Most authors plan virtual book tours because they have a book release approaching. Typically, they want to drive up book sales on the day their books hit Amazon. However, trying to produce a bestseller on one day or for one hour is not the only reason to go on a virtual book tour. Neither is producing sales and visibility for your new book over the course of a few weeks or a month, although, if it involves appearances on more than just one or two days, a virtual book tour will do this as well.
Your Virtual Book Tour Goal
Let’s say your book has been out for a little while—three to six months or more. Why else might you decide to go on a virtual book tour? Consider these reasons:
- To boost book sales.
- To increase visibility for yourself, your website, services, and book in general.
- To boost your book’s Amazon rank.
- To gain new blog subscribers.
- To boost your blog’s Alexa or Google ranking.
- To develop additional relationships with bloggers, authors, experts, or key influencers in your industry of niche.
- To build you mailing list.
- To increase the search engine optimization (SEO) of your site with back links from other sites.
- To enhance relationships with bloggers and thought leaders in your industry.
- To get exposure and sales with a new audience or target market.
- To get more reviews.
- To focus on a particular topic in your book.
- To build your business.
The purpose of your tour will determine the type of content you produce and the type of sites you choose to focus on as stops for your virtual blog tour. Your invitations should only go out to hosts that help you fulfill the purpose of your tour.
This sounds self-serving, but it’s always the case really. Remember, that you will provide the hosts with high-quality content that serves their audience, though. That’s the win-win aspect of guest blogging in general.
Track Your Success
No matter why you decide to go o a virtual book tour, you need to have a way to know if you’ve achieved your goals and fulfilled the purpose of your virtual book tour. You need to have some sort of metric to track your success.
First, be sure to determine a starting point measurement and an ending point measurement.
Second, set up a means to track your success. To do this, you can keep a record of your:
- Alexa ranking
- Google ranking
- blog subscribers
- email subscribers
- RSS feed subscribers
- Amazon Author Central account
- book’s Amazon sales ranking
Have you conducted a virtual blog tour for some other reason besides generating book sales? Tell me about it in a comment.
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