What makes free book marketing services good (other than being free)?

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Dennis AuBuchon on October 25, 2007 at 4:47am

I am always look for ways to market my current book and any that I will publish in the future. Free is especially helpful when you have limited funds as with most writers unless you are well-known. The free Internet Marketing service should be easy to use and the process well defined so that no steps are skipped. Also it is important that any service be reliable and not promise more than it can deliver. This includes having the principles of integrity in everything it offers and promises it makes about using the service. Integrity is important today and any service should have these principles and be reliable.

Permalink Reply by BiblioScribe on October 25, 2007 at 1:14pm

Dennis,

I agree. I am cautious about things that sound too good to be true. I suppose that whatever free system is used, transparency is key. Meaning that the system owner should be established, credible, and accessable.

Some great independent sources I have used to help build service-oriented sites like BiblioScribe.com are:

University of Kentucky white papre on Internet Credibility

Evaluating Internet Credibility

Stanford Web Credibility Research

and as a summary from the above link, see

How Do People Evaluate a Website's Credibility ?

You will see common threads in what the writers of the above articles think, but that has to be balanced with visitor perceptions mentioned in the last study link.

Jim
BiblioScribe.com

Permalink Reply by Cabo Bob on February 9, 2008 at 8:34pm

We've all heard "location, location, location". In this case I think it boils down to "traffic, traffic, traffic". That's the coin of the realm for marketing.

Sure there are SEO advantages to spread and backlinks and such, but those are subtle compared to the flow of eyeballs.

Granted there are a lot of esthetic factors in "credibility", but by and large people go where the action is. It doesn't matter how elegant a forum looks for instance, if there are 4 posts on it. All the people are over there on some tacky site where their posts get a dozen responses in a day.

So in a way, the whole problem is one of those quandries: how does one market marketing. And a bottom line is, if there is no traffic to a site, how good is the site at marketing?

Permalink Reply by BiblioScribe on February 10, 2008 at 10:20am

Excellent point! Craig's List is a horrible looking site, but the trafic is tremendous probably due to it's simplistic nature. So I suppose that if the quality and availability of the information is good, then it is possible that appearance will not (over time) matter. The independent study data in the original links above points to appearance. My experience is that appearance will help keep first time users looking at the site, and easy and understandible navigation to usable information is the next.

Jim
BiblioScribe.com