What is the best way to sell my book on the Internet? While most authors realize that the Internet is a good way to sell books, few understand how to do it. It’s all about “keywords”.

It is no secret that the Internet is perhaps the most powerful sales tool available today for marketing pretty much anything to anybody. One benefit of the Internet is that it is a level playing field where the “price of admission”, so to speak, is equal to all. It is, by far, the least expensive media availably for presenting services or products to the public. Virtually EVERY website starts out the same way by securing a domain name which is your Internet address. Once in possession of a domain name, a website or store front can be built for very little, if any, money. Once built, it is open for business to the hundreds of millions of Internet users. It’s as easy as that!! Or is it?

The good thing about the Internet is that there is equal access to all. The bad thing about the internet is that there is equal access to all. There are millions of websites out there, open and ready to do business. The problem every website owner has is how to get people to know they are there. A traditional way of getting people to know you comes right out of the marketing textbook. It is called branding. That is taking an otherwise unknown name and turning it into a recognizable brand. I remember years back, at Book Expo America in Chicago, when Amazon had banners all over the exhibition hall. “What’s an Amazon?”, I thought to myself back then. Well, many millions of dollars later there are very few people who do not know who Amazon is and what it does. That’s branding.

My guess is that very few of you have that budget for an Amazon type rollout so for now we’ll leave that for those with the big bucks. Instead we are going to go with a low budget alternative called “keyword marketing”. The term “keyword” refers to words or phrases that you feel someone will enter into a search engine to find a book like yours. If, for example, your book is on the “Parthenon”, you would ideally like for your book on the Parthenon to be at the top of the search engine’s list when that term is searched. Unfortunately, there are many books as well as other websites that deal with the Parthenon. Google catalogs over 4 billion web pages. Under the search term “Parthenon”, it shows 422,000 listings. Similarly Yahoo shows 461,000 listings under the same search term. If you look closely at the Yahoo listings you will see the top two and bottom three are titled “sponsor results”. After the top sponsor results are twenty numbered listings before you get to the bottom three sponsored results. In addition to the main listings there are also some short text ads off to the right, also titled sponsor listings. Few people would disagree that to be located any place on that first page is good. Being one of the top couple listings is great.

Being placed in the top 20 numbered listings takes a lot of hard work as well as a great deal of luck. Volumes have been written on how to obtain top ten listing on the various search engines. For the purpose of this article, though, we are not going to worry about the numbered listings. We’ll leave that to the search engine “experts”.

Remember that search for “Parthenon”? Take a look at the number two sponsored listing:

The Parthenon Code While the DaVinci Code is fictional and the Bible Code is bogus, the Parthenon Code presents a genuine artists’ code revealing the true history of mankind.
www.justbookz.com

It is the listing for one of the books in my bookstore, www.justbookz.com. Now try searching “Left Handed Golf”. The number one listing is:

“On the Other Hand” by Steve Anderson Finally, golf-instruction for lefties, written by the PGA’s only “certified” left-handed teaching professional, Steve Anderson. Includes 85 detailed photographs - $14.95.
www.justbookz.com

This is another book in my bookstore.How did I get two books into such great positioning? It was easy and it didn’t cost a nickel. At least not to have it listed and have it appear at the top of the list. I do, however, pay a fee if a person actually “clicks” on the link and visits the book on my website. It is appropriately called “Pay-per-click” advertising. This ingenious type of advertising appeared on the scene some time ago. A company called GoTo.com was one of the early pioneers. GoTo.com has since changed their name to Overture.com. Overture feeds listings to major search engines like Yahoo. Unlike banner advertising where the advertiser pays for “Impressions”, with pay-per-click, the advertiser only pays if someone actually visits their website. What’s the catch? What does it cost? Well there is no catch unless there are fifty other people who want that same keyword. Keywords are bid on by anyone who wants to be top listed when they are entered into a search engine. If you pick a word that is very popular it can get pretty expensive. In the cases of “Parthenon” and “Left Handed Golf”, the bid is under 20 cents per click. The minimum bid with Overture is 10 cents per click. Minimums are as low as 5 cents per click for some of the smaller pay-per-click search engines.

In selling books, the math is pretty simple. We charge our printing customers 25% of the retail price for every book we sell for them through the www.JustBookz.com website. In the case of the Left Handed Golf book, we make about $3.75 per book. That means that out of every 20 or so people who click on the listing and visit the website, one of them has to buy the book for me to break even. One in twenty is usually wishful thinking but in the case of this particular book, we do all right. The higher retail price of the Parthenon book increases the odds of becoming successful because only one out of fifty visitors or so needs to buy the book in order to make money.

The key is to pay as little as possible for the keyword while being as descriptive as possible in the listing so only people interested in buying your book, click on the listing. There might be dozens of keywords that will work with your book. If you printed your book originally or are going to print your book with www.BooksJustBooks.com, keyword advertising is available at no cost to the publisher.

Whether you do your keyword advertising through BooksJustBooks or you do it yourself you need to keep in mind that the object of the game is to make money. Visitors to your website are nice but if the purpose of your website is to sell books at a profit; that is what you need to do. As much as you might like a particular keyword, if it’s too expensive, don’t buy it. An example of this would be if you have just published a cookbook. “Cooking” would be a perfect keyword. Unfortunately “Cooking” costs 62 cents per click. “Baking” is even worse at $1.00 per click. On the other hand, “Baking Cakes” only costs 17 cents and “Baking Chocolate Cakes” only costs 10 cents per click. It will be pretty tough, if not impossible, to make money paying $1.00 just to have someone look at your website. Ten to twenty cents, on the other hand, is another story. Be patient and be creative. There are hundreds of people out there searching for a book like yours at this very moment. Don’t leave it to chance that they will find you.

Need a cover designed or complete book layout? Try www.BudgetBookDesign.com . - Only $250 for original cover design. Complete text layout from $250.

If you have a question pertaining to the publishing production process, please feel free to contact me at ron@rjcom.com.

Last 5 posts by Ron Pramschufer

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