When it comes to marketing your book online, you need to learn how to attract your target audience. You have to get the attention of readers that are truly interested in purchasing your book.
Most authors don’t know how to find their target audience. Even worse, when they do find it, they don’t know how to promote their books to that audience.
Let’s look at some of the finer points of finding your target audience and engaging with that audience so they become followers of your work.
Why Marketing Your Book Means Content Marketing!
Content marketing is one of the best ways to market online today. To utilize content marketing to it’s fullest, you need to build an authority blog!
Marketing your book through content works well because it allows your audience to get to know you and your work on a personal level. Plus, a website provides the ability to capture leads and really generate a following for your work.
There are several ways that you can utilize your content for marketing purposes. Let’s look at a few.
Marketing Your Book On Social Media
Social media is where your can really hone in and target your audience and develop a following. There are some great Facebook groups for bloggers out there where you can share your content and engage with people who read and like your content.
A lot of bloggers don’t find specific groups for their niche. When marketing your book, you need to market it to the right crowd.
While groups for bloggers are great, there can be a lot of noise in these groups that is hard to cut through. You need to find groups that have people who love to read your specific genre of book.
Not all Facebook groups allow you to post your blog content. But I have found that if you ask the Admin of that group if they are willing to allow you to post your content in that group every so often, a lot of them will say “yes”…as long as it is not a direct ad or spam but quality content.
Don’t just think that your social media presence should only be on Facebook. You need to be on multiple social media platforms.
I recommend you share your content on at least five to seven social media platforms. You can’t be on social media all day, so engage with people on two to three social media platforms. The others becomes places just to share your content.
Networking With People That Makes You Successful Online
Remember, the name of the game with social media marketing is engagement! You have to engage with people to receive engagement back.
Here are simple ways to engage with people on social media:
- Comment on someone’s post: When you comment on someone’s post, leave long comments that reflect the writers points in that article and give your opinion on the subject matter as well.
- Share their content: Make sure to share the love by sharing other people’s content as well. This helps draw attention to you and your posts. Most likely, that person will share your content with their followers as well.
- Follow and send friend requests to people who like your content: This is a great way to build a following because if you make the effort to follow or become friends with someone who has liked your content, chances are they will follow you back!
- Invite people to your communities and pages: After someone becomes a friend or follower, invite them to join your page, group, community, etc. This is a great way to build that following!
Social media is a great place to find and connect with your audience.
Search Engine Marketing
When it comes to marketing your book and finding your target audience a lot of people don’t use the number one tool out there: search engines.
Free marketing your book on search engines (rather than running a pay-per-click campaign) takes more time, but the quality of traffic is higher. Higher-quality traffic means is easy to convert into leads and customers.
To get high-quality traffic, use Long-Tail Keywords to hone in on a specific group of people.
Using Long-Tail Keywords For Search Engine Marketing
What are Long-Tail Keywords? Long-Tail Keywords are those three or four keyword phrases that really get specific about the topic you are writing about.
Keywords are primers for search engines to identify and classify your content in their SERPs (search engine results pages) and rank it accordingly against other people’s content that uses those keywords.
By using Long-Tail Keywords, you greatly reduce your competition for getting ranked higher in the search engines. If you know your genre and the world of book writing, finding Long-Tail Keywords is going to be easy.
Search engine marketing is about spreading your content across search engines and driving traffic back to your website. So what you want to do is use Long-Tail Keywords that are specific to your genre of book writing. If I write horror books, I am going to make sure my blog post consist of keywords like monsters, scary, horrific, bloody, morbid, killing, etc.
Those examples are one-word keywords and not Long-Tailed. You want to extend on those words and catered a phrase to the subject matter of that blog post.
Example: scary bedtime stories
Now you have a nice keyword phrase that is very specific to the genre and easily can target your audience in the search engines.
Google Adwords is a great tool to use to make sure that the keywords you use have traffic and are, therefore, viable traffic generators.
Remember, continued production of content is the best way to not only gain more ground but also to get ranked higher in the search engines. Google likes to see fresh content being posted on your website.
Titles Matter When Using Search Engine Marketing
Titles are a big deal when utilizing search engine marketing. Like I said above, keywords are just primers for search engines. The title will fill in the blanks about your post. Your keywords always need to be in the title!
There are common phrases that people tend to use to find things online. By incorporating these phrases into your title you are will be more likely to get found in the search engines.
These title phrases are:
- How To…
- Truth About…
- Secrets To….
- Why Your…
- How Much Does….
- The Worst…
- Top 10…
- What Are…
- Where Are…
- Tip To…..
- Facts About
- “Some Product Here” Review …. (include the current year in your title to refine search results)
These common phrases get entered into the search bar every day. Let’s say that I was doing a blog post about scary stories for adults before bedtime.
I would use the keywords “scary bedtime stories” and build my title off of those keywords. I might create a title that says…
- 8 Secret Scary Bedtime Stories For Adults
- Why These Scary Bedtime Stories For Adults Work
- The Worst Scary Bedtime Stories For Adults
- The Truth About Scary Bedtime Stories For Adults
You get the idea. Now I have my Long-Tail Keyword phrase in the title, plus I am using common search terms, which will help get my article found easier in the search engines!
For more on ideas for titles click here.
Think Outside Of The Box
When it comes to marketing your book, try to think outside of the box! Connect with websites and people who are selling books as well and see if there is a chance you can help one another.
Find places that allow you to market your book for free. There are websites like addictedtobooks.com where you can promote your book for free (if you follow their guidelines).
For more website where you can start marketing your book for free click here.
Marketing your book (or any product online) takes time and effort. But if you put in the hard work you will succeed!
About the Author
Todd Worley, an online entrepreneur and Internet marketer, is known as the disabled blogger. His goal is to help anyone online learn more about blogging and earning income from their websiteCheck him out at toddworley.com.
Todd lives in the beautiful green state of Oregon with his beautiful wife and three lovely children.
Photo courtesy of dizain|Fotolia.com
Hi Todd,
Nice article. You approach so many topics on this post. My favorite part it’s the one about networking. Building relationships and outreaching to influencers brought me the best results so far. People can use some tools to make it easier for them, especially on social media.
Do you use JustRetweet? You retweet posts from other bloggers and in exchange, you receive a number of credits. When you have a post you want to be retweeted you can offer those credits for rt. The idea is to be careful and share only posts from bloggers you know and trust, so it doesn’t affect your credibility.
Hope this helps. Keep up the good work!
Best,
Minuca
Hi Todd and Nina 🙂
Excellent tips! Have bookmarked 🙂 Thanks for sharing these amazing tips for how to market a book online 🙂
Glad you like the post. Todd is fabulous!
Great content Todd! This is super helpful guest post Nina, I am always looking for great content to learn more and leverage all the knowledge, thinking outside the box is important. Love the tweet plugin I want it on my blog, what is the name of this awesome plugin?
Social media is essential but it’s important to understand that the organic reach, especially on Facebook, is minimal. If you have some money to spend, Facebook ad targeting is very precise and allows you to get in front of target audience members based on location, interests, etc.
Thanks for the great advice, Kristen!
Excellent list. A real find for me today.
I have co-authored /edited several history books produced by my publishing company and recently released my first work of fiction, a novel about a time travelling, slave owning cotton plantation owner. I am working on a marketing strategy and was happy to find your article within a few minutes of my in-line research.
It’s so true that marketing can be as much work as writing a book. How fortunate that the Internet was invented to allow authors who’ve chosen to self-publish such a powerful tool.
Looking forward to implementing as many of your tips as possible into my strategy!
I’m so pleased my post was helpful, Elise. I wish you much luck as you market your book, and I’d love for you to stop back and tell me what worked best for you.