The more I work with authors like you to help them understand the ins and outs of online book marketing, the more I see that there are 5 basic and fundamental mistakes that 9 out of 10 authors make time and time again.
If you don’t fall victim to these five book marketing fiascoes, you’ll be ahead of the pack…way ahead. So, here are five things to avoid when marketing your books online:
1. Inadequate Keyword Research
This is the #1 big kahuna and the place where 99% of authors quite simply stuff it up.
Many of the authors I’ve worked with haven’t had success online for one simple reason — they aren’t approaching it the way an Internet marketer would. The biggest problem is that there’s no plan — no plan to find relevant keywords, and to get rankings for those keywords, which is really what it’s all about.
In order to have success online, you need to familiarize yourself with the concept of long-tail keywords; to understand how to analyze your competition; and how to know, with almost certainty, how much traffic a particular keyword gets.
Lucky for us there are tools available that will do all three. You can find them at the links at the end of this article. Make sure to take a look.
2. Lack of Content
Surprisingly, even prolific authors with many books to their credit — gifted writers who can write volumes on their area of expertise — somehow think that they can skate by on the Internet with just a couple pages (or even paragraphs!) of content.
Simply not true.
Here’s the deal: Google and the other search engines LOVE content-rich sites.
This is why behemoths like Wikipedia get so much traffic. There are millions of their pages in Google’s index.
How many pages from your site does Google know or care about? If I had to guess, I’d say somewhere between two and five.
If you have the type of site, you probably won’t be able to get rankings for any search term besides your name. Bottom line: if you shortchange people online, you’ll destroy your reputation in a heartbeat.
Stop looking at your site as though it were a high-tech dust jacket. Solve a problem for someone — that’s what your book does, right? So do it online, and do it for free, before you start asking people to buy your book.
3. Not paying attention to Social Marketing and Web 2.0
If you haven’t noticed, the Internet is changing. In only the past few years, sites such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Tumblr.com, as well as services like Twitter, have revolutionized how we interact online.
The top-down approach to the news is completely disappearing. We don’t have to, or want to, rely on editors or producers to decide for us what’s news and what isn’t — real people are doing that now.
In addition to the sites I talk about above, there are dozens of others that, collectively, represent one of the most remarkable opportunities for authors we’ve ever seen.
(Just check out the links I’ve given you below for the resources that will make it easy to find tons of sites that can help you sell more books.)
4. Failing to Build a Base of Support
It’s unbelievable how many writers don’t take advantage of the most useful online marketing tool there is — the ability to grow a base of support and loyal fans through things like mailing lists, or “followers” on Twitter, or subscribers to an RSS feed, or any number of other methods that traditional Internet marketers use everyday.
Why is this important? Because it’s always true that people who already know your work and like it will be much easier to sell more “stuff” to.
If someone has been won over — if they’ve gone ahead and bought one of your books — then selling them books two through four (or more) is that much easier.
But if you have no way to reach the people who bought your first book, you’re going to have to go through the entire “customer-acquisition” process each and every time for every new book.
Wouldn’t you say it would be a lot easier to just send an email or two to your existing fans?
Or simply to create a blog post to announce another book?
This is exactly the way an author can build an empire.
5. Trying to Sell Your Book
What? This is a mistake? But that’s the main point, right?
Yes and no.
The argument basically goes like this: Of course you want to use the Internet to sell copies of your book. BUT, you don’t want to ignore the relationship-building aspect of what you’re doing, because it’s these relationships, and the loyal fans you’ll naturally develop out of them, that will wind up being the base of people who buy basically whatever you put out (without being “marketed to”).
What’s better — being lucky to sell one or two copies of your book a day now, or selling thousands of books every day a year from now, and considering that an “average” day?
Stop struggling.
Start building information empires the way the most successful Internet marketers do. I’d suggest considering getting away from the “selling a book or two here and there” mentality. There are people out there who desperately need your expertise — so start concentrating on getting it out to them.
Sales (at the kind of level you couldn’t have dreamed of before!) will inevitably follow.
If you’re not selling enough books online to make a comfortable full-time income, you’re not doing it right.
I know for a fact that at least 90% of authors make vital — but completely avoidable — errors when attempting to market their books online
Would you like to find out if you happen to be one of them? Get my FREE DVD and find out what the “top dogs” know that you don’t.
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