How to Get Your Website Published In a Book (and My Story)

Glen Allsopp / 9 Comments / June 19th, 2008 / Subscribe via RSS

As internet marketers, we often look for ways to get the attention of A-list bloggers so that we can attract traffic and links to our websites. Sometimes, it can be a good idea to get the attention of people online, but not in a way that gets you on their website, but in their next book.

I wouldn’t share something I haven’t experienced, one of my first websites is in a book called “DJing for Dummies” which is part of the popular Dummies series that I’m sure you’ve all heard of. This wasn’t by chance; I had to work for it.

My Story

If you have read the eBook then you probably know how I got started online, if you haven’t then I’m going to cover it briefly. Just around the time when I turned 16, I was very into DJ’ing and the internet; to improve my skills as a DJ I obviously practiced a lot, but I also spent a lot of time on DJ forums learning from others.

I got so into all of this that I actually started to create a website with a friend of mine, Dean Martin: the result? MyDJSpace. Using our popular accounts on forums, our connections on MySpace and offline friends (Dean played in front of hundreds of people weekly), we were able to grow the site quite quickly.

Utilising my skills in SEO, we were also quickly ranking for a lot of equipment and generic terms like ‘DJ forums’ and in-turn saw the traffic increase as a result. The site quickly grew to over 5,000 members in a matter of 2-3 months. Due to being unique in our field and having a great community of DJ’s that could create their profile and upload music (like myspace), we were able to get the attention of some professional DJ’s and some of the most active guys on the internet. One of them, John Steventon.

John is a great guy who has probably the most thorough website of tips and tricks to becoming a DJ, his site was so good infact that he was contacted by the guys that make the ‘for dummies’ books and asked if he wanted to write for them. Now at this time, John was a member of the forums we took part in and also a member of MyDJSpace. We knew about the book from the start, trying to help him with everything and keep our website running smoothly.

The cut a long story short, the end result was multiple listings in ‘DJing for Dummies’ which was produced by Wiley. Whether this has sent much traffic I don’t know, but it certainly feels like an achievement for a webmaster and can help increase your authority online.

What You Can Learn from That

Although that was a condensed version of the story, there are definitely things you can take out of that, so we are going to look at simple steps you can use to get your website in a book.

Just to add, DJing certainly isn’t the only industry you can be featured in a book, there are books on blogging, cooking, fishing…anything. As an example, someone I greatly admire, Wendy Piersall, was featured in Problogger the book by Darren Rowse and Chris Garrett. Once you read the following you will understand why she was included.

Be Unique

The reason John was chosen to write the book, was because he had the best and only unique resource on ‘how to be a DJ’ online. His website was very popular in the community so it was no surprise Wiley got in touch with him.

MyDJSpace, although similar to the likes of MySpace and Facebook, was unique in the community and the first site of its kind for DJ’s, therefore our popularity grew quickly and we became the type of site that people naturally talk about and link too.

Wendy wouldn’t have been included in the ProBlogger book if she was just like the majority of blogging / MMO bloggers. She was unique, she started up a blog network around a site she had grown and became an example of uniqueness that people naturally talk about (there it is again).

Network

If myself and Dean had simply tried to promote MDS via SEO, it would have gotten nowhere (btw, I haven’t been connected with the website for a while). Instead, we were active forum users in the industry and made a lot of online friends. We had friends on MySpace already that were interested in DJing because that is what we were interested in.

John found our website through the forums we took part in, and that is also how I found out about the book, as he used the forums to ask for suggestions; which by the way, I think is a great idea. Going back to the Wendy example, do you think Darren / Chris would have wrote about her if all she did was push blog posts all the time and never communicated with people online? No Chance. Get to know the main people in your industry and network whenever you can.

Be Consistent

Consistency in this sense has a lot of meanings, being consistent can be:

• Blogging regularly
• Continually having good information
• Staying Online

Books are written to be timeless, so authors are unlikely to write about something that isn’t going to stick around. If MyDJSpace had a history of being offline for days at a time or rarely fixed any bugs, the author might not have trusted to write about us. Similar for Wendy Piersall, if she had of built up her network then let the site die, it wouldn’t have been anything to talk about.

Those that take the easy route often fail; those that work hard usually succeed.

In Summary

You may think that we were lucky to get in a book, trust me it was months before knowing about it to publication actually interacting with the author and working on the website to get it to a high, unique standard.

Really become a resource in your industry, in the same way that you want to become one online you can become one for book authors. Sites that offer little value and don’t seem to have a face behind them probably aren’t going to be written about.

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