Online Book Marketing - Why Authors Are Getting it All Wrong

July 11, 2009 by: Kelly
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Online Book Marketing

The more I work with writers to help them get 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 can manage to avoid mistakes like these five, you’ll definitely be ahead of most authors…way ahead. So, here are five things to avoid when marketing your books online:

1. Inadequate Time Spent Researching Keywords

This is the #1 big kahuna and the place where 99% of authors quite simply stuff it up.

I’ve worked with many authors who weren’t having the kind of success marketing their books online they wanted who were failing for one simple reason — lack of planning. There was no coherent plan for uncovering the RIGHT keywords to target, and then for going after those keywords and winning rankings in the search engines.

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 you can get access to tools that can do all three. You can find that at the bottom of this article — just follow the links. Be sure to take a few minutes and have a look.

2. Lack of Content

Surprisingly enough, even prolific writers with dozens of books under their belt — gifted authors who can write volumes on their area of expertise — somehow think that they can skate by online with just a couple pages (or even paragraphs!) of content.

False.

The reality is this — you need lots and lots of content to keep the search engines happy.

This is why giant sites like Wikipedia get so much love — and traffic — from Google. They have millions of pages in Google’s index.

How many pages would you say are in Google’s index from your site? I would guess that’s somewhere between 2 and 5.

The only thing you’ll ever get rankings for with a site like that is probably your name. Bottom line: there’s no way to shortchange people online and not have it come back to haunt you.

There’s no secret to how it works — if you’re offering amazing (and FREE) content right upfront, you can use your site to create true fans of your work, rather than having it serve as an electronic dust jacket.

3. Not paying attention to Social Marketing and Web 2.0

If you haven’t noticed, the Internet is changing. In just these past few years, sites like Digg, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Squidoo.com — and, of course, Twitter — have dramatically shifted the way we interact online.

The top-down style of the old media is quickly disappearing, if it hasn’t disappeared already. It’s being replaced by a system where actual people, not jaded editors, decide what’s worthy of our attention.

If you’re not using the sites mentioned above, along with about 100 others that can help you sell more books, you’re missing the biggest sea change in online marketing that you’ve ever seen.

(See the links below for resources that will help you identify dozens of sites where you should be marketing your books.)

4. Failing to Build a Base of Support

It’s incredible how many authors 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 simply take for granted.

This is ultra-important for a couple of reasons, but the main one is that it’s always going to be easier to sell things to people who already know your work.

If someone has decided to buy one of your books, they’re going to be the easiest person to sell to when your 2nd, 3rd and 4th books come out.

But when you don’t have a system in place to reach those people who bought your first book, you’ll be going through the entire process of attracting and acquiring new readers over and over and over again.

Wouldn’t it be a lot easier to fire off a few emails to your existing fanbase?

Or just to put up a new blog post to announce your latest book?

This is how authors are able to build empires.

5. Trying to Sell Your Book

What? That’s definitely a mistake? But that’s the point, isn’t it?

Sometimes.

So here’s what I’m arguing: If you focus just on “moving product” (i.e. on selling books now) and ignore the other stuff you should be doing (see #4 above), you’re not going to be putting enough effort into building a real presence, and a loyal following, online. But it’s that very loyal following that can be counted on to buy many thousands of books time and time again.

Is it better to settle for selling one or two books per day now, or would you rather be selling thousands of books a day just 12 months from now?

Stop struggling.

Start to build your own information empire the same way many 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 a level you would have never imagined before!) will no doubt follow.

If you’re not making a full-time income selling your books online, you’re missing something.

There’s no question that at least 9 out of 10 authors make crucial — but completely avoidable — mistakes when attempting to market books online.

Want to see if you’re one of them? Visit my free online book marketing blog and find out what the “top dogs” know that you don’t.

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