What would you do if you only had $500 to market your book?

First off, there is no magical way that your books are going to start selling, no matter how much you have to spend. There is no one place where you can send $500, $1000, $5000 or $25,000 where you can just write the check and sit back and watch the orders start rolling in.(Although there are plenty out there who would have you believe otherwise). Book marketing is a marathon, not a sprint. You need to pace yourself if you are going to finish. You also need to have a solid foundation on which to build your marketing program.

In my opinion, the first thing that your book marketing dollars need to be spent on is setting up an effective website. Your website is the foundation on which all your marketing efforts will be built. You will get more mileage, for less money, than any other marketing idea you will try. According to John Kremmer, there are 1001 Ways to Market Your Book… maybe even more, but none is more important than developing a website. It doesn’t necessarily matter that the site is large as it needs to be well designed, information rich and search engine friendly. I am not going to try to cover everything you need to know about web marketing in one article but, hopefully, just enough to get you started.

First off, your web address. You want an address people can remember. You also want the address to be associated with your book. My first book was titled Publishing Basics, this newsletter is titled Publishing Basics and guess what web address these are all tied in to… www.PublishingBasics.com. Make sense? To check availability of web addresses, you simply go to http://e-moxie.com/domains.php and try different names until you find one that is not taken. Owning a web address is cheap… only $15/year, more or less. Once you find the name you like, buy it. You will use this web address in everything you do from this point forward. Put it on your letterhead, in your email signature, in all of your future advertising. When you get to the point when you are giving radio or TV interviews, work your web address into every interview, every newspaper article, every blog posting…. Everything.

Now that you have an address, you need to put something there. The days are over when you can post a few pictures and a little type and think anything worthwhile is going to happen. Writing your book and writing website copy is actually quite different. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. Where your book may be guided by the Chicago Style Manual, your website copy is guided by what the search engine robots read and interpret as important. These robots which crawl the Internet are looking for content in the form of keywords and keyword phrases. Your content needs to not only to be informative and relevant to the reader but it needs to be keyword rich.

Keywords are the terms or phrases that a user enters into a search engine to yield appropriate results. Your “Home Page” copy needs to include your top keywords and keyword phrases within the main body text. Don’t forget misspellings. One of my primary keywords is self-publishing. While the correct way to spell it is as a hyphenated word, you will find it spelled not only non-hyphenated but joined as well on my websites. Not great English, but great for the search engines. In the old days you used to be able to repeat your keyword dozens of time on the page and the search engine would automatically list you number one. Today, that is the easiest way to be delisted. Remember, the search engines are always looking for the best site not the best tricks. Great content will always win.

Once you have written your copy, it’s time to bring in the pros. Website design can make a Fortune 500 company look like a mom and pop shop and vice versa. You don’t need to spend a fortune on design but this is probably not where you want to try out your do-it-yourself skills, either. I use a company called www.e-moxie.com. My son, Matt, happens to be one of the owners. He’s in his early 20’s, has lots of good ideas and is quite affordable. His basic websites start at only a few hundred dollars for a professionally designed website. He also understands how to optimize your site for search engines. Of course, you can use whomever you want, just don’t overspend. You don’t have to.

Most people use search engines to find information on the Internet. Google is the largest of these followed by Yahoo and MSN. Most of you came through one search engine or another to find me and this newsletter. There are two types of search engine listings. The first are natural listings which are the sites the search engines determine to be most relevant to a particular keyword or keyword phrase. These natural listings do not cost a nickel, just a lot of hard work in making your website as relevant as possible for the keywords that best fit you. The other type of listings is sponsored listings. This is where people pay to be listed at the top of the search engine page. Some years back a site named goto.com came up with the idea of selling listings where the advertiser would pay a set fee, every time a user clicked on the link, to be top listed under a certain keyword. This form of advertising is referred to as “Pay per Click” advertising. In the beginning, you could buy very good keywords for a couple pennies per click. Unfortunately, those days are over. Goto became Overture and Overture became Yahoo Marketing. During this time the per click prices have risen from a couple cents to many dollars per click. Great news for Yahoo and Google stockholders but not so great for the average website owner.

Try going to Google or Yahoo and entering the keyword phrase “Publishing Basics” and see what is returned. You will find my sites are eight out of the top ten listings. In Yahoo and MSN, the results are similar. All of these listings are in the natural results. If you’ll notice on all three, there are ads to the top and right of the natural listings. These paid listings are just that. There has been plenty written on paid vs. natural. Pretty much everyone agrees that natural listings are best. It’s debatable how much the paid results are worth. Generally, paying for visitors will not work in the case of selling books, other than in rare cases. Generally it takes hundreds of website visitors to net one paying customer. Do the math, even at ten cents per click it’s a losing proposition.
Remember up top I said there was no one place you could send money and sit back and watch the orders come in? This is no exception. Even with a good looking website, you will have to be an active participant in promoting your website and getting it known around the Internet or it’s not going to work. You should figure you are going to spend a half hour to an hour per day fine tuning and promoting your site. It’s a good idea to subscribe to a few web marketing newsletters. My favorite is http://www.sitepronews.com/, Site Pro News. You’ll pick up great tips monthly. If you put in the time, before you know it you’ll have a steady stream of traffic coming to your website. This steady stream of traffic will result in a steady stream of book sales.

Is this everything you need to know about websites? No. Is it a good start? I hope so. See you next month.

Last 5 posts by Ron Pramschufer

• ATTN: Vets…Don’t leave it to the historians. Have a story to pass on? - July 20th, 2010
• How did Book Expo America work out this year? - June 30th, 2010
• How did that Publishing Basics Seminar, in New York, work out for you? - June 30th, 2010
• Do you have any plans for Book Expo America this year? - March 19th, 2010
• Self-Publishing and the New Millennium plus 10 - January 14th, 2010