As an author, and someone who knows a bit about PR, book promotion is the most important thing you can do for your book.
All authors know this (and if they don't, they better hone up on some book promotion skills), and go through various book marketing strategies, hoping they hook onto the one that will turn their book (or eBook) into a bestseller.
While we all know that appearing on Oprah is the key to becoming an overnight sensation, not all of us have that opportunity, especially those who are published in electronic format.
However, there are still other methods that authors can use to give their book (or eBook) the needed boost to get those sales they so want.
While researching my latest PR eBook, ?A Complete Guide to Promoting & Selling Your Self-Published eBook,? I discovered many promotional strategies, and when implemented into a complete marketing plan, they do a bang-up job of getting your eBook recognized and sold.
Even though it's tough work to implement all of those outlined in my eBook, they are all necessary for your own eBook to become a success.
However, there is one marketing strategy I found that worked better than all the others and helped me get the sales I needed: syndicating articles across the net, such as what I am doing with this article right now.
If you are going to write an eBook, and market it over the Internet, you have to play the Internet's game.
The Internet's game involves being recognized and placing in the first three pages of any search engine (preferably first, of course) in order to publicize your eBook.
In order to do this, there are several things you must do to get there, including providing key search words and phrases throughout your web site.
While this is important, there is a quicker way, and will also boost your web site's search engine rankings a lot faster than just waiting for their spiders to find you.
Write articles, making sure to include those key search words and phrases, and distribute them to as many content ezines as you can. The more articles you have out there, and the more they show up in the search engines, the more recognized your eBook becomes. Not only will people find you and your eBook, your web site rankings will increase because you had the foresight to include your web site link in your bio.
For instance, let's say you have written an eBook on how to start a prolific home business, namely making gift baskets geared toward writers. On your home page, you've included those key search words and phrases ?gift baskets,? and ?gift baskets for writers? (there are many more you can use, but we'll use these as examples), hoping that someone will find you in the search engines.
However, your web site just isn't getting the hits you want, using just the key search words and phrases. So, you write articles about gift baskets, or any kind of article geared toward your business, using those same key search words or phrases.
And you submit these articles to every content ezine, including this one, that you can.
What is amazing is that when these articles appear in these content ezines, your rankings suddenly appear in the top ten rankings for those key search words of phrases in Google, Yahoo and MSN.
Cool, huh?
If you want your eBook (or print book) to become a success, this is the #1 promotion method out there. While any promotion method is good, submitting to content ezines, using those same key search words and phrases you are using on your web site to draw in buyers, works better than anything I know of. In the years since I've been doing this, I have figured out what will make or break an eBook. Don't take that risk. If you want the sales, you have to make every effort to write and submit those articles!
? Dorothy Thompson
About the Author
Dorothy Thompson is the editor of The Writer's Life (www.thewriterslife.net), one of Writer's Digest Top 101 Websites for Writers, and the author of the self-promoting eBook ?A Complete Guide to Promoting & Selling Your Self-Published eBook,? available at www.thewriterslife.net/TheWritersLifePublications.html.
