Use Your Website To Market Your Book Like A Pro

There are tons of things you can do to market your book from your own website. My website is www.MinisterFortson.com and I post that as an example. My website has been up going on 2 years and only the last 5 or so months has been focused on building my fan base. I read over 100 internet
marketing websites in order to weed through the following information on

1.      There are tons of choices when setting up your own personal website. www.BeyondSelfPublishing.com is a great option for $4.95 set up + $1.99 per month. Whatever hosting company you use, make sure you install the WordPress script. GoDaddy.com can also set you up for an entire year for around $60.

2.       Set up a Feedburner account to capture email addresses from visitors.

3.       Once your WordPress script is installed, choose the plugins that will help you best build your subscriber list. The following plugins can be used to capture email addresses: Feedburner Footer Slideup, Email After Post, or insert the Feedburner sign up code in a sidebar widget.

4.       Give your website and articles the opportunity to go viral. The following plugins allow people to easily share your website with their network: Digg Digg, Facebook Like, Facebook Share

I currently own the 5^th Edition of John Kremer’s 1001 Ways To Promote Your Book and one area it lacks in is Internet promotion. His newsletter more than makes up for it though (I’m a subscriber).

There are several things you can do to make your internet promotion much easier.

Get the Twitter Tools plugin for your WordPress site. It will automatically update Twitter whenever you post a new blog.

2.       Connect your Facebook and MySpace profiles to your twitter account. When you update your website, it will automatically update Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace.

3.       Copy your RSS feed URL and add it to Linked In and your Amazon.com author profile. By the time you complete this step, you can update your entire network simply by posting to your own website.

4.       I started my own internet radio show on www.BlogTalkRadio.com/ministerfortson which gets me about 600 – 1,000 listeners per week that download the archives. My show is usually in the Top 15 in the Religion category. I didn’t do a show on Thanksgiving so it may have fallen a bit if you read this when I first post it. Doing interviews with other authors helps build your listenership without much effort. They usually promote their own interviews so it equals free promotion for you.

5.       Submit your radio show to iTunes for syndication. It usually takes about two weeks for your show to be picked up.

6.       Post your BTR player on your sidebar so anyone that comes to your site can listen. Also post links to your latest show in your blog updates so your entire network knows about it.

7.       Convert your shows to .wmv format using Windows Media Player (free with any windows operating system). Upload your shows to YouTube to reach an entirely different audience. www.YouTube.com/ministerfortson. I only have about 80 subscribers on there, but over 16k plays and I still have hours of content that I need to post.

8.       Connect your YouTube account to Facebook so it will automatically update your friends when you upload new videos.

9.       Add your website address to your YouTube video descriptions so people can easily find your website.

10.   BTR has thousands of shows on their network. You can contact these hosts with a short bio and description of your book. I need to update my website, but I’ve done over 30 interviews on BTR on other people’s shows.

I’m currently averaging 1 book sale per day, except for this month, I’ve only sold 20. Probably because I’ve only done 1 radio show this month. Also, if you’ve been keeping track of how much money I’ve had to spend, it’s a whopping $5.00/month for hosting on GoDaddy. Everything else above is 100% FREE.

Technically I don’t spend any money because of the following:

1.       Participate in BTR revenue share program. It pays out monthly via PayPal. I average about $30/month, but its taken me 9 months to build it to that point.

2.       Add Google Adsense on your website. I’m currently earning $20/month average, but I only have it on my sidebar and the bottom of my posts. My site isn’t as monetized as it could be.

3.       Publish Kindle copies of your book. I sell 6 books a week on Kindle at 70% royalty on $4.95. My Kindle royalty is about $100/month. If you look up my book on Amazon Kindle, you will see that it is in the Top 100 in my niche. My book: As The Days of Noah Were: The Sons of God and The Coming Apocalypse

When you add up everything it comes down to the following since taking my writing seriously (July 2010).

$240 average monthly book royalties + $100 average Kindle royalties + $20 Adsense + $30 BTR - $5/month hosting = $385/month average. You won’t be able to quit your job, but an extra $385 month comes out to an additional $4,620 a year. Most people don’t even get that as a raise at their job.

Also be aware that you can join the Amazon.com affiliate program, review books on your site, and make money on other people’s books when they use your affiliate link to shop on Amazon. I haven’t
implemented this yet, but plan to. This isn’t the most money in the world, but it’s a great starting point for those authors out there spending boatloads of money and not making any. I’m sure if I increased my promotional budget from $0 to $100/month I could sell a lot more books, but for those starting with a $5/month marketing budget (like myself) this is an awesome return on investment.

I hope this post helps.