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Marketing

Marketing and networking, networking, networking

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This entry is part 1 of 7 in the series Marketing: social media

Building a Tribe

Which would you sooner believe: Jimmy shouting about how great his book is, or John shouting about how great Jimmy’s book is? I think we’d all value the opinion of someone other than the author of a book or a blog. That’s why we read book reviews, right?

There’s something we can do to help start this buzz or word of mouth. It can be genuine and real and most of all effective—with a little help from your friends.

I hope you already have writing friends. That’s the best part of the online writing community, right? Making friends, finding people who feel like you do. So how do you take those friendships and build a “tribe”?

And wait, what’s a tribe?

A tribe, a clan, a team, a rose

(You know, by any other name . . . ?)

No matter what you call it, a group of like-minded bloggers or Tweeters or Facebookers (or all of the above) can become a valuable resource for all of you. Odds are 100:1 that if you get 4-5 author-bloggers together, even if they write the same genre, their blog audiences won’t overlap.

So what does that mean? If you’re in this group and you write something truly fantastic—a book, a book review, a blog post, etc.—the other members of the group can share that with their audiences.

Looking at it from a mercenary point of view, building a tribe is a great way to increase your audience! But it isn’t purely mercenary: your fellow bloggers (and you!) are always looking for great content and good books to satisfy their audiences.

So, this group you speak of?

Your tribe might be totally informal—just a group of bloggers who happen to hang out together—or you might go so far as to “formalize” your relationship, sending out invitations, setting up ground rules, or even using some sort of social networking site to set yourselves up.

In my opinion, one of the ground rules of a successful tribe is to be sincere. If your friend’s content isn’t right for your audience, no matter how great it is, then you shouldn’t feel pressured to share it. That’s why I don’t particularly care for a program or ground rules that require group members to Tweet/blog/share absolutely everything the other people in the group write.

Because above all, you must be sincere.

It must be sincere!

If a tribe just turns into a retweet machine, and all you ever do is regurgitate and promote one another’s material in an echo chamber, it starts to lose value for the audience—and it starts to ring hollow.

Personally, I would be very careful about what I want to promote through my tribe. Because all blog audiences are different, you have to know what would suit yours. My friend Julie Coulter Bellon has created a fantastic blog and community, and one of her big features (during the season) is responses and reviews of her favorite crime TV shows (and she writes romantic suspense, so that fits well too). Many members of her blog audience also watch the shows, and it attracts new eyes all the time.

But I don’t watch the same shows as Julie, and I don’t really know if you guys would enjoy that. (Want to see me blog about old Law & Orders?!) It doesn’t turn me off her blog at all, but it’s also not the kind of thing that I would envision sharing in a tribe.

On the other hand, I do think another of her weekly features, First Page Fridays, is totally right for my blog audience. She has high-caliber professional editors—Angela Eschler and “Ms Shreditor,” an editor at a publishers—take a look at volunteer submission of the first page. The feedback there is always something to learn from!

Okay, in this context, this endorsement might not sound as true as I really do intend it to be (because FPF truly is great), but I think First Page Fridays is something that would add value to my blog readers, so I’m sharing it here. Sometimes I tweet about it. Because: 1. I like Julie AND 2. I think my readers would like to see things like FPF AND 3. I can be sincere (maybe?) in what I say about FPF.

It’s all about supporting one another

A tribe doesn’t have to just be about retweeting one another’s posts. It’s about supporting one another in whatever way you can: commenting on blog posts, attending or promoting book signings, helping with book launches, brainstorming, answering questions—whatever the group decides you want to cover.

It may not be easy

I kinda made this up as I went along, and I find it hard. Writers are legendarily introverted, and even putting ourselves out there to make friends online can be hard, let alone the subsequent efforts inside a tribe.

One thing I’ve tried from time to time is to set goals for myself in the area of interaction. “Comment on X number of new blogs this week” or “Check on my tribe’s blogs at 2 PM each day” work well, because they give you something concrete to strive for.

What do you think? How do you reach out? Would you use a tribe, or interaction goals? How would you show your support?

Photo credits: Team Spirit—JF Schmitz; Sincere Bank—Chris; Sincere sign—Sam Howzit

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Marketing

Book trailers: 19 ways to make them effective

This entry is part 3 of 7 in the series Marketing: social media

So, you’ve decided you want to do a book trailer. Awesome! Here are nineteen ways to make your book trailer the best it can be.

Watch other trailers first

Yes, yes, yes. You can go straight to YouTube to search, or you can just Google [book trailers] to find sites that showcase them.

See what you like, and what you don’t like, what works and doesn’t. See what professional-level book trailers look like, and decide what you want to do.

It probably won’t hurt to watch some movie trailers, too, to see how the big folks do it.

Learn how to do it yourself or hire it out

Most computers come with a movie making program these days, whether it’s iMovie or Windows Live Movie Maker. Surprisingly, these free programs are fairly adept, with dozens of included transitions and shot effects. If you have a free afternoon and aren’t totally tech backwards, I think you should be able to figure them out for a short book trailer.

And on that note:

Keep it short

Please, please. Remember that attention spans on the Internet—even for readers!—are very short. The absolute maximum I would recommend for a book trailer would be 90 seconds. Personally, I’ll spend all day reading a book but I won’t click on a 60 second video unless I already want to buy the book. A lot. But 30 seconds? Sure, why not?

Make it professional

This doesn’t mean you have to hire a book trailer company to make yours, but it does mean you need to put a high level of polish on anything you do. You can make a professional looking trailer yourself, absolutely—and see that you do. This goes double on hiring it out, whether that’s to your best friend’s second cousin or a book trailer company.

The professionalism of your book trailer should be reflected in all aspects: the images, the video, the shots and the sound. Yes, the sound. If you’re doing voiceovers, spring for a decent mic and test multiple “studios,” okay??

Use visual storytelling

Film/video gives a whole new meaning to the phrase “show, don’t tell.” It’s a totally different medium than the written word. I loved this analysis of visual storytelling by Miriam Paschal on Mystery Man on Film. It retells the opening shots of Back to the Future, showing just how deeply the images—no dialogue!—characterize Doc Brown and begin to set up his problem.

It starts with clocks: hundreds of clocks. There are vintage clocks and modern clocks. There is a Harold Lloyd clock with the man hanging off the arms of the clock, so we get some foreshadowing right away. We see the newspaper articles of how the old Brown mansion was destroyed, which we will learn later happened when Doc sank all his money into building the time machine.

We see the pictures of Thomas Edison and Ben Franklin, Doc's heroes.

Then we see the Rube Goldberg machine that Doc has built to streamline his morning routine. Well, it's not a classic Rube Goldberg machine, but it's inspired by one. However, something is wrong. The coffee pot pours hot water onto the hot plate in the absence of the pot…and coffee. Strange. . . . [Read the rest]

Writers work very hard to tell their stories in words, but trailers’ real strength is to tell the story in images. Play to the strengths of the medium—and still tell a story!

Write a script

You may be a pantser for your books, but you need to be a plotter when it comes to your book trailer. Think about those images and scenes from the visual story. (Before you run off and write it, keep reading, please.) You can absolutely use words, but you need to think about how you’ll handle those words in a primarily visual medium: live action dialogue? Floating text? Disembodied space voice?

Edit!

You wouldn’t send your first draft out to agents and publishers (I hope). Why do that with your book trailer script? Look for places where you can tighten the wording, focus on the visual storytelling, and create other effects. Polish it until it gleams—before you start shooting.

Remember, video is like decorating in that much of the time, it’s more about what you take away that makes the story strong.

Focus on the emotion

People read for emotions, and each genre has a different basket of expected emotions. You probably already know what those emotions are, especially if you read in your genre (which you do, right?). For example, in romance, we read to experience the heady feeling of falling in love, the uncertainty of the relationship in peril, and the happily ever after. Or we read thrillers to be, well, thrilled, to feel the uncertainty of the world tumbling down around us, and to execute justice in the end.

You don’t have to give away the ending, of course, but brainstorm some emotions that your readers want to feel, and will feel when reading your book.

Focus on the hook: attention grabber

Just like you open your book with a hook, open your trailer with a hook (possibly the same, maybe not). Grab the viewer’s attention right off the bat, whether that’s through something unexpected, or focusing on a major problem, or displaying the inciting incident.

Play to the audience

Like with the emotions, remember that your audience has certain expectations when they pick up a book. You genre has conventions, whether that’s a hard-boiled detective or magic or a plucky heroine. If your book has those, play them up (in an original way, of course, just like you do in your novel!)

Match it to the book

Your book itself sets expectations, with its cover (you really need to use the cover in the video), back cover copy, and even where it’s shelved. Try to dovetail your trailer with those elements, so that people can easily make the connection between your trailer and your book. Can you imagine watching a book trailer, then reading the back cover of what sounds like a totally different book?

Make it interesting

I hope this goes without saying, but a book trailer really, really, really needs to be interesting. One way to do this is to showcase what sets your book apart. You have magic, but it’s different because of X. You have a plucky heroine, but she stands out from the 10,000 plucky heroines out there because she’s Y. (And remember, show don’t tell!)

Short blurbs

If you have endorsements that will be used on your cover, your back cover, your inner material, or your website, include one to three of the most compelling examples—but make them very short and punchy. One word might not be bad. (Include attribution1)

Call to action

End with a call to action. The best book trailer in the world won’t be nearly as effective if you don’t end by telling the audience you’ve hooked what to do next. You might put a link at the end of the video, but be sure to include some text saying, “Go here to buy my book” or “Add my book on Goodreads” or “Like me on Facebook for deleted scenes.” Feature the cover prominently, too.

Use Creative Commons-commercial or public domain material, or buy the commercial license

If you use video, images or music made by someone else, this is an absolute must. You can find Creative Commons-licensed images on Flickr, for example, but be sure they are cleared for commercial use (yes, this is) AND derivative works (yep again). Alternatively, you can often buy the license for a photo, through Getty Images on Flickr, or through a stock photography site.

A book trailer is a direct piece of promotion for your book, and as such, is commercial. (I mean, hey, it’s a commercial for your book.) If you use someone else’s copyrighted work in your video, you could be construed as misrepresenting their work as an endorsement of yours. Let’s just say, “Big lawsuit,” mmkay?

Get feedback first

Before you throw your trailer up on the Internet, just like you would with your book, bring it to people whose judgment you trust—both people who’ve read your book, and those who haven’t. If they’re not used to giving feedback, be sure to prepare some pointed questions, especially “When did it confuse you?” (or “When did it lose you?”) and “When did it bore you?” You can also ask for positive feedback, too, of course 😉 .

Gather analytics

Just like I recommend using analytics on your blog or website, I think it’s vital to gather data on your video. If you use YouTube, for example, they automatically collect a good amount and variety of data on your video, including:

  • Number of views
  • Location of viewers
  • New YouTube subscriptions from the video
  • Viewer gender (no joke)
  • Sharing events, and the views that each of these generated!

This last one is incredibly valuable. You can see where your video was posted, and how many people watched it there.

Do you want other people posting your video? Um, yes. More on that now:

Make it shareable

Another reason I really like YouTube for book trailers is that it has some pretty easy-to-use embedding capabilities. People who like your trailer enough—or people who will be part of your book tour, or writing friends—can add YouTube’s automatically generated code to their blog and automatically increase your trailer’s potential audience.

Be sure to allow embedding of your videos!

Realistic expectations

Finally, after all your wonderful work, keep your expectations realistic. A book trailer probably will not automatically generate a bajillion sales. But if you remember our theory of marketing approach to book trailers, that every time someone is exposed to your book, they get closer and closer to potentially buying it.

Whew! Now you’re either pumped and ready to go, or completely paralyzed by fear.

Sorry.

More resources on book trailers
5 Tips for Making a Good Book Trailer from Abel Keogh
How to Make a Book Trailer, a guest post on Nathan Bransford’s blog
Kate Noble’s How I Made a Book Trailer for $5
Joanna Penn’s 11 Steps to Make Your Own Book Trailer
What key elements make an effective book trailer? from 30 Day Books
Michael Pryor’s 10 tips for book trailer makers
Top 5 book trailer tips from Book Baby
Literary Agent Rachelle Gardner: Should you have a book trailer?
A comprehensive guide to book trailers (list of links)

What do you think? What’s the best book trailer advice you’ve seen?

Photo credits:
watching movies—Q family; editing—Joanna Penn; books—Emily Carlin;
Creative Commons logo—Peter Leth; Sharing YouTube videos—Anne Adrian

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Marketing

Book trailers: Yes or no?

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Book trailers are short videos designed to promote your books like a movie trailer does for a movie. But are they effective?


I haven’t read this book, but the obviously professional production and the VERY short run time caught my eye

The Yes Camp

One theory of marketing says that every time a potential customer sees your product (read: book) name increases the likelihood of a future purchase. The tipping point, in this theory, is that it takes seven of these exposures before someone makes a decision to buy.

A book trailer can be one of these exposures. Realistically, odds are low that you can definitively trace any particular purchase back to any particular marketing tactic, but rather the collective total of those exposures. Anything you can do to help get your book out there and gain publicity and most importantly eyes will help your sales in some way.

Although book trailers are used more and more often, they can still be a unique way to catch the eye of a potential readers. Award-winning and bestselling authors use them (well, their publishers do). They’re a fast way to catch someone’s attention and convey a lot of information about your book in an intriguing way.

Possibly the biggest advantage is that a good, interesting book trailer is inherently share-able, or it should be if you manage it right! People who see your book trailer and get excited about your book, or even just the trailer, can post the trailer to their blog, Facebook or Twitter feed, exposing even more people to your book. This can be especially beneficial for mid-list and self-publishing authors.


Teaser trailer for my friend Don Carey’s book. Legos!

The No Camp

Like many people, I don’t think I have ever seen a book trailer and thought even so much as, “Hm. I might like that.” In fact, the only times I’ve purchased a book after watching a trailer, I’d made the decision to buy before I’d seen the trailer.

Additionally, book trailers can be expensive. They’re all too often amateurish, and that will never help your marketing efforts. The “medium mismatch” of the printed word and the visual storytelling of film sometimes doesn’t work out so well, and you have to consider whether book trailer viewers are your target audience at all.

In short, the no camp varies from apathetic to militant opposition to this marketing tactic, which they decry as a useless waste of time and money.

Making the call for you

Whether or not you decide to do a book trailer for your own book is a personal decision. Here are a few factors I think you should consider:

  • Do you have the video software and skills to do it yourself? (There are several free video editors.)
  • Are you willing to learn?
  • Do you know (of) someone who can and will do it cheaply and well?
  • Do you want a book trailer?
  • Do you have realistic expectations of the results?

Have you decided? Great new if you’re in the “yes” camp: next week, we’ll look at how to make an effective book trailer!

What do you think? Do you want a book trailer? Would you make it yourself? What else would you ask yourself before deciding? Join in the discussion!

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Marketing

Blog Tours: Finding & Measuring Success

This entry is part 4 of 4 in the series Marketing: Blog tours

by Rachelle Christensen

I think the most important key to a successful blog tour is organization. It’s tricky when you’ve scheduled 20-25 stops on your tour. You will need to answer questions, give reminders, and make sure each blogger has the information they need to participate fully. I keep a document or spreadsheet for each blog tour and keep track of things like who I invite to participate and their response, most reliable book reviewers, individual review and interview dates, email and web addresses, etc.

Jordan has covered some great information in this series, but you might be asking yourself, are blog tours really worth it? The answer to that is YES if you coordinate one correctly. If you don’t think the advice that Jordan has posted applies to you and that you can run a successful tour with a handful of unknown blogs, then no, a blog tour won’t benefit your book.

Blog tours are about seed-bedding. Have you heard the marketing phrase that a person needs to be exposed to an item anywhere from three to twenty times before they will purchase? Well, it’s true. So when an author decides to put their book on tour, they should be doing so for the exposure. Great reviews are priceless, but go look up a few books on Amazon. You might be surprised to see some well-known authors who have less than ten reviews, or you might be surprised to see some that have over 100. A blog tour creates buzz and plants seeds in prospective readers’ minds. Does this translate to hard sales? Not usually sales that you can measure, but it translates to many results that you might not even realize.

Here’s an example. Perhaps reader Jane hears about your book, then she sees some glowing reviews on your blog tour. The next time she is at the library, she asks them to order in your book. Reader Jane checks out your book and loves it. Now she is excited for the next book and because she enjoyed your book so much, she wants to buy the next one as soon as it’s available.

In the above example, you can see that I’m trying to share the vision of planting seeds. Sometimes you’ll get to enjoy an early harvest, other times the seeds will grow slowly and turn into a towering oak tree. Exposure is great for any business and the same goes for authors.

Say Thank you! I think it’s important to thank your blog tour participants individually and think about how you can extend that thanks in other ways. On a recent tour that I managed, we offered a special thank you gift to each blogger who posted their review on time and also on Goodreads and Amazon. It was a fun way to continue to get the bloggers invested in the tour and get the results wanted.

Stay positive. Look at each stop on your tour as a potential seed. Word of mouth is the best form of advertising and you never know who might see that post and decide to invest in your book. If you don’t see a huge jump in sales, don’t get discouraged. Remember, that you are offering readers many chances to get to know you and the quality of your writing. Think about other marketing avenues that you might use to piggyback on the blog tour. Giveaways are fun, as well as special “buzz-fests” or “book bombs” or hide-and-seek questions in the first chapter of your book. All of these work to increase visibility.

Have fun! Don’t be a stress-case if one of your reviewers misses their posting date. Life happens, and sometimes we have to pick up the pieces and be flexible. If I see that a reviewer hasn’t posted on their scheduled date, I send out a reminder just checking in and offer another date if they are unable to make it work that day. I certainly appreciate it when people are understanding of my brain cramps, so be courteous and keep things on the up side.

Keep a page on your website, blog, or sidebar with all of the participants and dates of the blog tour. When your blog tour is finished, make sure you have that page somewhere permanent in case you need to reference it.

There are many other benefits to blog tours, such as gathering usable endorsements from reviewers to be used for other marketing purposes and making lasting connections with your audience. Be willing to think outside the box to take advantage of every opportunity to create a successful blog tour—but most of all enjoy!

About the Author

Rachelle J. Christensen is an author who enjoys blogging and learning new marketing strategies. She organizes blog tours for a multi-million dollar worldwide company and has developed secrets for low-cost Internet marketing.
Her first novel, Wrong Number, was awarded Outstanding Book of the Year from the League of Utah Writers and was also a 2010 Whitney Finalist. Her second suspense novel, Caller ID, was released March 2012. She is also the author of a nonfiction book, Lost Children: Coping with Miscarriage for Latter-day Saints.

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Marketing

Blog Tours: Keeping it interesting

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This entry is part 3 of 4 in the series Marketing: Blog tours

Blog tours are great for introducing new audiences to your book. But for your existing audience, they can sometimes get a little . . . repetitive. Boring.

Most blog tour posts consist of the back cover copy and a review of the book. We definitely want the blogger’s review in the post, reading the same back cover over and over can get tedious, and even your biggest fans won’t read 25 identical posts, even for the reviews.

What’s the solution? Variety, of course!

But first, Announcements!

TODAY, July 16, is Sell Books for Steve Day! Steven Kerry Brown is the author of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Private Investigating, a really useful book if your character is a PI (or if you want to be one, you know, if you want to look at the intended audience. Whatever). I’ve had a chance to “meet” Steve online and see how much he gives back to other writers, and have been the beneficiary of his expertise more than once.

Steve has leukemia, and recently had to undergo a bone marrow transplant. As a PI, he’s self-employed and doesn’t have insurance. The transplant comes with a price tag of $500,000. To help someone who has helped so many people, Jeffrey Phillips has brought together more than a dozen authors who will donate part of their proceeds from today’s sales to Steve’s treatment. You can see all the available books or donate directly on Jeff & Steve’s blog, Handcuffed to the Ocean, where Steve is also reporting on his recovery.

Next weekend, July 27-28, I’ll be presenting on HTML at the iWriteNetwork Conference. If you’ll be in the American Fork area, it’s only $50 for two days. Check out the schedule in the sidebar of the iWriteNetwork blog.

Finally, remember that every comment on this blog in July is a chance to win a free 15-page critique from me!

Now, back to blog tours.

Encouraging variety to keep your blog tours interesting

Although bloggers are endlessly creative, it’s up to the author to encourage bloggers to use that creativity. You might include a list of ideas for bloggers so they know you’re open to them thinking outside the box when it comes to their posts.

  • Author interviews—answer a few questions for the blogger, about your writing journey, the process of writing this book, your characters, or even you.
  • Character interviews—if a blogger has a favorite character, you can answer questions as that character, which is not only fun but helps to draw potential readers into a character more.. I’ve also seen fellow authors have one of their characters interview one of the characters from
  • Giveaways—these are generally sponsored by the author and often have a big, overarching prize (I’ve seen Kindles and the like). However, if the individual blogger wants to also sponsor a giveaway. The blogger might offer their [hard] copy of the book, or if the author provided them with an extra copy to giveaway. If the blogger is an author, Another option might be a book of theirs in the same genre, though that might be a little sketchy.
  • Book features—this is my favorite, because you can go so many directions with it. My friend Annette Lyon had someone on her book tour blog about the smells in her book. How cool is that?

What do you think? What are the coolest blog book tour posts you’ve done or seen? (Links welcome, but if you use more than 2 I’ll have to manually approve the comment.)

Photo by Kevin Dooley

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Marketing

Blog tours: Best practices for bloggers & authors

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This entry is part 2 of 4 in the series Marketing: Blog tours

Blog tours offer both bloggers and authors a chance to get out there, find new books to love, find a bigger audience. I’ve participated in a few blog tours for other authors. Here are a few things I’ve learned over the years.

For bloggers

Be honest! While author-bloggers want to be loyal to fellow authors, we have to remember our blog readers are our real audience. If our blog readers go out and spend their money on a book we didn’t really enjoy but made to sound good, might that reflect poorly on us?

Be kind. To offset the above, just because you didn’t like a book doesn’t mean you should publicly rip on it. If you really, really hated it, I recommend contacting the author or blog tour coordinator first to let them know you don’t feel good about posting your feelings in public. I know of authors who’ve invited bloggers to post it anyway. You might focus on areas that you feel were strong and list other areas that needed improvement.

Link, link, link! You don’t have to list all the planned stops on the tour with links, but at the bare minimum, you should provide a clickable link to somewhere your readers can buy the book. Links to the author’s website and/or blog are awesome, too.

Remember your FTC disclosure: you received the book for free from the author/publisher, but that didn’t affect your opinion. In some cases, you might also need to disclose that it didn’t guarantee a review (such as newspapers, who receive free books to review all the time, but don’t guarantee a review just because you give them a free copy).

Make your blog post engaging! Just slapping the back cover copy on your blog only does so much to help to the author&madsh;or interest your blog readers! We’ll take a look at this in a little more depth in another week or two.

For authors

Be clear and communicative. Last week, Tristi Pinkston gave us some great advice on setting up a blog tour. Make sure you make your expectations clear from the get-go: tell the bloggers exactly what you’d like them to do. Offer gentle reminders about a week before a post is scheduled.

Be accommodating. Like Tristi said last week, provide an image of at least the book cover (an image of you would be helpful too!), as well as a clean, well-formatted copy of the back cover copy for them to cut and paste. If you can, offer your review copies in multiple formats: hardcover, Kindle, Nook, PDF, etc. And be sure to give them a direct link to somewhere their readers can purchase your book, to make things easy for them.

Cross promote, cross promote, cross promote! You do not want your blog devolving into a daily update of all the other places your book is being featured, but you definitely need to link to the reviews people are doing for you! If you have a Twitter account or a Facebook page, sharing those reviews there would be great. (Look for an awesome quote to go with the link to help draw people in.)

Recognize that not everyone will love your book. It’s just a mathematical impossibility. The purpose of a blog tour is getting your book out there in front of a wider audience, and not everyone will love everything they read. It’s not necessarily a reflection on you or your writing or even your book. So let’s put down the flamethrower, okay?

Consider whether you want to comment publicly on the blog posts. I have friends who don’t because they feel that their presence might stifle the conversation on the blog, emailing their thanks instead. Others pop by to say thank you publicly. Others engage in a dialogue (friendly, I hope!) in the comments.

Be gracious. The bloggers on your tour are doing you a favor, even if they post a negative review. Say thank you. Stay humble. Make friends.

A successful blog tour generates more than just sales. You’re building readership and creating relationships. Keep that in mind no matter which side of the book you fall on.

What do you think? What have you learned from doing blog tours, as a blogger or an author?

Photo credits: On the platform, reading—Mo Riza; Thank you sign—Avard Woolaver

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Marketing

Virtual Book Tours: an introduction by Tristi Pinkston

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This entry is part 1 of 4 in the series Marketing: Blog tours

by Tristi Pinkston

As you get more involved in Internet marketing, you’ll hear the term “virtual book tour.” What is that, anyway? Basically, a virtual book tour is where an author or publicist has arranged for several different blogs or sites to feature the book within a relatively short period of time. These posts should include the book’s cover, price, purchase link, and a little blurb about the book—and hopefully a review written by the blogger or a guest post by the author.

Virtual book tours are an excellent way to spread the word about your book. They can be as simple as asking five or ten of your good friends to blog about your book, or you can take it a step further and ask bloggers from all over the Internet and all walks of life to talk about it. You can determine for yourself how complicated or how easy you want the process to be, and whether you want to include any giveaways with the promotion. They can be inexpensive, or they can be a little more of an investment. It’s all up to you.

Regardless of how you set up your tour, there are a few simple steps you should take to ensure the best results.

1. Choose bloggers whose readers are likely to be interested in the topic of your book. Your favorite aunt might be really eager to blog about it, but if her readers are only knitters, and your book is about exploring coral reefs, this might not be the best fit. However, keep in mind that we can’t prejudge who will enjoy what books. For the most part, see if you can match readership with your topic.

2. Choose bloggers who have more than fifty followers. Of course, the more followers the better, but at least fifty is a good number to start with.

3. Provide the review copy to the reviewer. It’s bad form to ask them to review the book and then tell them where they can buy it … I had someone do that to me, and needless to say, I deleted the e-mail instantly.

4. Ask them to post their reviews on Amazon and GoodReads as well as on their blog. This will get you a ton more exposure, and it’s really only a few extra minutes on their end.

The Internet is the way everyone is marketing now. If you can utilize the Internet to spread the word about your book (or other product), you’ll be better able to keep in step with the future of marketing.

About the Author
Tristi Pinkston is the author of thirteen published books and works as a freelance editor. If you’d like to learn more about her new book Virtual Book Tours: Harness the Power of the Internet, click here.

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Marketing

SEO: Tracking your results

This entry is part 3 of 3 in the series Marketing: SEO

In marketing, we have to focus on delivering results. It can be very difficult to prove your return on your marketing time investment with SEO, especially for books, when you probably can’t point to the data to say “This person searched for [jelly beans], found our landing page and bought $67,028.26 of jelly beans.”

Google Analytics, which we covered a little while ago, does offer a little of that kind of information (though if you have a store on your site, be sure to read up on using Google Analytics for tracking). As you can see at right (click to expand), it does tell you what search queries people are using to find your site*.

But there’s something this report can’t tell you: how well you rank for those words. It can’t tell you if you got only 5 hits for “i lurve orange soda sumpin fierce” because only 5 people searched for it, or if it’s because your link is buried on the 57th page of results.

Google has another free product that can help you find out. Now, I know what you’re thinking: “Jordan, can’t I just Google my own keywords and see how I’m doing?” Yes. And no. Mostly no.

Google instituted personalized search five years ago. If you’re signed into your Google account, Google keeps track of a lot of things, possibly including what sites are yours (especially if you’ve ever claimed them), what sites you click on in search results, what subjects you search for, even who your friends are and what they like and recommend. It factors that information to the best of its ability in delivering your results. So your results and my results could be very different—including your ranking, or even appearing on the page at all. (Additionally, some more random variation occurs due to geography, what data centers you’re hitting, etc.)

However, being Google, they do keep track of your average ranking position on search pages, and they’ll share that with you through Google Webmaster Tools. If you’re on Blogger, you’re already signed up! If not, the sign up process is fairly easy. Visit the Google Webmaster Tools site (and create or sign into your Google account, if necessary), and click on the red “Add A Site” Button.

Enter the URL.

And use one of their verification methods.

Voila! It will take some time for them to build up a good set of data (a month, for the standard view), but they’ll start collecting data on what queries people are using to find your site. Here’s what you see when you sign in:

Note that it also gives you a list of URLs that aren’t working in the first column. These might be missing posts on your blog that you pulled down, or mistyped links from other blogs. (If it’s the latter, go to Blogger’s Settings > Custom Redirects. Click Edit and add a permanent redirect from the mistyped link to the correct one.)

For our purposes today, we’re going to focus on the queries report. Click on Queries and you’ll see something like this:

Or for a closeup:

This report (sorted by clicks) shows us impressions, clicks, CTR and Avg. position.

Impressions tells us how many times your link appeared on an actual search results page for that query. Clicks tells us . . . how many times someone clicked on your link. Duh. Clearly, the numbers for Impressions and Clicks are rounded, and numbers below 10 are not displayed. CTR stands for Clickthrough Rate (or Choose the Right, but come on, one of those makes more sense than the other here). This is basically clicks/impressions, telling us what percent of people who saw your link actually clicked on it. Finally, Avg. position tells you your average ranking.

In general, a higher clickthrough rate is better. Years ago, the industry standard for the paid ad links on the top and sides of a search engine results page (SERP) hovered around 2%. Organic results like these generally have better click through rates, but once you get out of the prime positioning on the first screen of results (“above the fold”), those CTRs tend to fall off.

If your CTR is lower than you’d like, take a look at what “snippet” Google displays for those keywords. Can you try to work in some sentences using those keywords that would be more enticing to your potential readers? Maybe make your title more engaging (while still using the keyword)?

In general, CTR is correlated with your ranking—sort by CTR and you’ll probably see this as a general trend—so improving your ranking can also help your CTR. Probably the easiest (ha) way to work on your rankings are to get more links. You might need to go link hunting! (As always, guest posts are my favorite way to come get links, sometimes with an anchor text that you specify.)

Another important aspect of the Queries page is the Top Pages tab at the top. It sorts all the same information as the Top Queries tab, but this time the info is grouped by the landing page on your site instead of the keyword people type in. (People can find the same page using different keywords, and if you’ve got multiple search engine results, they might look at the different pages for the same keyword.) (To get to the similar report in Google Analytics, go to Traffic Sources > Search > Organic. Just below the graph and big data chart, you’ll see a line that says Primary Dimension. Select Landing Page.)

If you want to get a little more advanced in your tracking, you can also go back to Google Analytics for Goal Tracking. My goals include having someone download one of my PDF guides or subscribe to my blog, so I’ve added special Google Analytics Event Tracking code into my links for those actions. I put an arbitrary monetary value on those goals (like $10 or something, but if it makes you feel good, say $1,000,000 or something 😉 ), and occasionally take a peek at my goals to see how I’m doing.

It’s also good to look at your “funnels” or paths in Google Analytics to see how people find your site and if they’re following the route you’d like them to.

Not comfortable sharing all this information with Google? I understand. I really do.

What do you think? How would you use all this cool information?

*Except when the searcher is signed in to Google, when Google Analytics reports the keyword as (not provided). Up to 40% of my search queries are (not provided) in GA. This is not my happy face. As you were.

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