From our friends at Poetrydances.com:

Poetrydances.com - Newsletter: September 2008-09-30

Well, its been a while coming!- the first newsletter from Poetry Dances.

First, big thanks to everyone who submitted their own poetry or links to other great poems hosted on various sites around the Internet. Without you, poetrydances.com would not be here.

Good news for writers listed on the site. It seems from site stats that rather than clicking through, many people are spending a lot more time reading the great poetry that has been linked to or submitted directly. Which is great- since it is the main reason we are doing what we are doing!

Who are we ?

We are just three. Three people who love to read great poetry and seem to like similar kinds of work (don't know if that's a good or a bad thing!) We share post-its or emails about work we have found out in the ether of the Internet that would be ideal to post on our site. Two of us are based here in South Korea and another over in sunny Florida.

Favorite Writers

Many of the people submitting poems, and other writers that have seen their poems listed on poetrydances.com have become 'Favorite Writers' on the Site. To those whose submissions have not yet been successful we offer apologies again, and look forward hopefully to seeing further submissions in time.

Favorite writers shown so far on the site are currently, in order of appearance:

Mamta Madhaven

Michelle Schaefer

Emily Burns

Ivana Plucinski

Joseph Michael Yeary (J. M Yeary)

Jason Lalli (Lalli)

Rambling Prose

Ray Neighbor

Cleo Harter Amos

Andrew Kelly

Milagros Cruz

Ernesto Pangilinan Santiago

Nicole Nicholson

William Laughlin

David Hixon

Robyn R. Gray [Lady Gray]

Claudia Anne Krizay

Holly White Valliant

Engtovo Bhodsvatan

Moqui Takoda

Nakya Cohen

Rebecca Lucente

Alicia K. Jones

Joanne Cucinello

Rex Cox

Michelle Hetzel

Angela Rizzitano-Bellenis

Brandon Farinha

Leo Durrant

Big thanks to all of these people for allowing us to showcase their fine work!

New developments

Since the Site began we have pretty much stuck to our core activities; linking to great poems on other sites, hosting submitted poetry along with our own, and showcasing Favorite Writers. Recently we started a couple or three new ideas too:



Poetry is..

This is just for fun- a page where you can send in a line/quote or two or more if you want as to what poetry 'is' to you. For your troubles we'll list your name and blog/website etc alongside your quote/s.

Poetry Dances- Quotes




Web Friends

This might turn out to be a silly idea that goes nowhere- but we hope not for the sake of the site. Web Friends is a page - where people can get links posted to their personal page/s on Myspace, Facebook, or other social networking sites. This we do in return for them posting a link to poetrydances.com on their own page/s on these site/s.

Poetic inspiration
A page where you can send in your own inspirations for writing poetry, or read about those of others. You can instead simply send in great line/s, from your own original work/thoughts- which you are happy to share with others. Again, in return we'll throw up a link to your blog/website or poetry page etc.
http://www.poetrydances.com/poeticinspiration.htm

Search engine visibility
We are glad to report that our position on all major search engines is looking promising. A search for poetry on yahoo.com listed us around 60th out of 450M results. Other searches have returned better results; searching for poems by great writers on yahoo.com listed us 2nd out of 31M results. The other top engines have us on page one also for this particular search. Nothing is set in stone of course, and listings change everyday- but at least for the moment- our visibility is very good.
What this all means, who knows! (It can't be a bad thing for writers using the site though eh).


Press releases
So far we have issued five releases through PR.COM. These have a little info about the site- and also highlight Favorite Writers for each of the months in question. Another is due to go out shortly.
http://www.poetrydances.com/press.htm

User feedback -
So far feedback from various users of the site has been very encouraging- in certain cases listing on poetrydances.com has helped to increase traffic/visits to user poetry pages/websites and blogs etc.

Links
We have many successful reciprocal links in place with different blogs and poetry sites- thanks so much to all of you. We hope you are also enjoying some increased traffic to your site/s as a result. No favorites, we are grateful to all but, special thanks to Lindsay at writingroom.com, Martha at listenandbeheard.net, Sara at poetswhoblog.blogspot.com and John and staff over at gotpoetry.com.

Advertising on the Site/financing
We advertise using Google Adwords- on various sites on Google's content network- although our expenditure is quite limited due to the cash available. In terms of ads on our site, at this time we are using Google ads to help with running costs of the site. Revenue from these ads seems to be minimal though!.

The future of poetrydances.com?
A question perhaps best left for another day!
At the moment though it looks bright-

Thanks to all who have been in contact with us so far-and those that have contributed so much. Special thanks to those who have been kind enough to let friends know about us too.

Any help you can offer by linking us on your blogs, websites or social network sites would be gratefully accepted!

We look forward to keeping in contact- so please…
keep your poetry coming! And please keep sending links for other great work you find out there !

A very big thank you from us,
Tony, Young Joo and John.