Promoting Yourself Using Social Bookmarking

If you’re a published author and you want to learn about how to promote your book, I highly recommend that you sign up for the Author and Marketing Experts newsletter. The newsletter is chock full of tips and tricks for how to publicize your book. You can also check out their free online courses and podcasts at Publishing Insiders.

One of the tips in a recent newsletter was about social bookmarking and you can also click here to read an article on maximizing book reviews by using social bookmarking.

Of course by now some of you may be wondering, “What the heck is social bookmarking?”

Social bookmarking lets you share your favorite websites, pages, etc. with others. Sites such as Delicious, Digg and Stumbleupon are just some of the sites which store your bookmarks and share them with others.

If you’ve got the Google Toolbar, you can also post your content to Blogger, Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, Yahoo and a number of other services with just the click of a button.

What can you share? Articles or blogs that you’ve written, reviews for your books, videos, contests and basically anything that you have online and that you want to share.

These bookmarks are great tools for having people discover you and your work and will help drive people to your website.

You can also make it easy for others to share information you’ve created by using buttons such as these in your posts and on your website! You can get this simple social bookmark widget at Addthis.com.


Bookmark and Share

I hope you enjoyed today’s Tuesday Tip.

Also, many thanks for all your help last Tuesday when I asked for suggestions for some upcoming contest. The lucky winner of the Valere! Please e-mail me your postal address so I can send your prize.

Improving Visibility on the Internet

Penny Sansevieri, the CEO and founder of Author Marketing Experts, Inc., tweeted the other day about how Starbucks had taught her something about Search Engine Marketing. For the full text of the article, you can click here on this link:
http://www.articlesbase.com/internet-articles/what-starbucks-taught-me-about-search-engine-marketing-260912.html

The article contains some useful examples for you on how to increase your visibility on the Internet and improve search engine rankings.

We’ve discussed some of them before, like leaving comments on blogs (and finding those blogs by using news alerts). Sending out books for review and having those reviews posted online is another great way to get your name noticed.

Likewise, we’ve talked about doing article submissions to create buzz and drive traffic to your site.

What else can you do?

Having links from key sites back to yours is another way to improve visibility. How do you do this? If you’re book has something that would be of interest to a particular industry (i.e., knitting, crafts, civil war), find sites for that industry and see if you can’t be listed there. Make connections to stores, vendors and magazines in that industry.

An excellent example of using this kind of marketing is Debbie Macomber’s connections from her books to the knitting industry. Macomber even has her knitting related products with her name available at HSN!

If you’re book is in a particular genre, like vampires, search out sites for that genre and ask to be placed on their list of links. Oftentimes sites may require that you link back to them which seems like a fair exchange.

Search engines will see those incoming links and if the site on which your listed is a high ranking site, that will improve your page ranking.

Finally, don’t forget press releases, especially close to the date of your novel’s launch. Reach out to local papers and use those free press release sites to get the word out!

Hope today’s Tuesday Tip was of help!