Create a Book Website to Sell More Books

A book website is your primary marketing platform for all of your book selling efforts. Instead of sending people directly to a link to your book on Amazon, you should be sending people to a landing page on this website to empower your book marketing system.

Utilizing a website to market all of your related books greatly increases your book sales during the promotional stage before and after publishing your books.

As part of your book marketing plan, having a website for your book or centered around a topic area of your book or multiple publications is essential so you never lose control of your marketing system for the life of your books.

Many people turn straight to social media and use it to do everything, but what happens if social media goes away one day? What if your one connection to the world just closes up shop and leaves you high and dry?

Never Risk Your Number One Marketing System for Your Books

Having a website that you own and control is essential for any business. People take for granted that social media platforms aren't forever safe. All it takes is one wrong move by the company and poof, your social network disappears and you can't get it back. Or if you do one thing wrong and they suspend your account, you can't do anything until it is straightened up which can take several days to several months.

No matter how many books you write and publish, you should definitely have a website to go along with them. They pull visitors from everywhere no matter what goes on. Search engines are a good residual source of visitors if you set it up properly. And you can always add too it to keep it growing. Use it in conjunction with your writer website and you will make a very successful selling machine.

A Book Website is a Very Important Part of Your Marketing Plan

A book website is the second most important part of your marketing plan, right there with your writer website. This is where all of your advertising sources feed into so the pages on your site can entice the visitor, tell the why they have to read your book, and funnels them through a process that captures their information (name, email address), which is your first priority, and sells your book (or directs them to where they can get it  such as on Amazon or other online stores).

It's all about building an email list for which you will ultimately be able to advertise to whenever you want. Definitely learn more about how to build an email list to see how many lists you should be maintaining and how you utilize them within your marketing plan.

The Structure and Features of Your Book's Website

Your marketing website for your book or related books can be as simple or complex as you want to make it. It gives you the opportunity to not only attract visitors, but a place to send potential buyers. Best of all, it does a lot of the sales for you so you can sell books automatically with very little interaction. This give you more time to write more books.

With that said, you will have to dedicate some time to building and maintaining your book website.

Your website should be centered around the topic of your book (an interest area, category, niche...) and be based on keywords that people are looking for. One great resource I've found that helps research keywords for books to find the best ones for your marketing efforts is Publisher Rocket. This site was designed to help authors choose the right keywords, generate book descriptions, and choose the right categories on Amazon. This is a gold mine source of great data that will skyrocket your sales.

Each page of your website should be centered on an individual keyword and related topic to your home page or entire website domain. Never go more than 3 pages deep with content (unless those pages aren't going to be indexed by a search engine.

Of course you need a home page for your website. This is you key focus area that introduces your visitors to the website's primary topic or area of interest. Do not sell you book directly from this page if you want your website to do more than just sell. If you want your website to attract people from the search engines, you need to provide quality content that people are looking for, and enough of it for the search engines to like.

You will also have your standard about the author page, contact page, and a main page that shows all of your titles associated with your book website.

Each book you are trying to sell should have a main page (one that teases the reader and makes them what to buy it). This is also known as a landing page or splash page. Also on this page, there should be a link to the sales page on Amazon, a buy it now button if you are directly selling the books, or a way for subscribers to get the book for free if they provide their name and email address.

Each book you have associated on this website with a landing page should be directly related to the overall topic of your website. If it is about any other topic, it won't help you website out; it can actually hurt your website when the search engines penalize you.

NOTE: You can have an "Other Books by Author" page where you list all of your books, but the main focus is the book or books you are trying to sell.

Another feature or page on your book website should be a blog about your book. Figure in time before publishing, tossing out teases here and there, progress points, and anything else you want to talk about related to the book. You can also add copies of reviews from Amazon, Goodreads, or other sources or have an independent page just for reviews.

Just like your author website, you want to continually grow your website, adding content frequently to help it with the search engines.

Getting Visitors to Your Book's Website

Getting visitors to your website is a little different than your writer website. You must concentrate all of your paid for advertising to getting visitors to this website. There are also a lot of free advertising methods you can use, but be sure they all link back to your book website so you can get them to give you their information and ultimately buy your books.

Using pay per click features of Google works. You focus in on keywords related to your book's topic and or website to drive people into your website.

You can post actual advertisements on Facebook that you can direct to people who are interested in your book's topic. You can also do free advertising to a book's page on Facebook or to a group on Facebook. Either way can be very good sources of traffic to your website.

You can tweet your website's URL (one of your splash pages) to twitter with a teaser statement on it to get people to click on your link.

If you can think of an advertising method, you can use it. Just remember to send people to this website.

If you have any questions regarding how to build a book website or getting visitors to that site, please contact me and I'll help out the best I can.

What's Going on?

Publisher's Notebook is adding content as quickly as possible to help as many writers and publishers as possible. Keep checking back for new, helpful information related to writing, publishing, and book marketing.