Yesterday I talked about how to make money by writing ebooks for Kindle. Today I’m taking a look at how to get them in front of potential customers – the marketing bit.
Great news: Amazon itself acts like a search engine
When your books are on Amazon, formatted for Kindle, there’s a serious built in marketing advantage.
- Amazon works very much like Google: you search, it delivers suitable suggestions. When people search for ebooks about Cooking With Dinosaurs, for instance, and you’ve written an ebook about it, Amazon will present your book in their list of suggestions.
- Amazon pages also pop up in the search results, which is a double-whammy. If someone searches Google for your kind of ebook, with a bit of luck your ebook page will appear on page 1
- It obviously helps if you name your ebooks sensibly. If you’re writing a guide to fitting a shower, don’t call it The trials and tribulations of a professional plumber. Call it How to fit a shower. When someone types ‘how to fit a shower’ into their search engine, your ebook stands a decent chance of being seen
Set up a simple website
- Choose a url. Since you’re selling ebooks, it makes sense to pick a name with the word ebook or ebooks in it. EbooksBySteveJones.com, for example.
- Use one of the world’s most popular and easiest to drive platforms, WordPress, to create a simple website with a home page, about page, contact page and a page for each book. Or get someone to do it for you. You’re bound to have a friend, family member, neighbour, teen geek or colleague who’ll do it for a few quid or a bottle of wine.
- Basic set-up takes literally minutes and you can choose a ready-made free WordPress theme so you don’t need to worry about design.
- When it’s ready, learn how to manage your website – it’s ridiculously easy with WordPress – and write your pages. Don’t forget to include a link to the Kindle ebooks page for each book.
Ebook marketing media
Here’s a list of the media we’ll be using to promote my ebooks online. This isn’t the place for fine detail – there’s mountains of information online if you’re starting from scratch and don’t know a thing about marketing.
- Social networks, the most popular of which are Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest and LinkedIn. Pick the ones you enjoy – it makes life so much easier than struggling with media you don’t like.
- Blogging – WordPress is excellent for blogging. Put very simply, the more you blog about your writing, books, life, thoughts and experiences, the more search engines like it and the more people will find your site.
- Content marketing – creating a regular stream of really interesting and useful information on your website to attract and keep people’s attention and inspire them to share your stuff with their social networks.
- Pay Per Click – You can always use Google AdWords (or the Bing and Yahoo equivalents) to push your ebook to the top of the Google search results. It can be remarkably cheap.
Will I make money if I don’t do any marketing?
Yes. It’s possible. You might write an ebook that catches the imagination of thousands or even millions of people, in which case it’ll take off like a rocket on its own. But as a general rule, the more marketing you do the more sales you make.
