Books For Catholic Kids Business Meeting: Part II

Hello, we are back (all three of us, see part 1 of this meeting) with a delicious cup of spearmint gun powder tea laced with orange oil. I brewed a pot and will keep it in my trusty thermos for the rest of this meeting. I brew the tea with the mint first and let it steep. Then I add a few drops of orange essential oil before serving. Delicious! The pelicans on the photo have nothing to do with the content of this post except that they almost look like they are having a business meeting right there on stump in Grays Harbor Bay. I also wanted to show off my photo.

We will now analyze our…

Website Traffic:

Website visits are easy to document as we have installed a counter which appears at the bottom of each page: 339 at the time of writing. This sounds wonderful. However, I must admit that at least half, if not more, of these visits were generated by myself and Mark trying out new edits to the site. Still, even a very conservative estimate of 100 visits in two weeks is nothing to be scoffed at.

Another important figure to consider is the number of subscribers to the blog. This is very important because it makes the site more visible to Google. At his time, we have five subscribers. To be honest about the significance of this number and to avoid an embarrassing confession next Sunday, I must admit that three subscribers are members of the Olson family related to or identical with Nadia, our illustrator.

Again, just like in sales, there is one unknown supporter of our endeavor whose email I don’t recognize. This wonderful person could be from anywhere in the world, from the UK, from Timbuktu or from Oldenburg, Germany. May St. Rosaline shower blessings upon you whoever you are.

Facebook Traffic:

Facebook traffic is a little more complicated than website statistics. One of the complicating factors consists of me posting on my personal facebook page as well as on The Story Of A Book page. I can never be quite sure whether the likes or shares from the two pages originate from the same person. To simplify matters, I shall assume they do.

Likes, which cause all posts from a page to appear on the liker’s homepage, are easy enough to see. We have fourteen now, a good number considering that the likers can actually be considered subscribers to our page.

Shares are harder to identify. We had about five altogether. They are extremely important because they are visible to all the sharer’s friends. Shares do more than keep a single friend informed, they bring the post to new people. Consider how many friends each sharer has and imagine how large an impact a single share can have. We are trying to get more shares by expressly inviting people to share in the posts. I believe many people are unaware of what sharing does. Again, I have a favorite share from St. Anthony’s Church in far away Billings, Montana. Thank you folks and may St. Rosaline bless you abundantly.

Facebook Insights, a feature of facebook business pages, analyzes page traffic and generates a report which can be exported by means of a spreadsheet. There is a column for likes but no separate column for shares, just a general ‘number of people engaged with the page’ column. I hope this slideshow on how to get your report will be helpful to all our readers aspiring to market their book on facebook. Hover over the images to stop and see the captions:

Here is the summary of our three reports: Since publication November, December 2017 we had two kindle sales and 53 paperback sales. In the last two weeks since the launching of our website and facebook page, we had 339 site visits, five website subscribers, fourteen facebook page likes, five post shares.

Altogether, I think we have done reasonably well. It is hard to tell because we have no real comparison. Please, tell us if you know more than we do about book launching statistics. How about a comment? You could be our first "commentor" – how exciting! We would be ever so grateful.

Meeting adjourned.

St. Rosaline, pray for us!