Creating a Buzz for Your Books Online
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By Virginia Lawrence
Ready to create a buzz for your book? You can do a huge amount online by making yourself known in a friendly, informative way.
- Find one or more communities discussing your topic. Online communities have been used to huge success by movie studios and music publishers to create a real buzz. For authors and book publishers, participating in targeted communities works best for nonfiction, but it can be helpful for writers of fiction too.
- Get your articles distributed online. If each article includes your contact information and Web site URL at the bottom, those links will bring buyers. If each article also includes the most important keywords used by people to find your type of book, lots of people will find the articles.
Special interest communities exist for every topic, as online forums or as online discussion groups. You can find and join the communities discussing your topic. For example, I belong to a Senegal Parrot discussion group. I enjoy the group as a source of information on small parrots, but some of the group members are there to promote their businesses. We have parrot book authors, parrot breeders, and people who have Web stores selling various parrot paraphernalia.
The business members are good group members, discussing and responding to posts from other members. Their participation makes them trusted members of the community, and people like them. So when these business members include breeder or book or Web store information in their e-mail signature, other members take notice.
The business members keep everything low-key, but they do make sales directly to the community. Plus, the community members make recommendations to their friends. It’s good old-fashioned networking, but it’s highly specific networking. By participating in special interest groups, the book publisher or author is talking directly to his target market all over the country.
Publish articles in a blog. You can have someone install a blog on your Web site, or you can simply use one of the free blog sites. Whether the blog is directly on your Web site or on a free blogger site, you want to include articles giving away some of your hard-won information.
Submit articles to Web sites displaying articles on your topic. If your articles enhance those Web sites, the articles will be welcome, and their site visitors will find their way to your site to purchase.
The amount of time you’re willing to spend in targeted online communities and in efforts to get articles published online will determine the success of your buzz campaign. You can create as much buzz as you want!
–© 2006 Virginia Lawrence, Ph.D. SPAWN's Webmaster and Technology Editor, Virginia is a professional Web Developer and Online Marketing Consultant. She routinely places client sites on the first page of a Google search. Contact her at virginia@spawn.org or visit her Web site at http://www.cognitext.com.
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