Marketing Your e-Book: The Challenge

The most challenging part of becoming a successful e-book author is in how to market your e-book.

The first thing to do before you jump feet first into the hurly burly world of online marketing is to define your marketing goals. You can achieve this in five easy steps

Ø Identify your audience – who will read your e-book?

Ø Determine the value of your e-book in relation to your audience’s needs.

Ø Plan how you intend to position your e-book relative to your chosen market.

Ø Decide which marketing platform you intend to use – article marketing, social networking, paid advertising, or even a combination of all three.

Ø Determine how much you want to allocate to your marketing budget.

Your marketing effort will very much depend on your budget and other resources at your disposal. As my budget is rather limited, I tend to use article marketing.

Article marketing is one of the easiest ways to stimulate interest in your e-book. There are literally hundreds of article directories on the Internet. These directories serve the purpose of supplying webmasters with free content for their websites.

Writing articles and publishing them to article directories for webmasters to use is an excellent way of drawing attention to your e-book.

In short, a webmaster browses an article directory for articles suitable for posting on their website or in their newsletter. In exchange for using your article, the webmaster provides you, the author, with a small space to advertise yourself and your latest work.

An alternative to article marketing is to harness the power of social networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn. Facebook and LinkedIn are social utility sites that connect friends, colleagues or people with similar interests. LinkedIn appeals more to the business professional, whereas Facebook has a much broader reach in terms of its demographics.

Social networking sites are an excellent place to showcase your latest e-book publication. Facebook, for example, has a set of tools for creating a fan page for your e-book. Visitors to your fan page can review your work and leave comments. With over 500 million active Facebook users, the potential for your e-book to go viral is enormous.

You can find out more on how to market on Facebook by reading ‘Facebook Marketing: An Hour a Day’ by Chris Treadaway and Marj Smith.

If your budget will allow, you can always use direct advertising. Google Adwords and StumbleUponAds spring to mind here. Google Adwords is slightly more expensive than StumbleUponAds, but both offer a good service supported by analytical tools to monitor the progress of your ads. It is all a matter of how much you are willing to spend on marketing your e-book.

But before you begin using any of the above methods for marketing your book, why not let your relatives and friends know about your latest e-book publication? Send them a few pages of your e-book as a sample of your work. The idea is to create a buzz around your e-book by encouraging your relatives and friends to talk about what you have written.

If your relatives and friends like the content of your e-book, then why not ask them to circulate the link where people can buy it? You will be surprised by how quickly and efficiently this method of marketing gets your e-book noticed.

Whatever method you choose for marketing your e-book, do not use spam as a means of getting your e-book noticed. Spam does not work and it will quickly get your e-book URL blacklisted by the search engines.