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By Phyllis Zimbler Miller in Advertising
Almost every book author wants to know: When is a good time to start marketing a book? While still writing the book, while looking for an agent or publisher, while going through the self-publishing process? When the book is available on Amazon?
There are few certain replies to this question except for one: It’s rather late to start marketing your book when it is already out on Amazon.
So what’s the answer as to when is the best time to start marketing a book? It depends.
And what it depends on is a great number of variables, including is this your first book, do you already have an online reputation, are you a renown newspaper journalist who is about to write a first novel, and any other variable that you care to name. (Such as, do you have a famous last name, such as Mary Higgins Clark’s daughter had when she started writing mysteries?)
If we can agree that we can’t pinpoint an exact right time that applies to everyone, are there general guidelines that can help all authors?
Yes, I believe there are. First, if you’re interested in promoting online, the earlier you start establishing yourself online the better. And the first step is to decide on your brand as a book author.
What do I mean by brand? I mean how you plan to position yourself in your marketing and promotion. What is it that will make you stand out from other writers of non-fiction or similar fiction? What will make people interested in you (and hopefully want to buy your book)?
The strategizing of your brand definitely takes place as early as possible in the publication quest for your book. And as part of this brand strategy, it’s very important to consider the proposed title of your book. This is even more relevant if you’re going to self-publish. You should check out your title with others even if you love the title.
Does your book title “read” the way you think it does? Or does your proposed tile have a different meaning to some people? For example, today I saw someone’s proposed book title that will be very hard to remember, let along spell on Amazon or for a URL. This is probably not the best name for a book.
And does the title stand out? Does it create an image in a potential reader’s mind so he/she can remember the title? A generic title such as “A Good Trip” doesn’t create a specific image, whereas “Six Sunny Days in Paris” creates a strong sense memory.
Once you are clear about your brand and have a good “working” book title (it still may change), you can begin to add elements to your brand positioning.
You can, for example, have someone create short videos (less than three minutes) of you talking about the stages you’re going through in researching and writing your book. Then you can use software such as Sony Vegas Movie Studio to edit the video and to put text such as your name and, if you have a website, your website’s URL on the video.
And you can upload these short videos to YouTube and other video-sharing sites. Remember, it’s important to tag these videos with good keywords that relate to you and your brand so that people will have an easier time finding your videos.
You can start a blog, detailing the stages of your book’s process and sharing sample chapters with your blog readers. Getting feedback early on can help you refine your book. And you can offer to write guest posts for other people’s blogs, again staying true to your brand in what you offer to write about.
And then you’re ready for a website – a site that you can control yourself without waiting days for your web master to make one little change. That’s why I recommend having someone build you a website using WordPress.org. Once all the backend steps are done, you will have a website (and blog if you want) that is hosted on your own site and can be completely controlled (read “changed”) by you.
Finally, it’s time to establish a sincere presence on social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn as well as various book sites and other social media sites. Gradually build up your presence on these sites by engaging in conversations with others, offering advice when you can, and establishing relationships that will come in handy when your book is published.
Having a website or at least a blog hosted on another site such as blogger.com provides you with your own arena of visibility when you set up your profiles on social media sites. By using your website URL or blog URL as part of who you are on the internet, you’re more firmly establishing an online foundation for your book’s publication and marketing.
Phyllis Zimbler Miller (@ZimblerMiller on Twitter) has an M.B.A. from The Wharton School and is an Internet business consultant. If you liked this article, you’re going to love her free report on “The Top 3 Internet Marketing Elements” – download the report now from www.QueensofBookMarketing.com
This article courtesy of SiteProNews.comfor MayonWebHosting Blog
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At the end of the year, many businesses start to think about redesigning their tired old website to breathe some new life into it. You may even be in the midst of a website redesign right now. If so, the first thing is to make sure you hire a design and development company that knows how to build the infrastructure of the website in a search engine crawler–friendly manner.
Beyond that, you need to address a number of additional SEO tactics before you get too deep into your redesign. The reason you need to keep SEO front and center during this time is twofold: so that you do not lose your previous traffic, but also so that you can gain additional targeted search engine visitors when the new site goes live.
Here are 6 SEO redesign secrets your developer may not know…ignore them at your own peril!
1. Creating Your SEO’d Site Architecture
Search engines look explicitly at how all your pages are linked together in order to determine their place within the site. Pages that are linked from every other page will be given more weight than those that are only linked from a few others. This is all considered a form of internal link popularity, or in Google language, internal PageRank.
Recommendation: During your redesign, don’t bury too deeply within the site any content that was previously bringing targeted search engine traffic. Ensure that any informational content that will be focused on the more competitive keyword phrases (for example, product and service pages) is high up in your site hierarchy.
In addition, all content contained in a specific category should be cross-linked via some sort of sub-navigation within that section.
2. Categorization and Avoiding Duplicate Content
When people are seeking information from a search engine, they usually have a question, a problem, or a need for specific information. The search queries they use at Google and the other engines reflect this. The more ways you can categorize your content for the various target markets you serve, the better.
Recommendation: Be sure that all top-level pages answer the potential searcher’s (your potential customers’) questions, and that it’s clear that your products and services can solve their problem. In addition, you also have to ensure that regardless of how someone found any piece of content on your site, they always end up at the same URL to avoid PageRank splitting and duplicate content issues.
For example, if a specific product can be classified as both a product and a service, it makes sense that it might be listed under both categories. However, the page (URL) that the potential customer eventually lands on, regardless of which category they started in, should always be the same.
3. New Content Management System and Changing URLS
If URLs must change in the redesign due to a new content management system or back-end coding, search engines may take some time to index the new URLs as well as give them the same weighting they gave the previous URLs due to URL age factors.
Recommendation: It’s critical to 301-redirect all old URLs to their relative counterpart within the newly designed website. This will pass the link popularity of the old URLs to the new ones quickly, as well as ensure that site visitors don’t receive 404-not-found errors.
This will be easier if the new URL naming is similar to the old one, because you can use automated methods. If URLs must change completely with no correlation to the names of the old URLs, and hand-redirects are required, you’ll want to at least redirect all the top-level pages, as well as those that you’re sure receive keyword traffic from search engines. But, ideally, every URL should be redirected if at all possible.
4. Coding of Navigation Menus
Links contained within the navigation of your website should be coded in a search engine–friendly manner so that they are visible and crawlable. Some DHTML and Flash menus are invisible to search engines, which causes the pages linked within them to not receive the internal link popularity they should receive.
Recommendation: Make sure all navigational menus are coded with CSS that is visible to search engines. In addition, avoid drop-down box links as the main form of navigation (CSS mouseovers are fine). You’ll also want to ensure that all content can be reached by hard-coded links – don’t force the user to go through any kind of search box menu because those are traditionally search engine unfriendly.
5. Custom HTML Elements
While some level of automation for titles, metas, headers, URLs, and alt attributes for images can be helpful, it’s critical that your new website’s content management system allow you to create custom descriptions for these as well.
Recommendation: Make sure the content management system has fields for custom title tags, meta descriptions, heading tags, etc. There should be no limit to the number of characters allowed in these fields either, because every page may need a different number of words and characters.
6. Session IDs and Other Tracking Links
It’s best not to use session IDs to track visitors, but if your system must use them, you’ll only need to feed the “clean” URLs to the search engine spiders – otherwise, they may get caught in an infinite loop, indexing the same content under multiple URLs.
You’ll also want to avoid any sort of campaign tracking links appended to URLs because these can split your link popularity by causing your content to be indexed under multiple URLs.
Recommendation: If this type of tracking is inherent in your system, use the canonical link element to maintain one URL for every page of content.
Don’t be surprised if your developer isn’t happy to receive some of these “secrets.” He or she may feel that their authority is being usurped or their creativity is being hindered. Just remember that it’s your website that you’re paying them to create in a way that will make you the most money possible. Let your developer know up-front that these things are non-negotiable. If they tell you that they can’t do any of the above, start looking around for a new developer – ASAP!
While there will always be a few unexpected bugs to work out when your site goes live, you won’t have to be afraid of losing your search engine visitors as long as you know what you’re doing. We’ve successfully helped many companies through this transition without any glitches. At the end of the process, there’s nothing like the feeling of having your beautiful new website launched. But more than that, there’s great comfort in knowing that the people looking for what you offer will continue to be able to easily find you in the search engines.
Jill Whalen, CEO of High Rankings and co-founder of SEMNE, has been performing
SEO services since 1995. Jill is the host of the
High Rankings Advisor newsletter and the High Rankings SEO forum.
This article courtesy of SiteProNews.com for MayonWebHosting Blog
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Article Summary: One of the best and cheapest ways to market your internet based business is through article marketing. Although this is a task that many internet marketers find quite daunting, in reality once you find an easy method to use when writing articles, you will see that it can be done quite quickly and is not that difficult to do. It is also very rewarding.
Written by: Michelle Jayes
Full article is located: http://ow.ly/Q8cw
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