to loading up more books now and will post any new developments on this blog as and when they happen.
J