It occurred to me recently that most of the authors that I work with have absolutely no idea what other clients are doing to drive traffic to their website … and how those efforts are paying off.
With that in mind, I thought I would take a few minutes today to update you on some of the recent marketing efforts of some of our clients. All of these are in the works now, and I will plan on posting again in a few weeks with updates on each of these campaigns and how they are doing.
Hopefully, this will provide ideas to other authors, and allow all of you to get a good idea of what’s working for authors in your genre.
Kathy Silverman and Lisa Bloch
TheManopauseMan.com
Marketing campaign: Advanced search engine optimization
The website for this new book, the Manopause Man, was just launched a week and a half ago. Our next project is to optimize the website for various keywords. Because this book and website is based on a very real topic — menopause for men — we know that people are going to Google and searching for terms like “menopause symptoms for men” and “male midlife crisis.” With that in mind, I worked closely with the authors to determine exactly which types of keywords they think people searching for information on the topic would be searching for. I then went ahead and did some keyword research to determine the 15-or-so specific series of words related to these topics that are being searched for most often. For example, “low-t” is searched for 368,000 times per month on Google, and “menopause for men” is searched for over 22,000 times.
Status: After selecting the specific keywords that we want to target, we are now working on implementing those keywords both on the front and back end of the website. I expect that in the next month or so, this site should start climbing up the rankings for the search terms we’ve honed in on.
Ronald A. Cooper
RonaldACooper.com
Marketing campaign: Blog tour
Ronald is a preacher in an African American church. His new book is an inspirational, uplifting, self-help book that speaks directly to his audience of followers. Every time he has had a chance to speak about his book to the African-American, Christian community, he has sold copies like wildfire. The challenge has been to expose his audience to the book.
Enter the blog tour. After working closely with Ronald, we identified about 30 different bloggers, websites, book reviewers and book clubs that speak specifically to his target audience. We looked closely at what each of these sites do (i.e. review books, interview authors, etc…) and customized letters to each one, encouraging them to include Ronald and/or his book in their updates. Any reference to Ronald or his book will, of course, include a link to his website and a link to purchase the book.
Status: Letters were sent out to all of the websites four days ago. We have now heard back from one person, asking Ronald to write a guest blog post for that site, and send along a bio, a photo, etc… We expect to hear from more in the near future.
Patrick Maguire, MD
TheCancerMD.com
Marketing campaign: Google Adwords campaign
Dr. Maguire is an oncologist who wrote a book for the general public about common forms of cancer, and their prevention and treatment methods. He also offers a copy of the e-book for sale on his website.
With September being Prostate Cancer Awareness Month and October being Breast Cancer Awareness month, Dr. Maguire wants to take this opportunity to really get the word out about the subjects. With that in mind, he’s decided to temporarily lower the price of the e-book to 99 cents … and use Google Adwords to promote the promotional rate.
With Google Adwords, you can select the search terms on which you want your ads to appear, write the specific text that will show up on a user’s results page, and bid on how much you’re willing to pay per click for those visits. That’s usually less than a dollar a click … and you only pay when someone clicks on your ad and goes to your website. Unlike traditional search engine optimization, these results are immediate.
Status: We will be setting up the Google Adwords campaign any day now. Do a search for “breast cancer awareness month” sometime next week and you will see Dr. Maguire’s ad. We plan to run this campaign for as long as his discount e-book price is in effect; probably until the end of October.
Check back soon and I will let you know how each of these campaigns are doing!