You have a product like an eBook that you want to self publish on Kindle, as you know, nothing will sell without traffic. Websites and products need to be seen and being seen is often the hardest part of any on line venture. So how can you drive traffic to your website or product?
Here we shall cover a few great methods of getting those all important 'eyes' on your products.
Social Media
Social Media is one of the most used ways today to generate traffic to a website; all the top blogging sites use Twitter and Facebook. There are many great ways to use these two sites to create a buzz for your product. And the great thing with these is that they are interactive, so you can talk to your potential customers.
Facebook Pages
One of the best ways of using Facebook is to set up a dedicated Fan Page for the book and invite your friends and family to it asking them to share your page, this could start to increase the page likes. This is good as it could have a viral affect with people suggesting their friends to like the page too. You could put on there in the form of notes along with an image a couple of chapters or extracts. Make the page inviting by adding a landing page and maybe get someone from Fiverr.com to do some graphics for your book to use as images on the page. The books introduction or first chapter should be pre-loaded for people to read when they come to the page then maybe over a couple of weeks add another chapter, then reduce it down a little by adding extracts of a chapter with a call to action like 'To read the rest of this exciting book please go to...' and direct them to your Kindle store. You could do this on your website and just use a Facebook page to create a buzz about your book then direct them to read extracts or chapters on your website before sending them onto Kindle.
Facebook Shop
There is also a great free ecommerce app where you can sell your downloadable and physical book directly inside your Facebook page. It is called Ecwid. We have it on our page for you to take a look at. You could also use Facebook ads to direct people to your blog site or Facebook page. Sending people outside of Facebook is more expensive than sending them to a Facebook page so the advice is to send them to a Facebook page then send them to a website/ blog site later.
Twitter is the same, you build up a large collection of followers who love to read books covering your style of writing then post Tweets with a short message saying a chapter/extract has been posted on your Facebook page/blog site. Many companies now use these two Social Networks to create a buzz about their products which then goes viral and creates an increase in traffic.
Videos
Turning chapters or extracts into video and placing them onto YouTube is also another great way of getting people to see your book, again they can be directed to your site, Facebook page or directly to your book on Kindle. There are other video sites to share to and not just YouTube. Create short PowerPoint slides with some wording and imagery on them then read extracts of your book into a microphone creating a short audio book. For videos over 5 minutes you will need to invest in some screen capture software like Camtasia by Techsmith or for a series of short videos you could use Techsmith's free version called Jing, there is also a great free online video service by the Twitter people called Screenr.
Podcasts Audio Books
Once you have recorded your videos they can be used again by turning the audio into a Podcast or audio book which can be sold in many places such as iTunes and Amazon or shared on sites like Podbean.com. If you have professional screen capture software you will no doubt be able to separate the visual from the audio and convert straight to MP.3 ready to upload to your Podcast sites. If you haven't got access to that kind of software then not to worry, all is not lost. There are Websites where you can place the URL of your YouTube video into their search bar and it will search for the video, rip the audio from it then allow you to down load it for free as an MP.3 straight to your computer ready to upload to your chosen sites. Just like the other methods here, you can then verbally direct people to where you want them to go to get the rest of the book or audio book. ListenToYouTube.com is a great place to start.
PDF Sharing
There are many free eBook and PDF share sites where you can upload your books for everyone to read and share, you could write a revised short version or simply convert a couple of chapters and excerpts into a small PDF and upload for free again with a 'To read the rest of this book please go to...' They can be sent to either Kindle or your website. Scribd.com is one such site. A Google search will give you a great list of places to start.
Article Marketing
Writing short articles around 500 to 800 words long based on the topic then shared with article directories is also a well-used traffic and branding method. The articles could get shared around the web giving your site much needed backlinks (helps with getting your site higher up the search rankings) and points potential traffic to your site and gets yours and your books name known. EzineArticles.com is the best known article directory. Again a Google search will give you a list of great article directories.
Satellite Sites
Another traffic method is to create satellite sites, these are free webpages that have similar content to that which is on your site and directs the readers back to where you want to send them. Satellite sites are pages in places like Squidoo, Hubzpages and Google's Blogger. Make sure that you do not just duplicate the content from your site, change it up a bit otherwise some of these sites will not allow it to be published and it could also harm your Google ranking.
Authors Blog
A little trick that a successful self-publisher once did which got him a ton of traffic was he wrote an article about a sportsman from his favourite team, he used a specific keyword which put his article into the top search results in Google. The article had nothing to do directly with the book but resulted in a lot of traffic from people searching on that keyword and topic; they visited the site, read his article then looked around his site to see what else he had written. So your books dedicated site could have an 'Authors thoughts of the week' style blog designed for the sole purpose of traffic generation. This could cover anything and everything, as long as you plan your article making sure it has good long tail keywords written into it and is based on very hot topics of the moment. Your rants alone could get you a great following!
Press Release
Consider having a Press Release, this is a powerful trick often used by big companies but can be costly. You write a descriptive article about your product then pay a company like PRWeb who will blast your article out to the four corners of the internet. Your article can be picked up and put onto other peoples websites like article marketing but on steroids creating backlinks and potentially a lot of traffic.
Paid Advertising
Finally the main and final tip is if you can afford to spend some money and have advertising done such as Google AdWords and banner ads made to direct your target market to your site. This is a science in itself and can be costly if done bad. Facebook does have a better advertising system that allows you to target people who might like your product as opposed to Google's which is based on what people search for. If you set an ad in Google on the keyword 'science fiction' and a lot of people did a search for 'science fiction' they would see your add and possibly click on it, but science fiction covers a lot of sub genres and a huge amount of people who clicked on your ad (you will pay for that click or per thousand impressions) might find that you are not offering what they are looking for, this would cost you a lot of wasted money. It can be an expensive learning curve. However, be warned, the normal cost of a Kindle eBook could easily be the same price you pay for a couple of 'clicks' and if they do not buy it is wasted money.
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