Here’s the background. I created an Orthodox Christian prayer book back in the mid-1990s. That was before the explosion in self-publishing options, when there was still a stigma attached to being a self-published author. It was hard to do book marketing then, because self-publishing was equated with being published with a vanity press. So I published with a small startup press. Since I did the layout and typesetting for the book, I claimed the copyright on the title page (a decision I’m glad for).
There was very little book marketing done. For one thing, it was much harder then. It was impossible to get it into bookstores, and it wasn’t easy to reach its target market. It sold steadily from the narthex of my church, and a lot of people have told me, without prompting, over the years how much they appreciated it.
Time went by, and the book more or less disappeared from circulation. People asked me to reissue it, but I didn’t feel like I had the time. I finally bit the bullet and reformated it and republished it.
I sent it to Lulu.com, a print-on-demand company. They do good quality, print one or a few or many copies at a time, take care of the billing. They charge a set price per book and you set your list price. For each book they sell, they take their per-book price and send you the rest. They also have a PDF download for sale, which I, as the publisher, can download for free.
Now that I have a book in hand, my parish can start selling them again.
I did some keyword research and found a set of keywords that are pertinent to my audience to create my content marketing campaign around. One of them, “orthodox prayer book” was available as a .com domain name, and I bought it. I also bought the book title and my book slug as domain names and did a 301 redirect to OrthodoxPrayerBook.com.
A 301 redirect automatically routes anyone who types in the title of the book to the site that is dedicated to it. It’s a simple one-time coding in the settings of the second domain name, and you don’t have to do it again.
I set up a WordPress blog at the site and put in a theme that will fit what I’m planning to do with it. So far, I’ve written two short posts, and elicted a couple of guest posts. Because I don’t have much time, I’m going to be looking for people willing to talk about Orthodox prayer for people who don’t consider themselves to be experts at it.
On my book-marketing to-do list:
Here are some other ideas I have for marketing this book:
Here’s a recent podcast on my book marketing experiment:
[Audio clip: view full post to listen]
(If you like this post, please tell Google, by clicking the +1 button.)
Book Marketing Experiment is a post from: Market Your Book | Content Marketing for Writers
]]> https://MarketYourBookBlog.com/2011/book-marketing-experiment/feed/ 2The best and brightest in internet marketing sing the praises of maintaining contact with your audience through email. I’ve got a list, but I just haven’t been able to do the kind of regular mailings that are so important.
But rather than drag you down by my lack of follow-through, this week’s podcast gives you at least some tips for getting started. I talk about schedule, autoresponders, and types of emails you can send.
One fact I got wrong, though. IContact does have a free subscription plan for people with fewer than 500 subscribers. It’s a great company and a tempting deal.
Click to listen:
[Audio clip: view full post to listen]
Podcast: Email Marketing Basics is a post from: Market Your Book | Content Marketing for Writers
]]> https://MarketYourBookBlog.com/2011/podcast-email-marketing-basics/feed/ 0For me as a novelist, it came through a series of books and workshops on story structure. I got there by trying and doing and then studying. I didn’t get it, didn’t get it, didn’t get it, and then suddenly I got it. I don’t know why, but everything clicked into place.
Then it’s as if a switch flips in your brain, and you never read a book or watch a movie with the same passive acceptance. You know who dunnit 15 minutes into a two-hour mystery movie. You’re tempted to stop a perfect stranger on the street just to read him or her a great sentence you just ran across. Your wall bears the marks of books that offended your writer’s sensibilities. You’ve crossed over, and you can’t go back.
There’s a switch like that for becoming a producer of web content. You’ll look at a web page and say, “This company’s target market is 18- to 35-year-old males. Why does it look like something for 55-year-old women?” You’ll read long sales copy with the same asthetically appraising interest you give the lifestyle columns on the newspaper. You’ll think of the search engines as a force to be reckoned with, the way a sailor thinks of wind and ocean, and not just as a useful tool to find things.
How do you get to that switch? Experience informed by education.
In other words, you need to start. You’ll make mistakes. You’ll look back later and think you could have done things better. But it’s like writing that terrible first draft: It’s never quite right, but it’s always the rich soil that the final draft grows out of.
From Consumer to Producer is a post from: Market Your Book | Content Marketing for Writers
]]> https://MarketYourBookBlog.com/2011/consumer-producer/feed/ 2Listen in:
[Audio clip: view full post to listen]
Find more about how you can set up your website for effective content marketing.
Podcast: Using Content Marketing to Sell Your Book is a post from: Market Your Book | Content Marketing for Writers
]]> https://MarketYourBookBlog.com/2011/podcast-content-marketing-sell/feed/ 0{You should|You must|You need to|It is best to|It’s best to} {take part|participate} in a contest for {one of the best|probably the greatest|top-of-the-line|the most effective|among the best|among the finest} blogs on the web. {I will|I’ll} {recomm…
An fascinating discussion is value comment. I feel that it is best to write extra on this subject, it might not be a taboo topic however typically individuals are not enough to speak on such topics. To the next. Cheers…
The first paragraph represents the coding for spinning software. The material between the { and } represent equivalent phrases that will be substituted at random to create many different versions of the text. The idea is that Google is too ignorant to notice that it is all substantially duplicate content.
There are two questionable assumptions here:
You can rewrite articles without changing much about them in order to elude the duplicate content penalty, but effective spinning is done paragraph by paragraph and takes as long, really, as writing a new article.
Somebody told these people that they can build PageRank and backlinks by posting comments in other people’s blogs. The only way to do that is not to be dumped into spam bin right off the bat. And the first step is not to include the spin coding in the body of the spam comment.
I use the Akismet plugin, and it maintains a blacklist. Spammers’ IP addresses (your computer’s online identifier) can get blacklisted not only from my blog but from every other blog that uses Akismet. (There is some concern that Akismet is overly aggressive, and although I just trash some comments rather than marking them as spam, I don’t have much sympathy for idiots like this one.)
If you want to build backlinks and PageRank with your comments, visit blogs you respect and write thoughtful comments that indicate that you’ve read the post. Disagreeing is OK, even preferable if you focus on issues, and far better than no-content “great post” remarks.
And although I’m not talking to my visitors but to a bit of software that just ran by to drop some garbage into the comment box, don’t be an idiot.
Comment Spam Idiots is a post from: Market Your Book | Content Marketing for Writers
It can be tricky, however, getting the links just right, and it can be a lot of extra time finding the product, collecting the link, downloading and uploading the picture, etc.
I found a handy WordPress plugin that does a lot of the work for you. All you have to do is put your cursor where you want the link or image to be, search for it in a handy on-site search box, and click the button for link only, image only, or both — a little box ad showing the current price.
The main hurdle is getting your Amazon Web Services security keys so that the plugin will function.
So I created a short video that shows how to install the plugin, how to get your security key, and how to use the plugin once it’s installed.
If you decide to use a different Amazon affiliates plugin, you’ll still need to input those security numbers in order to make the plugin in work.
Happy Amazoning.
P.S.: Update — There’s also an Amazon link in the tool bar right above the posting box that does the same thing. Maybe I’ll be able to add that to the video later, but for now I’ve got to call it good and run.
Video: How to Add an Amazon Affiliate Plugin is a post from: Market Your Book | Content Marketing for Writers
This week Suzanne and I talk about defining your target market, how important it is and how to get started at it.
It’s one of the most important and hardest decisions you’ll make getting started, and the same principles apply whether you’re planning a website, a small business or your next novel. In fact, we know from our day-to-day lives that we always shape our words by who’s listening — how to communicate what we mean in the words the other person will understand.
When we think of talking to “the public,” though, it gets harder, because “the public” is an abstraction. There isn’t any such person.
So defining your target market is thinking of the one person you’re talking to, writing to, selling to. It gives your message the power of recognizing and communicating with a unique individual.
Podcast: Target Market is a post from: Market Your Book | Content Marketing for Writers
]]> https://MarketYourBookBlog.com/2011/podcast-target-market/feed/ 4During the podcast, we talked about how to put ID3 tags (name, artist, composer, genre, etc.) into the podcast file so that it will be correctly identified in iTunes. Here is a video showing how it’s done.
(I didn’t have time to edit this video, so if you want good production, I would recommend a search on YouTube. If you just want the information, here it is.)
Trials and Triumphs of Podcasting is a post from: Market Your Book | Content Marketing for Writers
]]> https://MarketYourBookBlog.com/2011/trials-triumphs-podcasting/feed/ 0Everybody who uses the web knows that weblinks are highlighted phrases that take a reader to a different page.Clicking a hyperlink is easy. Thinking strategically about how to use hyperlinks to build your website takes a little specialized knowledge, but it’s essential for any site owner.
First, the basics. A hyperlink contains is a bit of coding that has a public face and the coding that makes it work. Here’s a sample of the HTML coding:
<a href=http://marketingsavvy.libsyn.com/>podcast about backlinks</a>
I’ve colored the two parts to make them stand out, but the source code is written in plain text with no fonts or decoration.
The blue part, “podcast about backlinks,” is called the anchor text. The red part is the hyperlink coding.
The search engine spiders read the anchor text as an indication of what the coded site is about. So if a link to your site uses the keywords you’re working toward, then when someone searches for those keywords, your site has an increased chance of appearing at the top of the rankings for that phrase.
Let’s say one of your keyword phrases is “Bermuda Triangle mystery.” If the anchor text says, “click here,” the robots have no way of knowing that your page is about “Bermuda Triangle mystery.”
A backlink is a link that points to your site from somewhere else.
One way we know people is by what others say about them. In the same way, Google’s robots know websites by what other websites say about them. Google determines PageRank largely by backlinks (it’s a proprietary formula, and it changes occasionally, but the company has always said that backlinks are important).
A high-PageRank site confers more authority with its links than a low-PageRank site.
Article marketing is at least partly about posting content to high-PageRank sites where you control the links. So when you post an article to an article directory such as Ezine Articles, one benefit to you is having a link to your site from a PageRank 6 site (higher is better), with anchor text of your choice.
The search engines don’t read from site to site. They read page by page. So let’s say you have a site about travels of your tour guide detective. One page or post (for the robots, they’re the same thing) might be about “Bermuda Triangle mystery.” Another might be “Cancun mystery.” And so on.
Deep linking means pointing to a specific page within your site
If you write an article about places to stay in the Bermuda Triangle, and you wanted to point to your site, don’t just point to your front door — http://MyMysteryThriller.com. Point to your Bermuda Triangle page — http://MyMysteryThriller.com/bermuda-triangle/, using your “Bermuda Triangle mystery” keywords in the anchor text.
Not all of your backlinks will go to inside pages; sometimes a link to the home page is most appropriate or all that’s permitted. Be flexible, but watch for opportunties to link to specific pages in your site.
Backlinks are incredibly valuable on the web, so valuable that a lot of writers consider a good backlink payment enough for high-quality content.
You can increase your search engine traffic by looking for opportunities to link back to your site from other sites. That might include link exchanges with other sites that appeal to your audience. It might involve writing for other sites such as articles for directories or guest posting for other blogs.
In this week’s Marketing Savvy podcast, Suzanne and I talk about writing for Squidoo with a side trip into how to use backlinks.
Subscribe in iTunes. 
Photo: “Links” by rubybgold, on Flickr“
Non-Geek’s Guide to Backlinks: 4 Things You Need to Know is a post from: Market Your Book | Content Marketing for Writers
Listen to the podcast here:
For a fuller exploration of efficient blogging, see this seven-part series.
To learn about how recent changes at Google affect the way you use other people’s content on your blog, check out my recent post on Google’s algorithm update.
Podcast: 7 Ways to More Efficient Blogging is a post from: Market Your Book | Content Marketing for Writers