Marketing Your Book Online

This is a guide to marketing techniques for promoting your book online.

1. Introduction
2. Creating a Web Site
3. Search Engine Submission
4. Search Engine Optimization
5. Web Page Content
6. Advertising on a Budget
7. Generating Extra Revenue
8. Amazon.com
9. Participate in the Internet Community
10. Final Words

So the book which you have laboured on for so long, has now finally been published and is available for sales. If you think your job is done, think again. Your publishing company is surely going to do what it can towards marketing your book, however your own actions can have a significant impact in your own sales. Too often authors write good books which go unnoticed for no other reason than insufficient marketing. My most important piece of advice is this: take an active role in promoting your book. Hopefully this guide will help stimulate your creative juices and give you ideas for creating an online marketing campaign.

Marketing consists of two goals:

1. let people know your product exists
2. make people want to buy your product

The first and most important step to creating an online marketing campaign is to create websites for you and your book.

Html is very easy to learn,. I have found http://www.w3schools.com to be an indispensible resource. Of course you don't have to learn html, you can simply use html authoring software. One very powerful and very popular piece of software is the CoffeeCup Html Editor (http://www.coffeecup.com/html-editor/). There are of course many others to choose from.

If you just want to get your feet wet in the world of creating web-sites, one place to start is to create a blog at Blogger.com. This provides you with a way to create a web page, quickly and easily and without cost. Some people find this a good way to get initiated into the world of html.

It is not neccesarily a bad idea to have a professional create your web site for you, just remember to keep it simple. The biggest mistake people make when working with web designers is asking for too much at the beginning.

About Your Domain

Ideally you should have a top-level domain for your site. Your domain name should be easy to remember, easy to type, and easy to say aloud. Search engines have a small preference for domains which contain keywords separated by hyphens. For instance: www.my-big-book.com may be ranked higher in search results than www.mybigbook.com. This of course violates the "easy to say" rule. My solution is buy multiple domains, and have the extra ones act as pointers to the others. Domains are a very inexpensive investment.

Simply building a website for yourself and your book is insufficient if no one visits. By far the most common way people find sites is through search engines. Of the myriad of search engines out there, most people use one of the big three: Google, Yahoo or MSN. Most other search engines, use a mixture of advertisements disguised as search listings and results from one of the big three.

The first step is to get your site listed in a search engine, and there are two ways to do this.

1. make sure a link to your page appears on a site which is crawled by the search engine
2. submit it manually

Warning: some search engines, and third-party companies, sometimes offer "guaranteed search inclusion" service. To be honest, this is a waste of money. You should only pay for advertising, on a pay per click basis, or maybe pay per impression.

Here are manual submission URLs for the big three:

• http://www.google.com/addurl.html - manual submission to Google.com
• http://submit.search.yahoo.com/free/request - manual submission to Yahoo.com
• http://search.msn.com/docs/submit.aspx - manual submission to MSN.com

Search engines find new websites using crawlers or "bots". These are programs operated by search engines, which search the web for changes to existing sites, to keep their indexes up to date, and to find new sites. The fastest way to get your site indexed is usually to have a link from a site which is visited frequently by crawlers.

It is preferable to let the search engines find sites on their own. This is because manually submitted sites have no link popularity yet, whereas a found site starts its life in the index with the one incoming link.

The position your site shows up in the search engine results (its ranking) will significantly affect how many visitors are referred to your site from the search engine. Your ranking for a particular keyword or keyprhase is based on a complex formula based on the text on your page, the number of links to your page, and the content of those links into your page.

In order to bring people to your site it makes an astonishing difference where your page ranks in search results for the search results. People are far more likely to follow the first returned link, than the second or third, let alone the 100th. Your goal then clearly is to have a site which appears in the top 10 listing for popular search terms related to the topic of your book. The practice of optimizing your site so that it will rank higher in search results is known as search engine optimization.

You can not purchase a ranking in the major search engines, but you can influence where your site shows up in search engine results. The key is to understand how search engines operate and planning ahead when you design your site. I will not be covering any tricky techniques, simply good solid established practices which are endorsed by search engines themselves.

Keyword Research

When designing a web page with search engines optimization in mind, it is crucial you know what it is people are searching for, rather than just guessing. You will probably be quite surprised to see what people actually type into a search engine. There are two ways I know of to do this kind of research for free. One is through the Yahoo keyword suggestion tool, which currently is available to the public at http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/srch/ . Another is by creating a free Google adwords account at http://adwords.google.com/select/.

Google PageRank

Google is the most widely used search engine today. It is also the leader in search engine technology. Focusing solely on how to improve your ranking in Google is the most effective use of your time, because it will yield the most results, but also because other search engines mimic its indexing and ranking technology. Google uses a system called "PageRank" for ordering search results.

An excellent source for additional information about how Google indexes and ranks pages is from Google.com, specifically: http://www.google.com/intl/en/webmasters/.

Information on the relative popularity of the various search engines can be be found at SearchEngineWatch.com ( http://searchenginewatch.com/reports/ ).

The most important factor in Google search results is a formula called PageRank. This formula assigns a value to every page on the web, a value of 0 to 10, which represents thats site importance in calculating search engine results. The precise details of the Google PageRank algorithm are a closely guarded secret, but the gist of it is as follows:

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important."

Important, high-quality sites receive a higher PageRank, which Google remembers each time it conducts a search. Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don't match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines all aspects of the page's content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it's a good match for your query.

- quoted from http://www.google.com/technology/

Most major search engines, operate in a similar way to Google using a weighted link popularity system for ranking sites.

Tip of the trade: You can view the page rank of sites by downloading and installing a web browser plug-in called the Google Toolbar from http://toolbar.google.com/.

Avoid Spamming

At all costs avoid search engine spamming, which is the practice of artificially increasing your search engine rank, by violating the search engines policies.

Some of the practices which are considered spam by major search engines are

• overuse of links
• invisible or partially hidden links
• keyword stuffing
• hidden text
• doorway pages, multiple domains or subdomains with essentially the same content.
• "sneaky" redirects
• cloaking
• linking to sites of questionable content, or known to participate in search engine spamming

Search engines are generally quite clear in their policy pages about what they consider spam. Violating a search engine policy can get your site permanently dropped from its index.

Webpage Text

When constructing the text on your webpage, your are doing it for both humans and search engines. From a search engines perspective your page has to have the keywords which people are searching for in close proximity to each other, and with a certain amount of frequency. This will affect how you write your content for your site. For instance if you wrote a C++ book, you would want to actually include the phrase "C plus plus" into your page somewhere. This is somewhat unnatural, but the truth is that over 740 people typed that phrase into search engine last month. Remember a search engine can only return results that contain the phrase that people search for.

Of course the text ultimately is designed for readers, so when in doubt, go for what is most appealing to your reader. Also make sure your spelling and grammar is correct. If the text on your web-page has mistakes, then people will judge your book accordingly.

Aside

Back in the older days of search engine optimization, a whole five years ago, some people used to spend inordinate amounts of time trying to compute optimial keyword frequency, placement and density. Some old-schoolers still promote this technique, but it is mostly a waste of time. You are better off, improving your content.

Your Html

The most important thing is that you assure that your site is fully compliant HTML, and that all links work. You can verify your site using HTML validators at http://validator.w3.org/.

Tips and tricks with regards to your sites html code:

• Avoid using the meta-keywords tags, they are at best ignored, and sometimes even penalized
• Use the meta-description tag
• Keep your site simple, and viewable by even the most primitive of browsers
• Don't forget to create a descriptive <title> tag for your page.
• Use header tags such as <h1>, <h2>, etc. for your headers, and try to include keywords inside of them
• Use cascading style sheets (CSS) to control formatting as much as possible
• Make sure that if you use Javascript or Flash, your site works well without it
• Test your site in different browsers
• Use keywords as the names of your images and documents, separated by hypens
• Use descriptive text in the "alt" attribute of <img> tags to describe your images

Don't Move or Delete Pages

As pages mature, the number of links into them increases, and their relative value or page rank grows. Moving a page, causes all of this work to be lost. Think carefully about naming your pages, and once you create a page don't move it. Nobody likes a broken link, and people are more likely to remove a dead link than to find where it moves.

The online marketing biz has a saying "content is king". This means that the best way to attract visitors is to provide interesting, useful and ideally original content. It can be a challenge to come up with original content. The more content, or value you can provide visitors, the more visitors you will attract, and ultimately convince to buy your book.

You book page though doesn't just have to be just about your book. Give it some zing! You should give potential buyers a reason to visit your book page, other than just "here's my book". Here are some ideas on how to make your web page have more appeal and more "stickiness" as we say in the online marketing biz.

• A picture of the book
• The table of contents on the book
• A description of the book
• The basic information on the book: dimensions, ISBN, page count, etc.
• Links to where the book is sold online - don't forget to use affiliate links
• A link to your home page, and related pages
• Biography
• A link to your publisher's page on the book
• Some anecdotes about writing the book
• Reviews
• Selected chapters for free download
• A discussion forum
• Links to a mailing list
• Reviews and suggestion of related books
• Articles related to the topic
• A blog

Tip: the more pages on your site, the greater the potential for your site to show up on search results.

Blogging

A web log, or blog as it is more commonly known, can be a very effective way to promote yourself, and add content to your site. A blog will indirectly help promote your book, by promoting yourself and your ideas. Your blog will be much more effective if it is hosted as part of a community, where a lot of blog readers aggregate. For instance, my own blog, Heron-centric, only started to take off in popularity when I joined the Artima.com blogging community.

Community Building

You can build a community around your book through mailing lists and discussion forums. It can give a reason for potential buyers to visit your site's home page. There is a lot of free discussion forum management software to choose from. One very popular one is PhpBB ( http://www.phpbb.com/ ). An even simpler solution is to use a free service such as Google Groups http://groups.google.com/, to host and manage your forum externally. Google Groups serves a dual purpose, as it functions also as a mailing list.

As an author, you will likely be tracked down, and asked questions. By responding to question publicly, you can increase the likelihood of people finding you and your web site through search engines. It also helps to avoid having to answer questions repeatedly.

Sometime a small investment can go a long way. One particularly effective and affordable option, for someone on a writer's budget, is to pay for specific keyword advertising though the Google Adwords ( http://www.google.com/adwords ) program, or using Yahoo search marketing ( http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/ ).

For as little as 10 cents you can ensure a visitor is sent directly to your home page. Furthermore for every person who clicks on the link usually 20-50+ people will have been exposed to the ad you paid for. These people will then have your book in their buried somewhere in their subconcious. Not bad for just 10 cents.

Consider it from a financial angle. Let's say you make $5 for every book sold. An investment of $2.50 could send 250 people directly to your site, and expose your book to 10,000 people or more. If you are careful that you only target potential buyers through careful keyword selection, then that should easily turn into at least a sale or two.

Through the Google Adsense program, or an affiliate program such as Amazon.com, you can generate extra revenue through your website. This can not help pay for the overhead of hosting, but also increase your marketing budget.

Google Adsense

The Google Adsense program allows you to host ads served by Google on your website, and share in the profits. You control the placement, size, and type of ads, and google shares an undisclosed percentage of the profit they make from hosting ads on your site from their advertisers. For more information or to sign up visit https://www.google.com/adsense/.

Judicious placement of ads on a page, not only brings in revenue, it can, if done well, also enhance the look and feel of your site. It even provides users with additional relevant content, which can be appreciated by a visitor if done with good taste.

Affiliate Programs

Virtually all online bookstores offer affiliate programs which pay upwards of 5% of every sale generated through specially created links to their site. Amazon.com has one of the oldest and most sophisticated affiliate programs available ( . An extra 5% of revenue on a book sale is nothing to be scoffed at.

You might want to consider creating links to other books which you think might be of interest to people who purchase your own. You could make a virtual bookstore, which links to related books you've read, along with your reviews.

Amazon.com sells the most books online by far, but just having your book listed at Amazon.com is not sufficient. You can too easily be overlooked on the 100th page of search results for a given topic. You want to attract people's attention. There are several ways to accomplish this:

• Create a "Listmania" list - This is an interesting, and clever, gimmick which Amazon invented for helping people to find related subjects. Registered members of Amazon are able to create lists of books on a specific topic. Amazon uses these lists to suggest related books to people.
• Create a "So you'd like to ..." guide - These are small documents created by Amazon members on a specific topic, which usually provides advice and book suggestions.
• Personally invite people to review your book - You should make sure those who specialize in your subject know about your book, and have a copy to review. You can give them one of your personal copies for free.
• Consider participating in the "The Buy X, Get Y" promotional program as a way to enhance your books exposure, buy associating your book with other popular books. This is however a somewhat expensive program.

You should visit discussion forums, newsgroups, and blogs and participate in discussions related to the subjects you wrote about. You shouldn't blatantly promote you book, but you can sign posts with your website address. That will usually pique people's interest, and it will also improve your link popularity.

Your signature should have at most three lines: your full name, your home page, and your book page. Make sure your urls start with "http://" since this improves the chance of the mail-reader, or web-page, making them clickable. I advise avoiding making jokes, or including quotes. It is a waste of bandwidth, and risks annoying people.

Note: I am not suggesting spamming sites, but rather making positive contributions to the community. If you are helpful, people will want to visit your site, and puchase your book. If you are simply annoying and overly self-promotional, it will have the opposite effect.

Take an active role in marketing your book, the internet provides the means for anyone to make a significant difference in their book sales. It is foolhardy to leave the success of your book up to chance.

Christopher Diggins is a regular columnist for the C++ Users Journal, and is the coauthor of the C++ Cookbook from O'Reilly. Christopher was doing online marketing and search engine optimization back when as far as anyone knew a google was simply a one followed by a hundred zeros.