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What Internet Book-Marketing Activity Has Worked for You?

You've written that book and now you're looking to make it into a bestseller. Your friends and experts have suggested that marketing the book on the Internet is one of the best ways to promote your book. Where do you start? What's the best use of your time?

I'd like to answer these questions by creating a list of all the Internet marketing activities that come to my mind. My hope is that this community will jump in and add to this list or comment on the efficacy of the activities on the list. It's also possible that some of the activities have alternative resources (for example, using Wordpress instead of Blogger for your blog.) Please note that I don't claim to be an expert on book-marketing and some of the ideas that are on this list can be improved. I really want this to be a collaborative effort at list building and would appreciate your input. (Disclosure: I'm the founder of fReado.com - a site that can help you distribute your book-extract across 60 different social networks and book-marking sites. I will however refrain from giving additional attention to my product in this forum post and attempt to be impartial and objective.)

I'll keep adding to this list as I discover additional activities. After sometime I hope to create a neat, printable document that will serve as a resource for future authors.

Thanks in advance for your participation.

Let's get started:
- Setup a blog (www.blogger.com)
- Write out a press-release and distribute the press-release (www.prweb.com)
- Become active on Amazon.com (create a full profile and link to your blog-feed)
- Create a book-extract (be generous with the number of pages you share - at least 30 pages)
- Make a book-widget out of your book-extract and use it instead of your book image
- Make and post a YouTube video about your book
- Get yourself interviewed by a prominent podcaster in your field
- Post your book-extract to your Facebook profile
- Post your book-extract to your MySpace profile
- Post your book-extract to your Orkut profile
- Tell all your Yahoo email contacts about your book
- Tell all your Hotmail email contacts about your book
- Tell all your Gmail email contacts about your book
- Get your book book-marked on Delicious
- Get your book book-marked on Digg
- Get your book book-marked on Reddit

Any other ideas? Please contribute your thoughts. Add to this list. Tell us what works and what doesn't. Elaborate on the points mentioned. I really want this to become the ultimate resource for authors looking to market their books online.

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Hi Heather,

Thanks for contributing. I absolutely agree. Twitter has been sending a phenomenal amount of traffic to our site. And I've got nearly 1000 people following me. The funny thing is that I was out of town for 3 days and was away from Twitter for that time. When I got back and looked, my Twitter followers had gone up by about 100 people (not bad for not posting anything for 3 days.)

So yes. I have to agree that Twitter is one of the top activities that an author can do and will add it to this list.

Any others. Would appreciate any additional ideas for marketing your book online as I want to draw up this list and put it up as an author resource.

Cheers,

Vikram
The ones that have worked the most for me are:

Make a book-widget out of your book-extract and use it instead of your book image
Writing a blog (though through Google-hits)
Writing related articles for magazines/websites.
Hi Chetan,

Thanks for this information.

Cheers,

Vikram
I remembered a few other items that an author can do in order to market their book online. These are:

- Create a Squidoo lens - This link helps you create a lens that is specific for Lulu.com. If your book is not published on Lulu, you can use this link as inspiration to create your own Squidoo lens. The link is:
http://www.squidoo.com/lulu/hq

2. Participate in social book discovery sites such as www.weread.com, www.shelfari.com, www.librarything.com,
There's another site that I'd like to add that helps with free websites - http://www.webs.com/
And here is one more that I forgot to include - tag your book on Amazon, and get others to do the same.

Chetan
I agree with Chetan. I've recently found that tagging your book on Amazon can really bump a title up in ranking.
thanks for that info I will go for each one of those suggestions. Please visit us @ www.nothingbutauthors.com and tell us what you would advise for us at our site
Here's one more thing you can do - especially for non-fiction ...
Join groups on Linked-in and share your book-extract with these groups on Linked-in
Thanks for the suggestion........much appreciated
This is wonderful, Vikram. I can't wait to see the finished list.
I am currently doing a blog tour, that has been helpful to me. Also, email marketing to my target market (through a company that has a proven email list) resulted in many sales of my Chrisitan children's book.

Best wishes,
Patti Ogden
Hi Patti,

Thanks for this information. A blog tour sounds like a good idea. It would be great if you could provide a few useful links / companies that help with blog tours.

The email marketing idea also sounds great especially for a clearly defined audience like Christian Children's Books. Good luck with your book!

Cheers,

Vikram

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