One of my many New Year’s resolutions (drink less, exercise, save money, meditate, translate poems, be a good boy…) is to make Deep Kyoto profitable. For a long time now I’ve been reading Yaro Starak’s tips on how to be a successful blogger. Basically he seems to have two key ideas: one being pillar articles and the other being marketing through increased internet presence. Pillar articles are basically posts of valuable information that people will continue to want to read long after they are written. Deep Kyoto is basically a series of reviews of good places in Kyoto so almost every post is a “pillar article” of value (which is partly why I came up with the idea in the first place). However, I haven’t really done any marketing up till now and that is undoubtedly why no-one is reading it. All that is about to change. I’ve come up with one idea for increasing my web-presence and yesterday I started to put it into action.
I’ve written previously on bookcrossing. The idea is you leave books you have read and finished with, out “in the wild” for other people to read and then they write their impressions on the bookcrossing site - and then they re-release them. My idea is a pretty simple one - I register myself on the bookcrossing site as “deepkyoto”, with a brief description of the blog on the profile page. I then place my own bespoke deepkyoto bookplates inside the bookcover along with the bookcrossing id number. In addition, I am leaving the books in places I have already reviewed so each book’s “release notes” contain a link back to a deepkyoto review. Why, it’s almost like a treasure hunt. I have plenty of books I don’t need anymore so I think I can continue to promote myself this way over a fairly wide area. Yesterday I left books at Long Island Cafe and Kyoto Prefectural Information Center. I wonder where they end up and how successful this little strategy will be?
Another key to successful blogging is of course regular postage and to that end there is a fresh review up today on !-style pottery. Enjoy!
