At my new day job several people use Twitter, so I decided to investigate it on Friday. OH MY. I’m sucked in! I set up an ‘emmaclair‘ account and now I’m rolling in the wonderful land of tweets and followers. I did a search for users with ‘romance writer’ or ‘romance author’ in their bio [...]

Many of the free Google services I mention on this site require you to have a Google Account. I highly recommend this — it’s free and easy!
What are the benefits?

You get a Gmail account - this is a fantastic way to read email that’s part of a “loop” because it groups the messages by conversation.
You [...]

After you’ve built a website, you’ll want to see how many visits you’re receiving. With Google Analytics, you can do that (and much more!) for free! Google Analytics works by giving you a little bit of web code that you install on each of your website pages. Each time someone visits your site, that code [...]

If you have several blogs that you read on a daily basis, you may want to use a Feed Reader to view them all in one place. A Feed Reader can also be called an Aggregator or an RSS Reader. They all mean the same thing. (If you want to know more about RSS Feeds, [...]

What is a domain name?
To discover if a domain name is available to purchase, you can go to a site such as http://www.dotster.com/go/whois and type in the desired address. Do NOT just type in the domain name into a web browser and see if a site is there. Someone may own the name and not [...]

Here is my collection of tips and tricks for creating a website. I am presenting this information with an eye on authors, but the information is universal.

How to register a Domain Name
How to get a Google Account
How to create a Google Alert
How to read multiple blogs in one place
How to track your website

You can use Google Alerts to keep track of yourself, an agent, an editor, your RWA chapter…you get the idea. Basically, anything that you can search for in Google can be set up as an Alert. Instead of YOU going to GOOGLE to keep tabs on something, let GOOGLE come to YOU!

Go to www.google.com/alerts
Enter [...]