Product Description
I announced the official launch of my new online community, Publetariat.com, on 2/11/2009. The site got over 7,000 hits in the first 24 hours following its launch, and 3-month average Alexa traffic rank in the top 6.92% of all websites-a figure which, when adjusted to account for the brief time period during which Publetariat had been open to the public, equates to a rank in the top 2% of all websites. What makes these results even more astonishing still is the fact… More >>
From Concept to Community: How I Built An Online Community And Took It Viral In 25 Days With Little Money And No SEO
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For anyone interested in getting into the website game, this is a great read. There is some excellent advice for people who are courageous enough to buck the system and not accept anything less than success in their endeavors.
Rating: 4 / 5
Empowerment Engine
Review of From Concept to Community, By April Hamilton
Review by Jabez L. Van Cleef, http://www.sustainyourspirit.com
This is a short book, actually more like what we used to call a “white paper,” on the subject of how an individual person might go about the process of “building” and hosting their own on-line interest community using freely available software. In general, I highly approve of the theory behind the book, and the admirably straightforward execution, both in terms of form and content. I have a few quibbles which I will get to, but rather than looking for random faults, I think you would make better use of your time by stopping here to buy and read the book. However, if you insist…
Who is April? I met her online as the author of a very informative guide to the ins and outs of Publishing On Demand. I can safely say she knows a lot about it, and I know more about it after reading that book, too. But now I have to say she also seems to know a lot about the psychology of people who want to join communities, and the hand-to-mouth philosophy of the “Indie” movement, wherever it may be manifesting itself, especially in the world of self-published books.
We “Indie” writers are resentful at being scorned for so many years by agents and publishers (if they deigned to notice us, it was with scorn) and pitied by everyone else who knew about the manuscript(s) in the file cabinet, at work or elsewhere. We are also astonished and grateful that the fertile world of “new technology” has suddenly, in the past year or so, made it possible for us to publish our own books for next to nothing, and sell them on amazon.com for a royalty of five bucks a copy. I am still shocked about this, but the dreamworld of possibilities has apparently not ended, because here comes April telling me that I can essentially start an equivalent to Facebook for my own area of interest (poetic reinterpretation of all the world’s religious texts).
I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. The same “new technology” that enables this purposive community building is characterized by satisfaction of three essential needs: the individual wants to be empowered; wants to have power without upfront cost; and wants to communicate the essentials of his/her individuality to the whole world, but especially to those people who would really understand.
My first quibble is that April doesn’t really give us much background on why she wants to write this book and help us out. And, in keeping with the high value she places on the “human touch,” I found myself craving just a little more back story. Back in the middle ages they called this the captatio benovolentiae, and it was essentially a short confession of ignorance and humility by the author meant to mollify the reader in advance.
Another quibble is that April doesn’t cut us much slack on what we don’t know. I realize this is a subject fraught with ambiguities, and people vary widely in their degree of nerdiness, but I started to gasp for air on page 35 when she told me to install my newfound CMS software on my host server. This indie guy thinks that at this point the book ought to digress into an explanation of what a host server is and how to find one, general review of requirements, pros and cons, etc.
Enough of quibbling. In general I love the way that April lets her humanity govern simple choices. On page 37 she counsels the reader to “Make the users of the site feel at home.” This is the type of attitude I often encounter in “Indie” oriented websites (the main one I use is http://www.garageband.com) and April’s homespun counsel is beautifully elaborated in Chapter 7 and thereafter. For instance, she mentions the needless obsession with security and passwords often encountered on heavily corporate sites, and tells us to apply a kind of guideline asking ourselves–if there is a security feature–what is it really for?
And yet, behind the friendliness, she shows a toughness too, by including some very canny advice in the last chapter on “monetizing” our sites, which is definitely worth the price of the book.
So, I am a poet, not very techy, and I live in New Jersey, where I have self published 42 titles and counting on Createspace. I advise you, if you want to build an online community, to buy April’s book, because like Occham’s razor it will yield the simplest solution to your problem. Thank you, April. If my arms were three thousand miles long, I would attempt to hug you.
Rating: 5 / 5
With the proliferation of sites like Facebook and Twitter, social networking has become standard Internet practice. Static, one-way information websites are far less appealing and far less effective than community-based sites. The future of the Internet is all about building community.
Do you have a great idea for an online community but no idea how to begin creating one? Do you want to add more community interaction to an existing website or web-based business? From Concept to Community gives a succinct look at online community building, packing a whole lot of information into a neat little package.
April Hamilton walks the reader step-by-step through her own process in creating Publetariat.com, a thriving online community for indie authors. The book includes strategies for branding, recruiting allies, designing your website, and launching your community as well as an overview and evaluation of some of the Content Management Systems you might choose to create and maintain your web community.
This quick read got my mind jumping with ideas and gave me a valuable introduction to online community building.
Rating: 4 / 5
April Hamilton was in the right place at the right time when she attended the O’Reilly Tools of Change conference earlier this year. Online community building was the big buzz amongst the authors and conference attendees, and the conference itself was the the final A-ha! moment that April needed to get her own website going, http://www.publetariat.com. In this Ebook, April basically tells you how she got the site up and running, what tips have made it successful in such an early stage, and how you can apply her methods to creating such a popular website of your own.
I usually turn crosseyed at the technology section in the bookstore, much less anything that mentions RSS, HTML, SEO, and the like. And most of what I know about computers and the internet today was all learned through trial and error. However, April’s 80 page guide was easy to follow and doesn’t assume you already know what such terms mean. After reading this book, I can honestly say I came away with a better knowledge of how I could improve my own website and online community.
April begins with simple steps like coming up with a good name (“A visitor may remember the idea behind the name, but isn’t likely to remember the name itself.), branding your site, zoning in on the correct community, creating a mission and its focus, planning the launch, and managing content. Each step is written in a nice easy matter-of-fact flow which is simple to follow and divided up into small sections almost like an outline. I found it easy to navigate throughout the book, and even easier to go back and find steps I wanted to highlight and remember for later use of my own.
April uses her own site, http://www.publetariat.com, as the prime example throughout the book, but also gives good examples of how to adapt her methods to your own blog or online community. Although I have previously visited Publetariat many times and I am a member, I went back to the site constantly to compare it to the steps in the book while reading it. Each step April has taken is right there on her site for you to see, and some content may seem like a given, but it’s these steps that some sites often forget but that web browsers like myself are always looking out for. One example is the “community forum.” I love the forum on Publetariat, I have participated in it, and I check it often for new updates. However, my own blog doesn’t contain a forum.
So, while reading April’s book, I kept asking myself, “Why didn’t I think of that?” And you’d probably be doing the same, but now you won’t have to. April has covered just about every detail that I can think of from advertising to merchandise to premium memberships. There’s even a section called “How To Get It Wrong.”
So, just as April mentions in the title…she did it all with very little monetary investment too. As she states in the book, she invested in some business cards to pass out at the conference. Her web address also appeared in an overhead slide presentation which led to a post on Twitter. The rest is history, and history that’s less than 3 months old because the site is brand new and still growing. I think I’ve visited it at least once a day since I signed up.
I commend April Hamilton on providing such a valuable tool for indie authors during a time when E-publishing and online prescence is growing at an even faster rate. She’s in the right place at the right time. And you can be too. Author or not, this guide is a top tool for anyone in need of tips on how to grow their own online community or following.
Rating: 4 / 5
Being a professional Internet producer with a focus on communities, I occasionally pick up books by other professionals to see what kind of innovation they have brought to the field. Unfortunately in this case I allowed myself to be fooled by a clever title and a few reviews that must have been from friends of the author. This “book” isn’t much more than a pamphlet, and at a steep $30, I can say that I have never payed so much per word for a book in my life. The description on the back cover mentions “hits” and “Alexa” – two things that scream “amateur”. You will never hear the executives of an Internet company exchanging stats based on hits or Alexa at the monthly strategy meeting.
Normally I wouldn’t have even bothered with what was clearly a waste of time. However, since it would only take an hour to read I thought I’d buzz through it and provide a few words of warning here. This book is full of generalities that will not be helpful to anyone actually trying to launch a web-based business. In many places its full of outright misinformation – as in the chapter about content management systems (CMS’s could have been the subject of an entire book themselves and the 6 pages dedicated to the subject in this book were both beyond the scope of the book, and full of misinformation). The author even goes as far as stating that if you need content, and you can’t contact the author of another website to secure permission to use that content, go ahead and steal it anyway, but only use 50% or less of the original article and link back to the rest. Unbelievable.
Not once does the book delve into actual, useful statistics. No analysis of page view, visits, unique visitors, or bounce rates. No trends over time. No revenue numbers or revenue growth over time.
Also, the website that the book was written about, despite claims of “going viral” has a forum that is essentially empty – and this after over 7 months of being online judging by the original post date. Take note – the books claim about “going viral” has not produced the kind of results we would expect from such a statement – high traffic and enough revenue to pay the author a salary.
But the salary is coming it seems, in the form of this 30 dollar pamphlet. Don’t be fooled. Sadly, the author really did do a good job of creating a niche website. However, to claim a level of expertise and success equal to writing a book on Internet success (and to charge an outrageous sum for said book) just isn’t acceptable.
Rating: 1 / 5