Urban Epics is my personal platform for YA fiction, but I wanted another site that’s for more general YA book reviews and news from the young adult genre, so I started theYAshelf.com.
Off the Shelf is a community site, which means you can sign up to post your own content or YA book reviews. The reason you’d want to do this, is because you need strong backlinks from other blogs in the YA genre pointing back to your main blog, website or even directly to your book’s Amazon page.
There are lots of ways to get links like this, but most of them entail either A) begging for a review from other book reviewers or book bloggers or B) paying for a blog tour.
I wanted to make a site where you can just sign up to contribute, without asking permission. The site is monitored though, and we don’t just want spammy, self-promotional content. We want excellent reviews of other books in your genre; interviews of authors in your genre; interesting wrap-ups of central themes or issues found in YA books, etc.
You get links back to your site from the bio, which is found beneath everything you publish – so the more you publish, the more links you earn. Because OfftheShelf.info is a community site, it will grow much faster than a normal book review site and everything posted their will rank well and get more traffic.
You can help this process by:
A) Sharing the posts you write on Off the Shelf with your platform.
B) Finding other great reviews or posts on Off the Shelf and sharing them.
C) Adding the following graphic to your sidebar.
More people linking to Off the Shelf = stronger search rankings = all your content ranks higher = the links from Off the Shelf to your own website are more powerful, boosting your own SEO and traffic.
