Fiction Writing

Let's try to write it

Fiction Writing - Let's try to write it

Category Archives: online marketing

Some Great Information on Self-Publishing

Recently, I have been following the Creative Penn by  Joanna Penn. Her blog continually gives really great ideas for everyone self-publishing while helping people experience the pain she went through to self-publish.

She gives great information on publishing, writing, marketing, and more. She updates her blog regularly as well.

One of my recent favorites was the 7 worst mistakes of indie authors 

I highly recommend checking it out.

http://www.thecreativepenn.com/

Know any other great sites? Let me know what I should check out.

How to choose keywords for your website?

How to choose keywords for your website?

Great question. Well why choose keywords at all? Won’t people find your site regardless? Maybe, but probably not. The web is huge and you want quality web traffic.  For example, my dad has a short story on his website about a cruise ship, and there is a picture of a cruise ship sinking. Most of his traffic comes to the website because of the cruise ship sinking picture and not the content we want of ‘great ebooks’ firefighter ebooks’ etc.

If you haven’t chosen about 10 keywords to focus on you really need to start. These keywords should be used about 1-3% of the time on your website. More than that Google doesn’t like, less than that they won’t be noticed. These should also be the ‘anchor text‘ of your links to your site.

Here are the linking website tips.

First, your website keywords should relate to your content. Focusing on the right keywords is very important.  So choose about 30 words you think relate to your content to use with the thought of narrowing it down to 10 phrases (not individual words). Or pay an SEO company to do keyword research for you. You can find this for $500 or less form reputable companies. More if you want a good company.

Second, research (if you didn’t pay someone). Make an account on Google Adwords and use their tools to find the best and least competitive keywords. Start putting these words into phrases. You don’t want to use individual words as they are highly competitive and you will probably lose.

Third, add these keywords to your site 1-3% of the time. Then make all incoming links use these keywords.

Use this html code: <a title=”best low price kindle books” href=”http://www.yatscoffbooks.com/” target=”_blank”>best low price kindle ebooks</a>

which looks like this: best low price kindle ebooks

This is a simple tip, and can be far more complicate. It definitely works on Goodreads, so use it.

 

 

Best way to link to your website

As an author you may not know the best way to link to your website. There are two main ways to link your website.

First is to insert the html  like this: http//www.yatscoffbooks.com. <– this sucks. When google searches through webpages it sees that your site is linked via http://www.yatscoffbooks.com.  So it relates this with peoples queries. So if people search ‘yatscoff books’ it will be great!! BUT no one searches that… So try number two.

Second is to insert this: <a title=”Great eBooks” href=”http://www.yatscoffbooks.com”> Great eBooks</a> Which looks like this when finished: Great eBooks. This means google will relate ‘great ebooks’ with your website instead of the name of your website.

First you should choose some keywords. These keywords are what you should use to relate to your website. For example: fiction ebooks, great ebooks, (genre) + ebook, (Genre) + (best)+ ebook. I’ll post about keyword choices soon.

 

Publicity through short stories

Hello!

Short story sites are a great way to get people interested in your site. It is important to write many stories and get them out. This provides links to your website and also build credibility. Self published authors should definitely check this out. If you self published your own book getting exposure is one of the most important ways to do this. I recommend online if you are self publishing via Amazon because you can link everything together making navigation for your readers easier and buying books easier.

Post them here.

Here are some great links I found, best to worst.

eStory submission site

First is a place for contests, publicity and overall exposure.

Short Story Submission Site

Short Story Site

Online Ebook Marketing

So I’ve been trying to market the book: Old Flames. A really great ebook by E.R. Yatscoff. The ebook giveaway is still going on till the end of October, so you are free to join until then on Facebook.  That is one way I have been marketing the book. So it had been good. Got about 100 subscribers. That will hopefully amount to 50 reviews or more. It would help boost sales.

Next is trying to boost incoming traffic to the authors website. This is done via website linking. Don’t link the name of the site i.e. :www.yatscoffbooks.com. Use a different term i.e.: firefighter ebook. This will help search engines define how it is linked and changes the search terms of people looking for your site. I also get incoming links via directories and blog rss feeders. We’ll see how well they work. It is a slow process as overdoing it one month can ruin google’s view of your website. Slow and steady is the key.

There are also more traditional approaches to ebook marketing like newspapers and paid newspaper reviews, but those are expensive and beyond my budget.

Good luck!

Are give away campaigns effective for eBooks?

So since I’m marketing my dad’s ebook Old Flames, I need to find the best way to market it. What is the best way? Low budget of course. So far I’m starting giveaways. I am advertising the giveaway on Goodreads and Facebook. Trying to get as many people to write reviews of the books as possible.

So I started the campaign at the start of October and will finish at the end of October. Give them 15 days to download then see how many reviews we get on all the sites. Hopefully it works out well.

100 people so far will receive the book, I really hope it gets up to about 500 though. That would make some waves in the market.

Other methods of Ebook Marketing

The next step would be advertising online.  Maybe PPC via google or even on Goodreads.

I am also using this blog, another blog, to bring web traffic to my father’s interesting book site.

Another strategy is using web directories to increase incoming links to my father’s website. I add his website to about 3 -6 directories each month to increase incoming links. These are good websites as well so they should increase search percentages.

I’ll keep you posted on the ebook giveaway. So far I have about 100 people joined, but that’s not good enough. Need more. Join the Facebook group if you do want the book though.

Marketing eBooks

In my own situation, I have 3 novels online–two juveniles and one adult eBook mystery–and am trying to get noticed.  I’ve placed a free eBook (a short story) to try and get people over to my website or peruse my novels. Also, I have the ability to give people free downloads of any of my novels and will be having a giveaway in a month or so of Old Flames.  I don’t really like doing it as I’ve spent an incredible amount of time writing and editing this book.  John Locke has been very successful starting off doing the freebie thing.

What I’ve discovered via the short story is there are people out there who are voracious readers and probably have downloaded a ton of free eBooks.  Trying to make my eBooks stand out among popular books is not easy, as last time I looked I was ranked 403,000 on Amazon.  Getting people to review my books is like getting the Pope to swear.  At the end of my stories I ask readers to take some time and post a review.  Some eBooks I see have dozens of reviews yet the book is not familiar in any way.  How do the authors cajole people into doing this?

It all makes me wonder how it’d go if a tight-fisted traditional publisher had placed my book with little or no marketing budget.

How to market your eBook?

So the big question is how to market your eBook from a basic eBook to a great eBook.  What do you choose? Pay per click marketing? Giveaways? Free samples?

Let’s look at some statistics from Smashwords.

So first we should think about the source= Smashwords. They did the survey on mobilereads. So we can assume it’s not the complete Smashwords fan base. Only a selected group. We should assume the statistics may not reflect Amazon’s fan base or even all of smashwords, but it is better than anything else we have to go on. So let’s work with it.

Let’s choose out marketing tactics to see if we have a fit. Let’s say giveaways. What benefits do giveaways offer? Reviews, page views, free reads, free samples. So this covers 29% (forum, blog, message board recommendations), 4% (sample and like), 7% (browse randomly and look at reviews) and 5%(free ebooks then buy). That gives us 45% for giveaways. That covers lots of our basis. This assumes if you conduct a successful give away you are creating ways to get books sold (assuming you have more than 1 book online). This can also draw people into friend recommendations as well.

Remember not to judge a book by it’s cover…. But I do. I don’t care what anyone says. I always judge a book by it’s cover if the author is unknown and no one recommended it to me. Make an awesome cover!!! Pay if you need to.

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