How to Market Self-Published Book, Part 3

In part 2, we learned the fundamentals of marketing via local advertising and online forums. However, there are far more places that you can market your self-published book to. Apart from forums - and there are hundreds of those, so be sure to get on as many relevant ones as you can - there are tons of free web sites such as article sites, directories, simple Ask Question sites like Ask Yahoo, and many more. Just do a few searches and you will unearth more than you need to get started. It might also be a good idea to keep a note of the sites & forums you have signed yourself up for.

What are Article sites? Article sites are springing up all over the place on the Internet. They serve a real purpose, too. Articles are basically a description of a particular subject, that includes relevant keywords and phrases that the search engines are likely to pick up on when they come crawling the article web sites. These sites are very popular with the search engines as they provide good, solid information on any subject you care to mention. The search engines always find new content every time they call, so they call very often - possibly every few days - to collect this new relevant data that the article site has added.

How do I write an article? You need to have an article written about your self-published book either by writing it yourself or getting someone else to write it for you. There are hundreds of article writers available - and quite cheaply, too. When you have the finished article, you will need to do a free sign-up on the article web site and during the process you will be asked to complete your profile. At the bottom of your profile you will find a box where you can put several links back to your book and/or your web site. When you are ready, submit your article - all about self-publishing perhaps, or this article about "how to market your self-published book," and wait for the article to get published - possibly a few days. Then your link will be live and waiting for the search engines to come a-calling.

Then you have to make a few little changes to the text and format of your article so that it cannot be deemed a copy of the other one, and start submitting the article to as many article sites as you can find. Eventually you will find free traffic arriving on your site from these great article links. All FREE.

As mentioned previously, there are hundreds, if not thousands of free places on the Internet that you can place an advertisement - generally for FREE. You have to hunt them out and dig till you find them, but for every ad you place, you are adding more strength to your web site and free traffic will definitely ensue.

Finally, there is the Paid Online Advertising: Google, Yahoo and MSN are the main ones. Put simply, you bid on a set of keywords and phrases that you believe are relevant to your web site and its products, and if, and only if, someone clicks on your ad box then you will be charged the amount you elected to pay for that keyword or phrase, and the visitor - the clicker - will be transported to a page on your web site where you have your sales pitch - with you hoping that the end result will be that they buy your product.

Paid advertising is a whole new subject on its own which we will get into at a later stage.