Commercial Viability and Estimating Traffic

How Many People Will Find Your Book Website

I write because I love to write, but I publish to make a living. Professional writers hesitate to publish books for which they suspect there's no audience. I did it once in my career and I was correct - there was no audience. If you're living on a trust fund and writing books primarily because you want to change the world, you should still do your homework before you start writing because you can't change the world if you're writing for an audience of one. The homework you do on determining the commercial viability of a website is similar to what you'll need to write about competing titles for any book proposal. But on the Internet, it's possible to take a much more fine grained look at the market. The key metrics for competing titles research are the number of similar books, their sales, and if you're very sophisticated, something about the market muscle of their publishers. The key metrics for the commercial viability of a website are search statistics for key words and phrases, the number and status of competing websites, and the opportunity cost for breaking in with a site of your own.

Go to Google and do a search on a key phrase from the project you are planning, the kind of phrase you would like to draw visitors for when your website is published. If Google comes up with less than 10,000 instances of the phrase (I've seen higher numbers for misspelled words), and several top 10 results are from article mills, you have an excellent chance of succeeding. Article mills are sites that either lure unwary writers into providing free content for them under the delusion it make a great publication credit, or which pay commission on articles ground out for subjects in hope they will do well with advertising. This simple search on a key phrase (perhaps a potential title phrase) for the book you plan to publish will instantly tell you two things. First, whether or not you have a reasonable chance of building a web page or a site that will dominate the search results, and second, whether or not there is any commercial reason for doing the work. If the search results for a key concept in a work you are planning consist of unranked blog posts and article mills, it's because there aren't any serious content sites in existence. As with the competing titles section in a book proposal, a dearth of competition is almost always a bad thing. It indicates a lack of demand.

Currently, the best place to do key word or key phrase research is the Google Adwords Keyword Tool. You don't need an Adwords account to use the tool ad long as you can solve their word jumble. After you do yoru first search, note the little box labled "Match Type" at the top of the results to the far right. The default estimate uses very loose matching, if the words from your phrase appear in a search, it's a hit. The "Match Type" dropdown menu also lets you choose "phrase", which will only count results where the phrase was used intact, or "exact", which will only count results when the search text was exactly that collection or words in that order, and nothing else. Another handy Google tool that only works for fairly popular phrases but gives you a graph of their popularity over time is Google Trends.

Investigating the traffic that competing websites draw is somewhat more complicated and will be much more accurate if you have access to the real traffic numbers of a website (such as your own) that you can use to calibrate the results. My favorite tool for quickly estimating a website's traffic is Quantcast, and if the website has signed up to have their traffic "Quantified", the results will be exact as those things get. If you wonder why anybody would want to make their traffic public in a competitive world, it's in order to attract advertisers. But the much maligned Amazon web traffic tool, Alexa, has been vastly improved in recent months, so that it gives more in depth results than Quantcast, including estimates of the percentage of traffic a website draws from search, and what key phrases are bringing people to the site. There are many other traffic analytics sites, but I find them to be less accurate than Quantcast or Alexa, both of which are already far from perfect but much, much better than nothing.

The status of competing websites is important if you feel it's important to attract visitors for a particular phrase. The Google PageRank, as displayed by the Google Tool Bar if you install it and accept the more intrusive terms, is one measure of the authority of those websites. More important than the bare rank number is the quantity and quality of pages on other websites linking to the particular page. And even more important the the quantity and quality of links is the context. That's why Apple and Gateway are both in the top three results if you search on "computer" but nowhere to be seen if you search on "computer repair." From the context and the huge numbers of links to them, it's clear to Google that Apple and Dell are both involved in computers, but that there are much better places to send visitors who are interested in computer repair. Besides, neither company is really interested in making repair part of their corporate image.

That's another key as to whether or not you're likely to be able to win significant traffic share for a particular term or phrase. Is that term currently in the page title of web pages posted by large companies or long-time web players with high authority ranking? If so, there's a good chance you'll never be able to compete for that specific phrase. Again, this isn't a bad thing for your overall chances of gaining visibility writing about the subject, it just means that you're better off not building your web strategy around that particular term. And not focusing on some specific, ultra-popular term in your writing will save you from wasting a lot of time and make your writing a lot better. Don't slip into the career of a keyword writer, grinding out fifty articles combining every state in the union with some keyword involved in your topic, like "Tsunami Arizona", "Tsunami Ohio". That's not platform building, it's bottom feeding, and rather than becoming known as a Tsunami expert, you'll become known as a spam expert.

One interesting and underused resource for writers is Google Trends. They track the use of keyword and key phrases over the years, and make the results available for those that archive a certain threshold. It's a quick way to check whether or not you're arriving on the tail end of some trend that you thought you were out front on. For example, I'll include the trend results below for baseball vs opera.

The slight deterioration in the total traffic for both keywords is probably a result of Google user searching on longer phrases as time goes on, rather than making single keyword queries. I chose baseball because I wanted to show a subject that has very cyclic interest, and indeed, you can see that Internet searches on baseball peak in the early spring each year as teams put together their rosters, with a mid-summer spurt near the trading deadline. The play-offs in the fall are a quiet time for baseball related search, because people are watching the games, not doing research. Keep in mind that a lot of the traffic has nothing to do with major league baseball, it's parents looking for coaching advice, or kids uniforms, or baseball summer camps. You could investigate any of these by using a longer search query on trends.

Opera, on the other hand, shows steady interest year round. While some of the interest is no doubt for the Opera web browser, I'd assume that most of it is from Opera fans, and that most of those searches are about opera facts, rather than schedules. Opera has a season as well, and the lack of seasonality in the search results implies that not that many people are using a simple search on "opera" to look for opera tickets. In fact, I went back and checked "opera tickets", which showed a demand peak around December each year, with low interest mid-summer. The results in Google Trends are all relative, there are no absolute totals given so the only way to get a handle on the volume rather than the trend is to compare with a phrase for which you know something about the volume, either through your own web results, through overture, or through public web reports on search traffic.