Marketing Tips

Your web site is a marketing tool for selling products, in our case eBooks. Marketing eBooks is simply a matter of providing descriptive material, so the buyer knows what the eBook contains, and can decide if it is something they want. Trying to persuade someone to buy an eBook consists of presenting the descriptive material in the most favorable light possible, and showing the potential buyer how those contents might be of benefit to them, be they entertaining, informative, or whatever.

The real difficulty in marketing on-line is getting people to your web site in the first place, so they can read the descriptive material you provide. That requires marketing the web site itself.

Many people design a web site, then begin to look at how they can bring it to the attention of web surfers -- but that is backwards. First, you need to decide how you are going to attract visitors, then design the web site with that in mind. Many of the marketing techniques that will help promote your site need to be built into the very structure of the web site itself.

Begin by considering who your target audience will be. If you say "EVERYONE!", that is an overly ambitious goal. If you lack the resources of a Yahoo.com or Amazon.com you will find yourself spread too thin trying to appeal to the interests and needs of everyone. You need to target a specific and limited audience -- later you may want to expand to other groups, but focus on one at a time. You need to make sure that the targeted audience isn't too limited, you need enough potential customers to make your efforts worthwhile. To gauge the size of your potential audience you need to do market research -- not a formal study with survey's and statistics -- but a bit of targeted browsing and searching.

First you need to consider which keywords best describe the interests of your target group. These are the words they are most likely to type into a search engine when looking for information on the Web. Let's say for example you decide you want to target people interested in history. That topic is probably too broad to target effectively -- lets do a little research to see if we should narrow it down to History of England, or 19th Century History, or what?

Our tool for doing this market research will be a web site called Wordtracker (www.wordtracker.com). You can sign up for a free trial to get started, or subscribe for more complete results. What they do is compare the frequency of requests for particular keywords to the number of sites available for that word. You can start with one word, and they provide related terms. The results are summarized in the column labeled KEI, look for a value over 400 for best results. Words or phrases with a high KEI are a good choice for your site. Begin designing your site around these keywords, keeping in mind the audience they are likely to draw.

See our Website Design Tips for specific suggestions on building your website. Concentrate on providing unique and interesting content, and you will get traffic when people discover your site exists.

The next step in helping people discover your existence is to submit your site to the major search engines. Don't waste your time or money with those offering to submit your site to 1,000s of search engines. There are fewer than a dozen search engines that matter, and with their inter-relationships and shared listings, you really only need to submit your site to some of those -- see our article on Search Engine Optimization for more details.

You can also attract some traffic by announcing your site on related newsgroups, if you can find some that allow such blatant self-promotion (and some do). For those that frown on such announcements, try a more subtle approach, and use some of the knowledge you have acquired developing your site content to contribute relevant posts in related newsgroups. Include the name and URL of your site in a three or four line signature at the end of your message. This approach will not garner a great deal of traffic, but for a new site it is a start, and the results are immediate (if short-lived). Hopefully you have provided content that will convince visitors that the site is worth return visits.

Direct email is a wonderful way to promote your site, IF you have a mailing list of people already interested in the subject who have opted to receive mailings on that topic. Mass mailing (spam) is not effective, in fact it will be counter-productive as you will be labeled as a probable crook for using unethical promotion.

How can you find a targeted mailing list? People will offer to sell you one tailored to your desires, and then give you an arbitrary list of email addresses harvested from the Web. More spam. Instead, find a newsletter (or ezine) covering your topic, or a related field. If you have chosen World War II history, for example, you can find plenty of periodicals devoted to History, Military History, 20th Century History, etc. You can pay to have an add included if they accept advertising, or you can write and submit an article on the subject that will be published for free, and include your website URL and title in your signature. The editor is not going to accept your article if it is just an ad for your site ... you need to include worthwhile information. But that information doesn't need to be new research or unique (at least for most ezines) -- simply find a good book on the subject, and tell the story of one event or sub-topic in your own words. Later you can expand that same article and put it on your web site.

A great way to attract new visitors is to give away some 'freebie' on your site. It can be an eBook, special report, a screen-saver (there are programs that let you create those), 'wallpaper' graphic, sound file, or whatever. Just be sure you are not infringing on anyone's copyright, patent or trademark. Mention the freebie in your signature file in articles, newsgroup posts and email. If you offer something worthwhile, other people will spread the word for you.

The 'Web' is so called because sites are linked one to another. Some search engines, like GOOGLE, even use the number and 'quality' of links to your site as a ranking criteria. So getting other sites to link to you is a prime means of generating traffic. One way to do that is to offer to exchange links. Most of the on-line advice you read will suggest you try to establish reciprocal links with related but non-competing web sites. That is short sighted. Your competition is really the best place to establish reciprocal links! This is counter-intuitive, but look at it from your customer's perspective. If they don't find what they are looking for on your site, where should they look next? They can (and will) go back to a search engine if you don't provide them with a link. They are going to find your competition eventually anyhow, why not benefit from it? If your competition has a link back to your site, you are getting very targeted traffic from them. Your customer's experience is more positive, so they are more likely to return. You gain credibility, traffic and customer loyalty. Will you lose sales? Only if your competition offers better prices, products or service than you do -- and if that is the case you need to change.

Another secret to getting effective links to your site is to offer endorsements. Many web sites have one-line quotes from visitors and customers raving about how wonderful the site or product is. If you can honestly say so, send your endorsement to such a site, with the request that they include a link to your site in the quote. If you have credentials relevant to your topic, all the better.

A similar technique can be used with 'visitor books' and other automatically posted comments (web logs, blogs, etc), if you find relevant sites that have these. Be sure your comment doesn't look like an advertisement -- be relevant and positive. Put a link to your site in your signature line to draw traffic to your site.

Banner exchanges, web rings, free-for-all postings, and their ilk are useless, and more likely to attract junk mail than traffic (you usually have to provide your email address when you sign-up for this type of 'service').

Use creativity and persistence -- it takes time to build traffic. Look for at least one place each day to post your URL, either as part of your signature, or as part of a link-exchange. Even small results will add up over time.