A reader asked me for some advice on doing some unconventional book publicity--when I say "unconventional" I mean marketing the book online rather than traipsing from bookstore to bookstore doing readings.
Not only is that expensive, time consuming and personally taxing, but it also produces very limited results. The really cool thing about marketing online is that you reach more people than you ever could have before, and you're also able to stay in touch with them.
There are a few steps to doing an online marketing plan for a book, and we've already covered the first two:
- Set up a website for you book that will allow you to gather email addresses of your potential customers.
- Set up a blog for your book where you'll post regularly.
Now, we're on to step 3:
Implement an article marketing campaign.
First off, what is article marketing?
With article marketing you write educational articles on your topic and submit them as free reprint articles.
The term "free reprint articles" means that you are giving permission to website owners to republish your article for free, as long as the resource box with your author bio and active link to your website is also included.
People do article marketing to build up the authority of their website so that it can get a higher search engine ranking for specific keyword terms that your potential customers are typing into Google and the other search engines.
The ultimate goal with article marketing is to get a page one or ideally #1 ranking for your website when certain keywords are typed into Google. When you can accomplish that, it can dramatically increase the traffic that you get to your website. Increased traffic (website visitors) can in turn dramatically increase your sales.
How To Submit Free Reprint Articles
I would recommend using an automatic article submission service, such as SubmitYourArticle.com.
By submitting articles automatically you’re able to write fewer articles while still getting results. When you submit articles automatically, your articles are sent to lots of online publishers--article directories, blogs, ezine editors, and other types of online publishers. You submit the article to the submission service, and they distribute it to their network of online publishers. When submitting automatically, you’ll submit 8 articles a month for each website that you're marketing.
If you were to submit articles by hand, one directory at a time, it would take forever, and you could never submit to as many sites as an automatic submission service could. You would also need to write and submit many more articles (say 50+ a month) in order to see similar results to submitting automatically.
So, for practical reasons, I think it's definitely worth it to use an article submission service--it saves you time and it's more effective. It also makes article marketing quite do-able.
Where Do You Get Your Article Topics?
You can bounce your articles off of your blog posts. For every blog post that you write, re-write it and submit it as an article. It’s important to fully re-write the blog post before submitting it as an article, as you want to keep the content on your own site unique. Sites that have unique content are more attractive to Google and the other search engines.
Re-purposing your blog content is a great way to get the most use possible out of the content you create. Just like with the blog posts, the articles should be educational. Articles that teach readers how to do something are the most popular online. These are called “How To” articles, because they have titles that often start with the words “How To”. For example, “How To Train Your Dog To Walk On A Leash”.
Other popular types of articles are Top Tips articles (10 Top Tips For Leash Training Your Dog), and “numbered list” articles (Teach Your Dog To Walk On A Leash In 5 Easy Steps). People are drawn to the “how to” articles and the articles that mention a number in the title. Articles that contain a numbered list are easier for online readers to read (most people skim online content).
Like the blog posts, the articles will be about 600 words.
The Resource Box
For every article that you submit, you’ll also create what is called a “resource box”, aka an “author bio”. This is the one spot where you can talk about yourself and your book and give a link to the website of your book. Most resource boxes are between 400-450 characters long.
Here is the info to include in your resource box:
- Your name
- A short bio (why should readers regard you as an expert in your niche?)
- A reason for the reader to visit your website (a great incentive would be an excerpt from your e-book).
- If the article was excerpted from your e-book, be sure to mention that and to also give the title of your book.
- And finally, your website URL.
You might wonder, what website should you link to--your blog, the book’s website, or the page on Amazon that sells your book?
Great question--Be sure to link to the website for your book, rather than to the page on Amazon where your book is sold.
The goal is not to sell books directly via the articles. The main benefit of the marketing should be benefiting your website for the book or web pages that you own that link to the website for the book. The goal is to get a high ranking for your book’s website when people search for certain phrases (keywords) related to the topic of your book.
On the book’s website you can then direct readers to purchase the book at Amazon--you can link to the sales page on Amazon from the book’s website.
It’s also a good idea for your resource box to link to any webpage of yours that is linking to your book’s website (say, pages on your blog). Most publishers will only allow 2 links in the resource box, so you can create a few different ones to use interchangeably. One of those links should always be going to the website for the book.
The idea is to make the book’s website powerful (resulting in a higher ranking in Google), rather than the sales page on Amazon. This will help you generate more long term sales for the book, because you can use the website to capture email addresses and follow up with newsletters that will sell help the book.
Note: Links provided here for SubmitYourArticle.com are affiliate links, and I’d stand to gain a small commission should you decide to purchase their paid-for services. If however you’d prefer not to go through my affiliate link, you can just go direct to SubmitYourArticle.com-- it’s entirely up to you.
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