This kind of “online book marketing” won’t help you sell books

I got an email the other day with the subject “Blog Partnership Invitation”.

It read:

Good day!

We are BookMarketingBull.com [I changed the name because I won't be giving any "link luv" to these sleazoids], an online book marketing services provider that caters to the needs of self-published authors around the globe.

As a part of our current expansion, we have been searching for potential blog partners to reinforce our web presence.

[Notice - they're wanting the reader to help THEM and not the other way around.]

With regards to this matter, we would like to invite you to be one of our blog partners. We are willing to contribute book marketing articles for your blog. We are giving you the opportunity to re-post an array of our book marketing articles that will attract users to keep visiting your website.

This email horrified me on many different levels.

First and foremost, this company claims to provide online book marketing services – yet seem to be blissfully unaware of what is common knowledge amongst experience web marketers – that “re-posting” their book marketing articles creates what is called “Duplicate Content”.

Of course – these sleazoids aren’t blissfully unaware – but they’re counting on the fact that self published authors are and will take them up on their offer.

The search engines are in business – and like any business the search engines have customers they have to please.  In the case of the search engines, it’s the people who search who are defined as their “customer”.

Let’s say BookMarketingBull.com  has a great article about online book marketing and they have fifty lazy bloggers who blindly take them up on their offer.  Now, when the Google bot makes it’s appointed rounds – indexing the content of the vast internet wasteland – the Google bot will find not one buy FIFTY identical articles about online book marketing.  It doesn’t make good business sense for the Google bot to index ALL fifty of those pages – after all the Google bot has literally billions of pages to index.  Therefore, Google has to decide WHICH page to include in it’s index.  Google’s customers – those who search – don’t need to find fifty links to the same article so Google picks just one and ignores the rest.

Matt Cutts – who is the online voice of reason representing the big G – writes about the issue of duplicate content on his blog.  Matt writes:

However, I would be mindful that taking all your articles and submitting them for syndication all over the place can make it more difficult to determine how much the site wrote its own content vs. just used syndicated content. My advice would be 1) to avoid over-syndicating the articles that you write, and 2) if you do syndicate content, make sure that you include a link to the original content. That will help ensure that the original content has more PageRank, which will aid in picking the best documents in our index.

What makes BookMarketingBullshit.com even sleazier – if it were possible – is they offer a wide array of services for the self published author including “web development” where they promise to create a website in which the

“SEO friendly aspect” will now be incorporated in each basic Web Design Service.

So – at one point they admit they were selling authors websites that were NOT “seo friendly”.   SEO Friendly is a term I coined years ago which basically means that the search engine bots are able to get in and index a website.

Designing a website that can not be easily indexed by the search engines is a lot like designing a car that can’t be driven on the highway.  The problem is – many authors don’t know that they have purchased such a marketing vehicle for their book.  A website that can not be indexed by the search engines can sometimes look BETTER to a human visitor than one that is search engine friendly.

The unsuspecting author – having paid a dear price for a website – assumes that the reason no one is visiting their site is that their work isn’t worthy – rather than the true “reason” their book isn’t selling online – because their website can’t be indexed by the search engines.

The sleazoids at BookMarketingBull.com are asking blog owners to help them – because they know that blogs are search engine friendly.  If they can get blog owners to re-post their articles -they know that the link back to their site will increase their visibility in the search engines.  They’re counting on blog owners not understanding who wins and who loses in their proposed relationship.

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