How to Promote a Book Online

According to current statistics, there are 1 billion people online. Nearly seventy percent of Americans surf the Internet. Savvy authors are moving to maximize their creative brand with Web marketing.

Instructions

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Things You’ll Need:

• Computer
• Internet access
• Active website
• Blog

1. Harness your home page. A home page is a must for authors. It’s actually more than a 24-hour advertisement for your books. Your home page is an experience of you, your creativity and your latest works. The secret to a successful author website is “stickiness”. To be sticky means to provide enough content so that visitors stick around to enjoy themselves.
2. Create solid content. Information and entertainment are the two main content forms. Your website is about what you offer people, not what you sell to them. Attractive page content possibilities include: your book’s cover and jacket blurbs, brief book excerpts, professional reviews, full e-book downloads, writing tips for your genre, a sign-up ezine, a comment
   section, videos, media page, brief bio and an updated appearance schedule.
3. Blog for balance. While your primary website is an official calling card, your blog is a way to communicate directly and regularly with your people. The best author blogs focus on a specific topic and function just like forums for creative visitors to comment and share common ideas. Blogger.com and wordpress.com are free blogging services which will jump start your blog.
4. Motivate With MySpace. Social Web 2.0 statistics are staggering. For example, MySpace is reported to attract four times the daily visitors of Google. Your MySpace pages are a snapshot of you: personal pictures, likes and dislikes and your favorites for reading, listening and viewing. You can set up on MySpace for free and encourage folks to be your
   online "friends". You can send these friends messages or bulletins about your own book release, author signing or speaking engagements.
5. Attract via Amazon. Amazon.com/connect offers published authors the opportunity to set up their own bio page and blog. These are linked to every book you sell and empower you to stay in touch with your Amazon readers. Amazon.com/shorts permits people to download a short story of yours for 49 cents. This is a viable way for a potential buyer to sample your writing. For every download, you will earn 20 cents. Amazon.com/listmania allows you to create a list of books that are similar to yours. This list comes up as a sidebar when people do searches on these authors. So your recommendations can attract fans of other authors to view and purchase your own books.