Create Relationships On The Internet With Key Websites- John Kremer

Today's blog is one I have been anticipating for a while. Book marketing expert and guru (a word I do not use lightly), John Kremer, has agreed to share with Marketing Tips For Authors readers the most important promotion you can do on the Internet for your book. John's decades of book marketing experience and bona fide sales success is available to you through his website at Bookmarket.com, his blog, and in his many books and products including his 700+ page book, 1001 Ways to Market Your Books. An entire blog post can be devoted to uncovering the gems and resources he has for authors at his website and blog. You will be doing yourself a favor by visiting it and poking around. No doubt you will leave with some nuggets of advice you will want to put to use today.


Create Relationships On The Internet With Key Websites
Book Marketing Advice from John Kremer

The most important promotion you can do on the Internet is to create relationships with the key websites that your targeted readers are already visiting on a regular basis. You want to look for websites that fit these criteria:

• Rated among the top 30 for the keywords that your readers would type into Google to find websites featuring content like your book. For example, if you are writing on crocheting Halloween costumes, you'd type in Halloween costumes or crocheting costumes or the full keyword: crocheting Halloween costumes.
  
  
• Ranked among the top half million websites according to Alexa.com. Rankings in Alexa roughly reflect the number of visitors to that website: The lower a website's Alexa rank, the greater the number of unique monthly visitors to that website. You want to contribute content to websites with lots of traffic.
  
  
• The website features content contributed by other people. If a website features little outside content, you will have a tough time creating a relationship with that website. You'll find that many government, educational, and association websites feature very little contributed content. Also, some retail websites are reluctant to accept outside content.
  
  
• Check to see that the website is open to the kind of content you can contribute. If you like to write articles, does the website feature articles written by outside contributors? If you like to be interviewed, does the site actively interview outside contributors?
  
  
• Finally, can you control the content? Wikipedia entries are often highly rated in Google, but such entries are hard to contribute to and, more important, hard to control. Anyone else can come in after you and edit your contribution.
  

The protocol on the Internet is that if you contribute content to another website, that website has an obligation to link back to your website (or blog or Amazon sales page) with a credit line you write.

Note: The top-rated websites are always looking for new content. That's one of the key ways they stay top-rated by Google and top-ranked by Alexa. New content draws repeat visitors.

Most websites can't create all the content they need to stay top-rated. Hence, they need you. All you have to do is determine the content they like to feature that matches the content you can provide. Content might include articles, guest blogs, blog comments, interviews (written or audio), teleseminars, radio shows, Q&A columns, book reviews, book excerpts, forum posts, and videos.

Remember to target high-traffic visible websites focused on the keywords which reflect the topic of your book. You can have all sorts of great content on your website, but if no one comes, it really doesn't matter. That's why you want to contribute great content to websites that area already getting the traffic you crave. Over time, as you contribute to more and more high traffic websites and get links back to yours, your website will become more highly rated and more often visited. That's the goal of Internet marketing: getting eyeballs.

Note that the above advice applies to fiction and poetry as well as nonfiction.

With fiction, your targeted keywords might be horror thriller or contemporary romance or John Grisham (if your novel is a thriller in the style and plot of a Grisham novel). You'd want to find high-traffic websites that feature author interviews, book reviews, fiction excerpts, and fan interaction.

With poetry, your targeted keywords might be rhyming poem or e.e. cummings or absurdist poetry. Or, if your poetry has a theme (such as golf), your keywords would be golf poem or golf poetry or golfing poet. There are thousands of websites that feature poems and poets.

Creating relationships takes work. It's not necessarily easy in the beginning to track down the people behind the websites who decide what to feature on the website. But it can be done. Your goal should be to create one new relationship per day (if you are working full time on marketing your book) or two to three new relationships per week if you ware working part time.

The neat thing about taking the time to create these relationships is that they can be good for a long time. You can go back to the same websites and blogs again and again to contribute new content.

In my Ten Million Eyeballs online marketing course, I start with a ten-hour lesson on how to create relationships because they are the basis for everything else you will do on the Internet to market your books, including giving things away free, doing joint venture campaigns, creating viral videos, and building viral websites.

This first step of creating relationships should not be ignored no matter how much Internet promoters want to sell you on the next hot thing. Without these relationships, your marketing campaign becomes a one-hit temporary wonder (at best) or a complete bust (at worst). Your goal should be to create long-term relationships that will help you sell books for years to come – with less and less effort!

-- John Kremer is the author of 1001 Ways to Market Your Books, webmaster of BookMarket.com (top ten rated in Google for more than 100 keywords), and developer of the Ten Million Eyeballs online marketing course. For more information, see http://www.tenmillioneyeballs.com.