One of the questions I am frequently asked is "How Do I Promote My eBook?". There are lots of answers to this question, but the most important aspect is that you should have a centralized hub for your promotion efforts. This hub is usually a blog or web site that links into your other promotional tools, like Facebook and Twitter.
You can design a hub web site using a free Blogger account on Google so the only real cost for the web site is the cost of the domain name. Speaking of Domain Names, a good idea is to host a Blog on its own domain instead of showing the standard Blogger account URL, that is fairly easy to do using instructions from Blogger, especially if you are hosting your domain name on Go Daddy, Blogger has a simple link to set up the forwarding automatically. You can also buy a domain name right through Blogger and have the forwarding set up automatically. If your domain name is hosted somewhere else there are easy to follow instructions on Blogger for that as well.
The first thing you will see on a Blog is the look and feel, this is set up using a standard template from Blogger with a few customizations for the type style and color. Next you can add stand alone pages as tabs, for instance Home, Sign-Up, and Books. Blogger makes it easy to create specialty pages for your blog. The Home page is the standard blog page with all of the nice blog features, auto date inclusion, archiving of past posts, ability to set up favorite links, etc. All of these are easily included using Blogger's tools. One of the reasons to use a blog as a web site is that they are so easy to set up using the supplied templates, you can get a web site up and running in a week or less with no trouble. Once you have gone through the steps you could actually set up a Blog in an afternoon, I have done several of these to promote individual titles or topics.
The Blogger Tabs are special pages that contain static information, more like a traditional web site. A standard blog will have a list of posts with the most current post at the top, and the rest below or included in the archive. But if you want some information always readily available then adding in additional pages is the way to go. You could create a Sign-Up page that contains basic instructions on using the email sign-up form on the right, along with pointing out the Sharing buttons and links. This page would be basically for people who are new to blogging. Most experienced users will have already spotted these links, but it doesn't hurt to put in some instructions as well, just in case.
Blogger allows you to customize the blog by adding in what they call Gadgets. Depending on the template you use you can add several of these Gadgets in different places on the page. As an example there is a Gadget that contains share links for Facebook and Twitter. Of course Blogger automatically puts in Share buttons at the bottom of each post as well.
You can make income directly from your Blog by putting in an Amazon Affiliate box, placing ads from Amazon directly into your Blog. To add one of these you need an Amazon Affiliate account, then you can simply do a search for a book title on Amazon using the Amazon ASIN number or ISBN number. Set this up as a box using your Amazon Affiliate account and Amazon does the rest. You can sign up as an Amazon Affiliate using the link at the bottom of the Amazon home page titled "Become an Affiliate". There is no cost to join Amazon Affiliates.
You then grab the HTML code supplied by Amazon and put that onto your blog. I like to use a HTML Gadget (used to hold basic HTML or text) and paste in the HTML from Amazon. Amazon then serves the ad directly from their servers. By default the ad will align itself to the left side of the Gadget area, but by putting a Div tag around the Amazon code (in the HTML Gadget) you can then put in an align="center" attribute in the Div tag and align the ad to the center of the Gadget area if you like.
Another useful box to include is an email sign-up box. You could call this "Join My List" or "New Releases & Signings", or whatever you feel is appropriate for your site and audience. This is placed into another HTML Gadget. It is best if you use a service to handle this type of email box, one that I like is aWeber. The whole thing is set up over on AWeber and then the code is simply pasted into the HTML Gadget just like we did with the Amazon code above. The aWeber form takes you to a confirmation page, plus you will get a confirmation email. If you confirm through the email link you will then be taken to the blog's Book page. The confirmation page opens in a new window so you will not lose the Blog page. All this is set up using aWeber's service and is handled by them. All you need to do is configure the aWeber account, then grab the code and paste it into a HTML box on Blogger.
Other items that you might want to include in your Hub page are, a button to join the site using Google Friend Connect, an About Me link, a Favorite Links section that is another Blogger Gadget, and of course the Blog Archive (also a Gadget).
Once you have your Hub page set up, using Google's Blogger, other blog software, or your own hosted account you are ready to begin driving traffic to your hub page. The idea of course is to give yourself a central location to send traffic to. That central location will then have all the links you need to market to your list or prospects.
One final nice feature of Google's Blogger, since it is owned by Google your site is listed in Google's Search Engine practically as soon as you publish your blog.
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