Online Book Marketing - How Many of These 5 Rules Are You Breaking?
Monday, July 6th, 2009 Subscribe To Our Feed
The more I work with writers to help them get the ins and outs of online book marketing, the more I realize that there are five basic and fundamental mistakes that 90% of authors consistently make.
If you don’t fall victim to these five book marketing fiascoes, you’ll be ahead of the pack…light years ahead. So, here are five things to avoid when marketing your books online:
1. Flawed Keyword Research
This is the #1 big kahuna and the place where 99% of authors quite simply stuff it up.
Most authors — including the ones I’ve worked with — haven’t had success using the Internet to market their books simply because they don’t approach the process the way someone who’s used to selling things online would do it. Namely, there’s almost never a plan put in place that will allow them to find, target and eventually dominate a set of keywords that are related to their books.
In order to have success online, you need to familiarize yourself with the concept of long-tail keywords; to understand how to analyze your competition; and how to know, with almost certainty, how much traffic a particular keyword gets.
Lucky for us there are tools available that will do all three. You can find that at the bottom of this article — just follow the links. Make sure you check them out.
2. Too Little Content
Surprisingly enough, even prolific authors with many books to their credit — gifted authors who can write volumes on their area of expertise — somehow think that they can skate by online with just a couple pages (or even paragraphs!) of content.
Untrue.
Here’s the deal: Google and the other search engines LOVE content-rich sites.
This is why mega-sites like Wikipedia and others are able to get all that traffic. Google’s index includes millions of pages from their site.
How many pages from your site does Google know or care about? A guess would be somewhere between two on the low end and five on the high end.
You’ll never rank well for anything other than your name with that kind of site. Bottom line: if you shortchange people online, you’ll destroy your reputation in a heartbeat.
Stop looking at your site as though it were a high-tech dust jacket. Solve a problem for someone — that’s what your book does, right? So do it online, and do it for free, before you start asking people to buy your book.
3. Not paying enough — or any — attention to Social Marketing & Web 2.0
If you haven’t noticed, the Internet is changing. In the past few years alone, outfits such as YouTube, Digg, Squidoo, Facebook.com — and, of course, Twitter — have dramatically shifted the way we interact online.
We’ve been through a seismic shift in the way news and information is not only delivered, but also in how it’s filtered — the “average guy” sitting in a cubicle in his office can catapult a story to the top of the news, no matter what some out-of-touch editor somewhere happens to think about it.
You should be using the sites mentioned above. If you’re not, you’re missing out on one of the biggest opportunities for authors in generations.
(Just check out the links I’ve given you below for the resources that will make it easy to find tons of sites that can help you sell more books.)
4. Ignoring the Importance of Building a Fan Base
It’s amazing how many writers don’t jump on the most powerful online marketing tool there is — the ability to build a base of support and loyal fans through tools like mailing lists, or “followers” on Twitter, or subscribers to an RSS feed, or any number of other methods that traditional Internet marketers use all the time.
Why is this important? Because it’s always true that people who already know your work and like it will be much easier to sell more “stuff” to.
If someone has been won over — if they’ve gone ahead and bought one of your books — then selling them books two through four (or more) is that much easier.
But when you don’t have a system in place to reach those people who bought your first book, you’ll be going through the entire process of attracting and acquiring new readers over and over and over again.
Wouldn’t it be much more efficient to just write and send an email or two to people who are already fans of yours?
Or simply to create a blog post to announce another book?
This is how authors are able to build empires.
5. Trying to Sell Your Book
Huh? This is a mistake? But that’s the point, isn’t it?
Sometimes.
The argument basically goes like this: Of course you want to use the Internet to sell copies of your book. BUT, you don’t want to ignore the relationship-building aspect of what you’re doing, because it’s these relationships, and the loyal fans you’ll naturally develop out of them, that will wind up being the base of people who buy basically whatever you put out (without being “marketed to”).
What would you prefer — selling a couple of books a day now, or selling thousands of books every day to throngs of adoring fans a year from now?
Stop all the struggling.
There’s no reason why you can’t build an information empire the same way thousands of Internet marketers have done. You might want to think about how you could benefit if you stopped trying to just sell one or two books every now and then. Start focusing on creating killer content and getting it out to the very people who need your expertise.
Sales (like you’ve never experienced before!) will inevitably follow closely behind.
If you’re not making a full-time income selling your books online, you’re missing something.
There’s no doubt in my mind that at least 9 out of 10 authors make vital — but ultimately avoidable — mistakes when trying to market books online.
Want to find out if you’re one of them? Visit this free online book marketing blog and finally realize what the “Ten-Percenters” know that you don’t.
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