Breaking Into Publishing With A Website

Introduction to Building An Author Platform

Designing a successful website, one that is attractive to search engines and serves the visitors they send, doesn't require any tricks. In fact, the more sophisticated the search engines become, the better your website will hold up if you don't depend on gimmicks to attract traffic. For authors and publishers just learning how to sell books online, the most overlooked element of website design is choosing the right page title for each and every page. The page title is the HTML title, the one that appears near the top of your page when you view the source code, as in: <TITLE>Online Book Marketing - How to Sell Books with a Website or Newsletter Advertising</TITLE>. If you're unsure what your HTML page title is, view the page in your browser, and the text that appears in the (usually) blue bar at the very top of your screen is the page title. It's critical to choose the right page title because once your page passes the semantic analysis that tells the search engine it's not just a bucket full of key words, the search engine uses the page title to determine what the author is writing about. The exact word order isn't critical - book marketing online would do as well for all but exact phrase matches, which are rare in any case.

Let's say you're and author or publisher of books about gardening and want to market a book online about how to raise cucumber plants. It will likely contain instructions about selecting the best seeds, preparing the ground, planting at the proper time, cultivating the plants, attracting pollinating insects, discouraging pests, and even how to pick the cucumbers at the peak of flavor. If you title the page "Growing Cucumbers," that's what the search engine will believe the page is about, and a phrase it will send you traffic for, all other things being equal. If you title the page, "Digging in the Back Yard" or "Helpful Insects" then that's what the search engine will believe the page is focused on. It's not that the search engine is ignoring the other text on the page, it's just that there are millions of web pages about gardening, insects and eating, so the search engine relies on the title to resolve which of these subjects your page is really about.

Here's where true website design optimization comes in. You title your page, "How to raise cucumber plants" and make sure that the nouns actually appear in the text, so the search engine doesn't think you're trying to pull a fast one. But don't artificially increase the density of key words on the page. It may be counterproductive in terms of search engine credibility, and you don't want the visitors you do attract to leave in disgust with the writing style. Once your page is crawled by the search engines, you can expect good search engine placement if somebody types in the query "raise cucumber plants." But there may be a problem. What if most people interested in raising cucumber plants type the query "grow cucumber vines," "cucumber gardening" or "how to plant cucumbers?" You increase your odds with a title like, "Growing Cucumbers - A Gardening Guide On How To Plant and Grow Cucumber Vines," but that approach can only go so far. Search engines will downgrade your page if you repeat a word more than once or twice in the title and dilute the value of the individual words in the title as the length grows.

One method to determine how people search on the subject is for the author to ask friends and family how they would go about it, though it's hard coming up with a way to phrase the question that won't influence the answer. Better yet, sit behind them and look over their shoulders when they try. Another method is to make educated guesses and experiment with different page titles every couple of months, monitoring site statistics to determine the results. The irony is that when you figure out a super-attractive key phrase for your material, you can be sure that 100 other sites are using it as well, so your chances of being at the top of the pile are better with a slightly more obscure phrasing.

Both of the paid Internet advertising options we discussed earlier, Overture and Google Adwords, are very useful for optimizing your page titles for online book marketing. With the free Overture Search Term Suggestion Tool, you can check key phrases to see how popular they were in searches in Overture partner sites the previous month. It's a quick heat check that will tell you if people are searching on "Growing Cucumbers" a hundred times a day or ten times a month. Google Adwords, for a small investment, gives you real time data on how often your target search terms are being used. If you sign up with Overture or Google Adwords for a paid campaign, you'll not only get to test key phrases, but you'll actually be marketing your books right on the search engine's site. You'll probably find that most of the pages on your website can be accurately described by many different key words or phrases. The feedback from your marketing data can go a long way towards revealing the mechanics of how your audience actually thinks about your subject matter. Of course, tracking how your books are selling is the best measure of success for any online publishing effort.

If you have much more information on a web page than you can capture in the page title, it's time to consider dividing it into multiple pages with more focused topics. It works well with search engines, and it works well with readers who are looking for pretty specific information, like how to make pickles, and don't want to read several thousand words about cucumber farming before they get there. When it comes to selling your books, a large number of short pages help to give the impression that it's better to buy the book than to visit and print each of the pages in hopes that it will suffice. The best part of breaking a large topic down into component parts on separate pages is that you can learn from your visitor statistics which subjects are the most popular. If you use this strategy with a draft copy or with articles that you're considering for a book, you can use the visitor statistics to help shape the final form of the book. We aren't suggesting you write a whole book based on visitor statistics, that would be like planning family meals around what the kids like the most, and you'd end up with nothing but desserts. However, if you're an author who's publishing for a living, you better pay attention to what the public has a taste for.

Tweaking your ordering links and learning how to get the most out of your online marketing takes patience, but is worth the effort. For example, this page had sales links at the top, left, and bottom when I added this note, but I'll rearrange them in a month or two if I'm not selling books. Sometimes I link directly to Amazon from a page like this, or include my PayPal sales link, it works differently for every title and the only way to get it right is to experiment. If you have more than a hundred people a day coming to your website but feel your're not selling as many booksas you should, drop me a line and I'll take a look.

No-Spam E-mail Marketing

Nobody I know likes getting junk e-mail, affectionately known as spam. Spam is generally defined as untargeted mass e-mailings to millions of random addresses purchased for a few dollars over the Internet. Targeted e-mail marketing campaigns to a self-selected group, such as the subscriber list of a professional organization or club, are generally viewed as acceptable in the industry. As a member of several professional organizations, I'm dead set against their selling the membership list to make a few bucks, and I eventually set up a separate e-mail account for those subscriptions so I could delete all the unsolicited offers without reading them. Despite that, if you have a genuine resource you want to tell people about, a website with serious content or the launch of a new newsletter, I don't think it's immoral to do a one-time mailing to a purchased subscriber list of professionals in your field. Just try to see it through the eyes of your target audience and don't send an e-mail solicitation that you wouldn't want to receive yourself.

There is such a thing as good e-mail marketing, and it follows the same model as print advertising in magazines. If you can provide people with actual content, articles they want to read, news blurbs or employment prospects in a specific interest or industry, even jokes or serialized novels, you can build up your own base of subscribers to a regular mailing. These opt-in newsletters are only sent to people who sign up for them and who can quit at any time. The best way to get initial subscribers to an opt-in newsletter is through an active website and high quality content. Organic growth can be very rapid since your subscribers will forward a newsletter to friends and colleagues if they believe it has merit. Nobody is offended by advertising in a free newsletter, though the positioning is a critical part of newsletter design. Don't load up the very top of the newsletter with ads, and don't place multiple ads between every article or news item. A single short ad at the top and the bottom is the classiest approach, and it should contain a hyperlink to a web page where readers can get more information. Don't use fancy formatting in a newsletter, as even the limited use of large fonts will be more than the e-mail software of many subscribers can tolerate. A slightly improved aesthetic is never worth losing a portion of your audience to software incompatibility

If you're looking for a quick way to get a newsletter off the ground, jumpstart website traffic, or promote a new book, you can purchase advertising space in an established newsletter. There are newsletters for every subject under the sun, many of which have membership lists in the tens of thousands, yet charge in the low tens of dollars for a small ad. Don't expect a huge result from paid online book marketing, that's why it doesn't cost much. However, the mathematical equation for launching a new POD book or Internet newsletter is less about making an immediate profit than getting those initial readers who you hope will get the word-of-mouth going. The best way to investigate opt-in newsletters for their advertising potential (not to mention news about an area of interest) is to set up a free e-mail account with Yahoo! or MSN and use it exclusively for when you subscribe to newsletters and professional organizations. It's easy to find newsletters to join on the web by doing a search on Google or your favorite search engine for subscribe newsletter "topic" where "topic" is a couple of keywords about the subject in which you're interested. Many newsletters will have advertising rate information included in every issue, and the rest will give the e-mail address of the newsletter publisher to contact for rates.