“To succeed in life, you need two things: ignorance and confidence.” ~Mark Twain

August happenings…

• Heading off to Alaska in a couple weeks.  Never been, so looking forward to sticking my tongue to a glacier and seeing what happens.
• Goats are visiting for the summer and munching down the field behind my house.  I’ve learned that goats don’t care to have their horns patted, they can Hoover down food faster than my dogs (yes, that is an incredible feat), and they have soft ears.
• The ever-bearing strawberry patch is pumping out succulent treats for me on a daily basis.
• I’m thinking of giving up on the topspin backhand and just perfecting my slice. The former gives me trouble while the latter gives other people trouble.  Probably a no-brainer, there, though I hate to give up on things.
• A karate place opened up two miles from my house (pretty impressive considering how few things are within two miles of my house), and it just happens to teach the same style I studied before.  Fate might be telling me to take it up again, though I’d probably have to start over as a white belt at this point.
• I’m getting positive feedback on the new novel I’m running through the SFF-OWW. This may be the one I actually query agents with.  The last one had some fans (thank you, Sandy *g*), but I never could come up with a synopsis that didn’t sound been-there-done-that and, oy, an assassin character.  There’s only 50 million of those in fantasy. This novel has a philologist/cryptanalyst for the protagonist.  If nothing else, I bet you can’t say, “Oh, geez, another one of those…”
• I’ve given up aspartame (diet coke) and am drinking Zevia, which is made using the Stevia leaf. Probably won’t see this at Mcdonald’s any time soon, but it’s not bad.

Unless you count the used books I’ve purchased on eBay, I’ve never participated in an auction.  That changed in May when I heard about author Brenda Novak’s annual online auction for diabetes research.  She got all sorts of publishers, editors, and authors to donate goods or services for readers and aspiring novelists, and, a few days ago, I became the winner of a complete manuscript read by literary agent Laurie McLean. (If you’ve ever read a chapter page by an unpublished wannabe novelist, you’d know just how brave she is to make such a donation *g*).

My bank account will be a little lighter this summer (goodbye trip to New York for the U.S. Open and hello camping at Cannon Beach), but this is a great cause and a great prize, so it’s definitely worth it.  Besides, thanks to all the high fructose corn syrup I’ve ingested in my life (Dr. Pepper, how could you be so good and so evil at the same time??), I’m sure I’ll benefit from that research someday.

“I try to leave out the parts that people skip.” ~Elmore Leonard

Since that’s advice I always try to follow in my own stories, I’ll go for it with this blog entry and keep things short (not that anyone reads this blog, but, hey, it’s practice for when I’m a famous novelist and being stalked by SF/F groupies).

This week in life…

• Five margaritas are too many for one evening.
• If you’re leash-walking two dogs and come to a mailbox, tree, signpost, etc. they will always choose opposite routes around it.
• If there’s not enough drama in your life, just sign up for a sports team.
• It will rain for your Memorial Day weekend barbecue (and, if you live in Seattle, it’ll rain most other days, too).
• Choosing the difficult road is rarely the quickest way to achieve a goal, but sometimes the payoffs make it worth the extra time.
• If you want something badly enough (cough, someone else to mow your lawn, cough), you can always justify the expense.

Until next time…

Though it’s only become a buzz term in the last few words, social networking has been a part of the web since the beginning.  Before Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace, we had forums, chatrooms, and instant messaging, but ever since Google decided the number and quality of links pointing to your site would affect its placement in the search engines, we’ve been networking for links like madmen and women.

It’s like high school all over again.  To be noticed, you have to be talked about by the right people (AKA linked to from the right kind of sites).  So, for those of us who’d prefer not to talk to legions people, right kind or wrong, is there any hope?  Are our sites doomed to languish in obscurity forever?

Though it’s hard to escape social media as a link-building tool these days, there are still some ways to get links to your site without going out and sucking up to authors of popular sites spending hours on networking sites. Let’s take a look at my favorite method:

Article Marketing

I’ve been making money online for more than six years now, and this has been one of the tried-and-true ways I’ve built links.  For the introvert who doesn’t want to network in person or online, it’s ideal.  Since everyone is doing article marketing these days, it takes more work (more articles published) than it used to, but it’s still an effective way to get links to your site.

Just type the term into the search engines and you can learn more about it, but the gist is that you write informative articles in your niche, include an author bio with a link or two back to your site, and post your articles online at sites such as Ezinearticles and Articles Base.  Webmasters and bloggers (I’ve even had a couple articles picked up by the online editions of major metro newspapers) looking for free content may print your articles on their sites.  They should leave your author box with your link intact (if they don’t you can put a hex on them–it doesn’t change anything but it makes you feel better).

While you may or may not get any human traffic from these links, you’ll definitely get some loving from the search engines.  Keep posting articles, and over time, you’ll notice you’re getting more traffic from Google, Yahoo, etc. because you’re appearing higher in their rankings for certain key terms (we’ll talk about keywords another time).

More on article marketing at Wikipedia (is there anything this site doesn’t have a page for?)