Plug Your Book! by Steve Weber (books to read to be successful .txt) π
Many of the new readers liked Touching the Void so much, they wrote rave reviews on Amazon's site. These "amateur" book reviews, written by real climbers and armchair explorers, resonated deeply with the next wave of shoppers. More sales, more good reviews.
Ten years after the book's launch, Internet-powered word of mouth did something that no team of marketing wizards could do--it landed Touching the Void on the bestseller lists. The story was adapted for an acclaimed docudrama. Simpson, his writing career turbocharged, followed up with four successful adventure books, a novel, and lecture tours.
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The name Omakase is Japanese for "Leave it up to us," a custom in Japanese restaurants in which the chef improvises a meal based on his knowledge of the diner's preferences.
For more information, visit:
#www.Amazon.com/Associates#
Barnes & NobleBarnes & Noble's affiliate program isn't as widely used as Amazon's but it can attract buyers who prefer Barnes & Noble, particularly members of its loyalty program. Members receive an additional 10 percent discount on purchases. See:
www.bn.com/affiliate Commission JunctionOpening an account at Commission Junction provides access to hundreds of niche affiliate programs. You'll find affiliate opportunities for nearly any type of product, including dozens of specialized book retailers. The site provides the codes you'll need to insert on your Web site, and consolidated reports of your commissions. See:
www.CommissionJunction.com# #eBay#If there's a category on eBay of interest to your target niche, it may be well worth the effort of opening an affiliate account. You can display relevant ads for popular auctions on your site. The ads contain product information, gallery images, bidding prices, and ending times. eBay claims that the click-through rates for these ads are double that of regular banner ads. After joining, you can operate your eBay affiliate account using a network like Commission Junction, mentioned above.
For more information, see:
http://affiliates.ebay.com Google AdSense, other advertisingGoogle's AdSense program is perhaps the best-known Web ad network, and it's relatively easy to sign up and incorporate text or banner ads onto your site. For more information, see:
www.Google.com/AdsenseTwo alternatives to AdSense are #www.AdBrite.com# and #www.BlogAds.com#.
Pay-per-click advertisingPay-per-click advertising has revolutionized online promotion, and has been wonderfully effective for many Internet businesses. The prime advantage of pay-per-click is its ability to deliver your ad to targeted audiences. Unfortunately, like other forms of advertising, pay-per-click is seldom a cost-effective technique for marketing books.
Although pay-per-click can bring targeted traffic to your site, it's unlikely you'll convert enough of those visitors into buyers to make your ad campaign worthwhile. Google, for example, will charge you 75 cents or more per click for competitive keywords, and only a small fraction of those clicks will result in sales. Even if you're paying as little as 10 cents per click, your advertising bill will likely exceed the revenue from sales, in the experience of many publishers. With typical consumer books, there's just not enough profit margin to pay for the ads.
Google AdWordsWith AdWords, advertisers write short three-line text ads, then bid on keywords relevant to their ad. The ads appear alongside relevant search results or on content pages. For example, to advertise a book about tropical fish, you might bid on several different keywords and phrases--#aquarium#, #exotic fish#, #fishkeeping#, and #pet fish#. Depending on how popular those words and phrases are with other advertisers, you might have to pay a minimum of 10 cents, 30 cents, or several dollars for each click. The higher your bid, the higher your ad shows up on the relevant page.
Although most general-interest books can't be cost-effectively marketed using AdWords, the program can be effective for specialty publishers and sellers of certain high-margin products, such as:
Expensive books such as technical and professional manuals costing more than $75, where a built-in advertising budget of more than $15 per unit can be justified.
Publishers with a long line of complementary books and products. If customers spend a lifetime average of $100 or more on your products, acquiring new customers with AdWords might work.
Business consultants or professional speakers, whose books help establish their reputation and help attract clients, speaking engagements, or seminar attendees.
Learn more about Google's AdWords program at:
#www.Google.com/Adwords/ Learningcenter#
In 2007 Amazon launched a pay-per-click advertising network, Clickriver. The ads appear on Amazon's detail pages for books and other products. For more information, see:
www.clickriver.com Yahoo Search MarketingThe main competitor to AdWords is Yahoo Search Marketing. In recent years, Yahoo's program has lagged Google's AdWords in effectiveness and ease of use, but recently Yahoo has been working to improve its program.
For more information:
http://SearchMarketing. Yahoo.com#. Power toolsOne of the favorite pastimes of authors is checking the Amazon Sales Ranks of their books. In the past few years, several free tools have emerged to help authors and publishers monitor the ranks of their books and competing titles.
www.RankForest.com# allows you to chart your Amazon Sales Rank by drawing a line graph similar to a stock chart. You can add books to a "collection" for quick reference, and leave comments on books. Many of the site's features are free. www.TicTap.com# also allows you to track Amazon Sales Ranks over time on a bar graph and compare purchase prices from different retailers. Amazon Sales RankAmazon ranks each book based on how often it sells relative to every other book in its catalog of some 3.5 million titles. The best-selling book is ranked 1; the slowest seller exceeds 3,500,000. Books for which Amazon hasn't recorded a sale are ranked "None."
A book's Amazon Sales Rank appears in the # Product Details# section of its detail page on Amazon. Sales ranks are recalculated hourly, and can change significantly day to day.
Since Amazon has an estimated 70 percent market share among Internet book retailers, its sales rankings are the best free, publicly available information about the relative sales performance of individual titles. The rankings include new and used books sold by third-party sellers on Amazon's Marketplace platform.
Amazon doesn't publicly discuss its sales figures for individual titles, so it's impossible to correlate the rankings with quantity of sales. However, based on anecdotal reports from various publishers, you can assume that an Amazon sales rank of 5,000 translates into about 15 to 20 sales per day, depending on seasonal factors.
TitleZTitleZ is a handy tool for evaluating book topic ideas because you can gauge the potential audience for a given topic or title. Using TitleZ you can easily assemble a list of related books with their historical sales rankings and descriptions. This indicates whether other books on the topic have succeeded or failed, and may show where opportunities exist or where markets are saturated.
TitleZ also provides pricing information on competitive titles, helping you determine the right price for your book. You can also track your book's performance over time to assess the effect of promotional efforts and marketing programs.
Affiliate partnershipsOnce your book achieves a modest Amazon Sales Rank, you'll have clout outside Amazon, too. For example, you can pursue affiliate sales on Web sites that feature content related to your book. Many sites are affiliates of Amazon or BarnesAndNoble.com and have a "Bookshelf" page. Here's an example of a bookshelf page, with affiliate links to books in the column on the right:
www.WineLoversPage.com/ winebook/# #quickbooks.phtml#If your book about wine was featured here, you'd undoubtedly get extra book sales from visitors who noticed the link to your book on Amazon. Likewise, the owner of this Web site would be pleased to feature your book here because he or she would be raking in more affiliate commissions on sales of your book. So don't sit back and hope that the site owner discovers your book and adds it to the Bookshelf page--suggest it yourself. Point out that your book fits perfectly with the content of the site and will generate strong affiliate revenue based on its Amazon Sales Rank.
How can you find sites like this to feature your book? As an example, we'll use our imaginary title How to Grow Organic Strawberries:
Go to Google's "Advanced Search" page, #www.Google.com/advanced[underscore]search#.
In the box labeled #with all of the words#, enter this text, including the quotation marks: "In association with Amazon.com", bookstore, strawberries.
Scroll down to the section labeled #Domain,# and change the pull-down window from #only# to #don't#. In the blank on the right, enter #Amazon.com#.
Click the gray button on the top right, "Google Search."
The results will include Amazon affiliate sites with content pertaining to our book keyword "strawberries."
We might be able to find more relevant sites by tweaking our search. Instead of using only the keyword "strawberries," we'll try these combinations:
Organic strawberries
Growing strawberries
Strawberry growing
Organic gardening
Healthy food
Some of the sites Google returns may not be book affiliate sites, or might be inappropriate for other reasons. For the rest, you might contact the Web site owner via e-mail or via telephone from contact information from the site. If there's no contact information listed, there's often a Webmaster e-mail address near the bottom of home pages. Sometimes a site's "advertise with us" link will provide the fastest response, but you won't be offering to pay for advertising.
A personal note to the Web site owner works best. Explain who you are and why you think the site's visitors will appreciate learning about your book.
Driving more sales to Amazon through its affiliates will further boost your sales rank and continue the positive feedback loop, with more people discovering your book, and adding more weight for your title in Amazon's recommendations and search results.
Analyzing your traffic#Part of creating a useful, valuable Web site is understanding the behavior of your visitors--how they find your site, and what they do once they arrive. Depending on which Web host you've selected, you'll have access to some type of traffic reports that can provide valuable insight into which of your content pages are most effective.
If you're doing any paid advertising, these reports can also help you figure out whether your ads are effective. Google Analytics is a very good free tool that provides detailed statistics about the activity of your visitors, and it's fairly easy to add the service to your site. For more information:
#www.Google.com/Analytics#
www.MyBlogLog.com # is a handy tool for bloggers who want quick statistics on where their visitors are coming from, and what blog posts they click on most often. www.StatCounter.com # and #www.SiteMeter.com # are other free resources for tracking visitor activity at your site. Linking strategy#Many bloggers publish a list of links to related blogs on their sidebar, known as a blogroll. This can be helpful for your visitors, but it can be overdone. You should strike a balance between giving your visitors easy access to useful, outside information, while not encouraging them to leave your site sooner than they otherwise might.
It's counterproductive to link to marginally related sites from your home page because it dilutes your site's "authority" in Google rankings. A better solution is to link to outside content from within individual blog posts when relevant. Build a separate "resources" page on your site where you can point visitors to outside resources without getting penalized for it on your home page.
Search engine optimizationThe beauty of publishing a blog is that it naturally optimizes your content for indexing by search engines. A blog makes you highly visible, without your having to think too much about technique. Even so, it helps to know some basics of search engine optimization (SEO) to enhance your site's ability to draw new visitors.
The leading search engines are Google, Yahoo, and MSN.com. If your site doesn't already appear in search results, request that
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