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The Best Way to Market Your Book Online

June 25, 2012 by Atilla Vekony, Publishing Information Manager

All marketing is just marketing, the saying goes; as long as you know the principles you should be able to translate them to marketing a book. I believe that.

A marketer’s job is to connect a product with a market. An author’s job is to connect his message with his audience. (To be more precise, we ought to reverse those: a marketer’s job is to connect a market with a product, and an author’s is to connect an audience with a message.) Therefore, author = marketer. Don’t like the sound of that? I’m not the one who made it that way; I’m just reporting it to you!

Now, you as an author have an unfair advantage over the vast majority of other marketers when it comes to marketing your product. You see, your product itself—your book—is pure information, and a great part of marketing itself involves disseminating information about your product. You’ll have to write only half as much (or much less) of what you’d otherwise need for your marketing efforts simply because you’ve got most of it written already.

Consider someone marketing a widget. The widget itself is a great product for its market, but no information has been written about it yet. When the widget marketer starts wading into online marketing, she starts with nothing but a blank screen and a blinking cursor. Much of your online marketing, on the other hand, will involve copying and pasting, since you’ve already written a ton! Do you feel your immense advantage yet?

The best way to market a book online is to connect your audience with your message online. Forget for a moment that you have a physical book, and think about the fact that you have a message. Find your audience online, engage them, and share the message with them. Let them know that they can get the message in book form on Amazon. But concentrate on spreading your message online. Here’s how to do it:

1. Write a book and publish it. For most marketers this first step is insurmountable, so, congratulations, you’re already light years ahead!

2. Start a website dedicated to your message, whether it’s about buying land in Texas or the fascinating world of science fiction. You can start a free blog on many blogging platforms or, if you’d like a properly designed custom website, have Wheatmark create one for you. To have a book but not a website is such a waste of opportunity!

3. Copy and paste content from your book—chapters, sections—regularly to your blog. Record short videos of you discussing the content and post it to your blog. (You would actually post the videos on YouTube first, then embed them in your blog post.) Have your blog posts be optimized for search engine traffic (more on this step in the future).

4. Find other websites and blogs with similar interests and leave comments, always linking back to your own site. Develop a relationship with the owners of these influential media.

5. In addition to making friends on various social networking sites, provide a link on your Facebook, Twitter, or Google+ profiles every time you publish a new post on your blog. This way you notify all your friends on these networks about the brand new blog post. When they see it they can click through to your website to read the actual post, and thus your site gains new visitors.

Don’t fret if nobody’s looking at your website at first. Building visitor traffic takes a lot of time. But once you’re there, the amount of traffic coming to your website can remain steady for a long time.

The best way to market your book online in a nutshell: Slice it up into smaller pieces and republish those pieces on your blog and other sites accepting similar content. Then, drive traffic to your blog using social networking sites and search engine optimization techniques. Provide a link on your blog where people can buy the book. Keep adding “new” content to your blog and keep spreading your message to your audience online.

If you need help marketing your book, consider joining the Authors Academy. You’ll be glad you did!

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Filed Under: Marketing,

Comments

Pricing?

posted on 8/9/2012 by Denny

Denny, what is it you’re looking to have pricing for?

posted on 8/9/2012 by Atilla Vekony

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