How Can Geotargeting Help You Market your Book

As an author (or any online marketer), you may find times when it's beneficial to show specific information to visitors, depending on where they live. Fortunately geotargeting can help this happen. This post will not explain all the technical details of how geotargeting works, but there is plenty of information on that available on the net if you want to do some more research.

When would we want to use geotargeting? Consider these circumstances:

• Pay Per Click Advertisements- If you are advertising your book signing tour on a site like Google, then it can save you a lot of money if you advertise specific ads only in the cities you will be visiting. Only people in those cities will see your ads and you will only pay for people who can actually visit your signing.
  
  
• Translations of your website- If you have a strong international visitor base, you can actually have pages written in specific languages show on your site depending on the country code of the visitor.
  
  
• Regional News- Suppose you have news on your own website that is specific to certain regions in the country. This is a simple example, but it will work to illustrate the point. Let's say that you are having a webinar. You can have the event time displayed in the visitor's specific time zone. Or if you have written a series of book on gardening, you may want your book on desert gardening to be the main title for people visiting from Arizona while your book on mid-west gardening to be the prominent title for visitors from my home state of Indiana.
  
  
• Local advertisement- Let's say that you are running a special advertisement for people in Florida and Texas during their Strawberry Festival. You can have your server run specific pages for them during the time of their festival while all other visitors get your default page.
  

There really are a lot of uses for geotargeting if you want to get this detailed in your marketing and advertising. For a PPC advertising campaign on Google, it's a pretty simple thing to do. But if you want to run a geotargeting campaign on your own server, it can get pretty technical and you may need to hire someone to help, though there are instructions that can walk you through the process of doing it yourself. Here are some more resources for you to look at if geotargeting sounds like something you want to look into further.

Geotargeting Tutorial
The Benefits of Geotargeting
FREE Geo Targeting ASP.NET Component
Setting a geographic target for your site in Webmaster Tools (YouTube Video)
Geo Redirection and Geo Targeting (YouTube Video)
Php geotargeting techniques
Geo target your visitors
Effective Geotargeting with PHP

I hope these resources help get you started on your quest for implementing geotargeting into your marketing campaign. One resource you do not want to forget is your web hosting company. They may or may not be a wealth of information, depending on how eager they are to help you with a project like this.

As I said, geotargeting via your own server can be a highly technical thing to do. It's definitely not for everyone, but if you want to take your marketing to a new level, then this is one area to consider.