Write E-books for Publicity and Even Profit: Part 5 — Promoting Your E-book
Unless you’re Stephen King, your e-book isn’t going to sell itself. You’re going to need to get out there and market it a little.
First of all, make sure it’s featured prominently on your site. Write a post about it, making sure to use all the important keywords you think people doing a Google search might use to find information like yours. For a while, at least, it’s a good idea to put a blurb about your e-book at the bottom of every post you write, too — make sure our existing readers know about, and keep telling them about it!
Contact anyone you have any connection with on the web and ask them to link to your e-book, too. Send them a copy and ask them to review it. If it’s for sale, offer free copies for a giveaway on somebody else’s site. If you’re using e-Junkie, set up an affiliate program and give people a piece of the action in exchange for their promotional efforts.
Insert a link to your e-book into your signature block on your email and in any forums you frequent. Add a link to your profile on any social networking sites you belong to. If you’re giving it away, add it to directories of free e-books (Google “Free e-book directory” for some ideas).
If you’re selling your e-book, make sure you add it to Amazon’s Kindle store through their Digital Text Platform. You’ll have to reformat it for the Kindle’s screen (which is black-and-white and about the size of a pocketbook page), but you’ll get your title in front of thousands of Kindle users — a number that’s hopefully going to grow a lot. You can charge whatever you want for it — the average price at the moment seems to be $9.99 US — and you get 35% of the sales revenue.
Be creative with your promotions. Make up business cards or bookmarks with the URL of your e-book’s page prominently featured, and hand them out wherever you can. Put up flyers on bookstore bulletin boards. Buy Google Adwords or advertise in literary magazines. Obviously, don’t spend a fortune — and if you’re giving it away, it’s probably a good idea not to spend anything at all — but if you think you can make it back, putting a little money into promotions isn’t a bad idea.
Posts in "Writing E-Books" series
- Write E-books for Publicity and Even Profit: Part 1 — Why E-books?
- Write E-books for Publicity and Even Profit: Part 2 — Writing Your E-book
- Write E-books for Publicity and Even Profit: Part 3 — Producing Your E-book
- Write E-books for Publicity and Even Profit: Part 4 — Distributing Your E-book
- Write E-books for Publicity and Even Profit: Part 5 — Promoting Your E-book
May 2nd, 2008 at 12:24 pm
Dustin,
Excellent series on ebooks. Thanks for writing it.
May 2nd, 2008 at 12:27 pm
Glad you think so, Jay. Thanks for reading it!
May 2nd, 2008 at 11:18 pm
There are many ways to promote your ebook without spending a single dime, and I am glad to see some of these mentioned in the above post. However, there are a few others that I would like to mention here as well.
One other way to promote your book is through making comments on other people’s blogs. However, what you need to remember is this. Don’t just go to a blog and put a link back to your site on there without saying something. I have personally seen many blogs where the comments weren’t anything but a link back to somebody’s site. Don’t do that!
If you’re going to comment, the comment and make it worth while. Add real value to the author’s blog by posting comments that really do say something in return.
After you’re finished writing the main text of your comment, then put a link back to your site. You can also write articles and post them to article sites and article directories. There are a grea number of these all over the Internet, and they’re an excellent way to get traffic to yur ebook’s site.
I like the business card idea because it really does work. My fiance does that for her hummingbird web site and she has gotten quite a response from that effort.
Placing flyers around town is also a great idea too, and it will draw traffic to your site because if you place the flyers in places where you know a lot of people frequent, they’ll take notice and visit your site.
If you want to learn more about this and other things relating to ebook publishing and information marketing, then you may want to check out Ebook By Blog by clicking on the link here below.
Click Here To Secure Your Copy Of Ebook By Blog
Although many marketers love to focus on the search engines for getting traffic to your site, along with those PPC, (Pay Per Click) programs, as you have seen here, there are ways to increase traffic to your site that do not cost anything, or very little to do without breaking your budget.
So if you really want to see results, then use some of these techniques mentioned here, and you will see a huge difference in yuor business. You will see your list starting to grow, plus you will be able to make more sales too.
May 12th, 2008 at 6:35 pm
Dustin, first chance to check back on the series in a few days. Shaping up quite nicely!
I love it when authors give away their content like Zen Habits did awhile back. Bob Younce is doing the same thing with his Helium paper on Writing Journey. I think he’s going to charge for it eventually.
http://writing-journey.com/internet-writing/the-helium-report-is-now-available
I wonder how large an audience you need to make this work financially?
May 13th, 2008 at 6:07 am
[…] Bob, Dustin Wax over at Writing Technology has laid out the basics on e-books in a five part series. If he keeps cranking on the series, he will eventually have an e-book. This is the same story […]