If you are not yet well-known and no one knows the title of your book - then your future customers aren't searching for you on the internet.
How do you get them to discover your book? It's easy. The concept is called Associative Marketing and publishers have been using it since time began to sell books. As an author, you also need to tap into the system so that you can significantly increase your book sales on the internet. It is explained in great detail in the book Advanced Book Marketing.
It's not a matter of getting them to notice you and your book, it's putting your book where your customers are already searching for answers, and everyone wins...
* * *
Scroll down to read a free preview of Advanced Book Marketing!
A new chapter is posted on this website every day.
Bookmark this page and come back tomorrow
for the next installment!
Stop marketing what you want to sell
and start marketing
what they are looking for.
There is a tool on the internet called the "Reverse Search Engine" and it is used mainly by people who create pay-per-click advertising campaigns. This tool is a valuable source of information because it lists what search terms people are using and how often.
If for instance, you are trying to find out what search terms people actually typed in when they were looking for ANGEL products, you'd find there are celebrities named ANGEL, TV shows named ANGEL, organizations like the "Blue Angels," and quite a few other subjects where the word ANGEL shows up that have nothing to do with a book about ANGELS. So, to try and be the #1 entry in a search engine for the word ANGEL is really a useless endeavor and it would be for most broad search terms like that. Getting listed on the front page of a search engine for the phrase "ANGEL BOOK" is a lot more useful and ultimately much easier to do.
There are also a vast number of categories like Heavenly Angels, Guardian Angels, etc that fell into an area where someone searching for one of these categories might very well be interested in a book about Angels.
The internet is a crazy place because its rules seem to change on a daily basis, but it is becoming the bookseller of choice for the world. More books are sold on the internet than any other type of product, followed distantly by video games and other digital products. I predict that books will remain in the #1 spot for at least the next 10 years.
So how do you market a book to two different people, one who is looking for Heavenly angels and the other looking for guardian angels?
I learned a lot about marketing books
through "brute force & ignorance"
~emphasis on the 'ignorance'
I always say that I'm an author first and a publisher second. When I started my publishing company in 2001, I planned on leading by example - that is - finding great ways to sell books and teaching all of my authors how to do the same. I also believed very much in teaching as a path to empowering others to do great things. "Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day, but teach a man to fish and you've fed him for a lifetime." This old addage was something I based my publishing company on.
In 1998, when I first started down the publishing path for Angel On Board, I didn't know a lot about the internet, but being computer saavy, I knew I could learn what I needed to know.
The first thing I did was buy a domain dedicated to my book: AngelOnBoard.com. Everything on that page was about Angel On Board or me or reactions from my readers. I didn't cross link to any other pages because I didn't know any one else out there on the internet.
I did however buy into a pay-per-click system and created a strategy based on what they taught. What they wanted was for me to bid on 'search terms' and they provided many tools to facilitate picking out great ones. They had a reverse search engine and I found out many interesting things about people's searching preferences. I bid on these terms and quickly started paying more than my book brought in.
In those early years, the lesson was lost on me that the categories of the search was what I needed to cater to, instead of trying to jump up and down and pay money to get people to notice me.
If I could go back in time, I would have learned through the same process of using the reverse search engine, but I would have taken those search terms and used them as copy on my website, used them in my meta tags etc. Instead I was trying to be clever and write the best synopsis about Angel On Board I could without regard to what was actually being searched for.
If I had been paying attention, I would have used the same search terms as meta tags to match what people were actually looking for. No one knew me. No one searched for "Angel On Board" and no one searched for books by "EJ Thornton." They didn't know me and they didn't know the title of my book.
The problem was I didn't know how to make myself known effectively. I sent out press releases and many were printed, but it didn't increase sales. I handed out business cards, but no one cared. I went to writer's groups and no one there cared, they were interested in how to market their own books and quite frankly, most were as frustrated as I was.
I had a great book, I knew it and I knew the internet was the place to sell it. I had all the pieces, I just wasn't putting them together.
A few years passed and I re-created Angel On Board a few times. It was re-launched and re-packaged and re-launched and so on, but it still did not result in many sales.
Then in 2001, I opened up a publishing company, basically because I had to. The printer I had been using went under and he took about 80 authors' books down with him. I had to become my own solution, I couldn't afford anything else.
So, I started to get outside my own problem and look at how to market other people's books. I started to market the publishing company. I was very successful at attracting authors to me (again using the pay-per-click method). A publishing contract had a profit margin that could support a pay-per-click campaign (books do not) and suddenly, I had dozens of authors on my hands, all needing their books to be marketed and sold.
At that point, I'd sold about 1000 Angel On Board's and was pretty confident in my skill set, but I still wanted to sell millions of books. I knew I could. I just had to find that golden ticket, then I could lead by example and sell millions of mine and millions of each of my authors' books.
But I still didn't "get it" until I started to group the books together simply because they addressed similar topics. I started to sell the category of books, and it was then I saw the magic of associative marketing.
I went out to the reverse search engines to confirm what I was experiencing. People weren't looking for my nutritionist author by name or by her book, but they were looking for a book on better nutrition. I could put her books in their search results.
It seemed such a basic realization, so I started selling everything that way. Sales started to soar and multiple book sales began happening. As if to drive the point home, it dawned on me that major book publishers have catalogs arranged by categories and genres. It was a revelation.
But I took it one step further...
I categorized each book in as many categories as was possible. For example, Angel On Board was sold as:
I had my book appearing on so many webpages, it finally gained some decent recognition. It wasn't because of a press release or that I won an award, it was because I had experienced an epiphany!
It was then I suddenly realized that I could draw people into my website with book titles that they already knew. I started adding more titles to the categories I was defining so that my books had more 'company' on their web pages and the pages' relevancy ranks increased. The books I chose to put next to my books were the same books that the mega-booksellers were putting next to my books on their webpages. When people saw that two different websites recommended the same books in the 'If you liked this book - you'll love this book...' section, credibility skyrocketed.
In the beginning, choosing the books to list beside my books was simply discovered by accident, but after just a bit of due diligence and research, I realized how I could influence it, even on the online bookseller site. Pay attention to exercises 3, 4 and 5.
I even discovered how to make commission income for the sales of the other books in addition to the sales of my company's books.
I have been an amazon.com affiliate since 1998 (when I first released Angel On Board). This bookseller takes 55% commission, leaving me with only 45% of the retail price. I could increase my take home pay slightly, if I sold an Angel On Board through AngelOnBoard.com, meaning that the internet visitor clicked through to the online site via my website. I claimed 4% back in affiliate commissions. It made the split 51%, 49% which was slightly more to my liking.
For the other books listed on the web pages, I earned the 4% commission when my visitors clicked through to the online bookseller. This arrangement allowed me to use the books of other authors to help promote mine - and I got paid for the priviledge!
These websites drew in much more traffic because I could put them right where the people were searching for what was on them! But since I was advertising 'Great Angel Books' not 'Great Angel Book,' I felt I had to put more books on the website that had to do with angels. So, I did. They drew in traffic based on their names, and then the internet surfers got to see my book right next to the one they were searching for. This was the best of all worlds. If they knew me - they found me. If they were searching for the other books, they found them and they also saw my book (free advertising). If they didn't know what they wanted specifically, those searchers also found my book and other angel books - one of which was sure to be what they were after.
I could tell from the books that sold which of the category web pages was getting the most attention, so I added more books to it. The system worked wonderfully, not only to increase my affiliate earnings, but I sold more of my own books right along side these other books.
Finally, I had a system where I didn't have to get out on the speaking circuit or create some kind of following, I just let my customers find my book, because they were searching for my books, they just didn't know its name yet.
So, I will ask you again, and list what comes to mind now.
If they don't know you and
they don't know the title of your book,
how are they going to find you?
__________________________________________
__________________________________________
__________________________________________
__________________________________________
__________________________________________
__________________________________________
__________________________________________
Last updated on: Friday, July 03, 2009
If you liked this information, please review the following: Ken Follett
If you liked this information, please review the following:
Furnace Filters
