It’s my experience that most authors don’t have any idea of how much “marketing” goes on behind the scenes for a typical book.
Marketing your book can either be the most frustrating or the most fulfilling task you’ve ever tackled.
One of the things about marketing is it’s an ongoing process. If you’re actively marketing your book, then you’re constantly “tweaking” your marketing messages.
Last month, I did a post about the blog I use to promote my book, Beyond the Niche: Essential Tools You Need to Create Marketing Messages that Deliver Results
I posted my traffic figures and quite honestly, they were kind of weak. I mean, for most authors, they’d be THRILLED to have over 1400 visitors coming to their website to read more about their book, but I knew I could do better.
So, shortly after I looked at those log files… I decided to get serious about upgrading the presentation of the Beyond Niche Marketing blog. I applied a new theme and added a few pages… and as a result I’ve seen a nice jump in the visitor numbers for the blog and a HEALTHY jump in number of visits per visitor. YEAH!
In case you didn’t know, I began my career on the web creating “traditional” static websites. To make a long story short… I hired a coach, finished my book and began promoting my book via a static website AND a blog. Within a year, the blog was blowing away my static website in every way measurable.
So it’s a matter of personal experience that gets me excited about marketing books through blogs. Personal experience as a “marketing professional” and person experience as an author.
Remember when I said that a HUGE part of marketing is “tweaking” your marketing messages? Well, part of “tweaking” is altering the presentation of your message. In the case of my book’s blog, applying a new theme to my blog has SUBSTANTIALLY improved its performance.
Changing the blog’s theme was very easy…. EXTREMELY easy. Even though the blog has 186 posts and 5 pages… updating the site’s appearance was a BREEZE. If the blog had been developed as a traditional website, I would have had to go in and “update” each of the 191 pages individually. ACK!
I would have had to be careful that I didn’t “break” any links… or miss updating any pages. It would have been a nightmare… one I wouldn’t have embarked on casually.
However, because it’s a self hosted Wordpress blog, updating the appearance was easy. Not only was it easy, it was REVERSIBLE!!!
What if the new theme had decreased visitor interaction? What if the new theme drove away my potential book buyers in droves? What would I have done? I would have switched back to the old theme. Believe me when I tell you that a traditional website is NOT that easily updated or switched!!!
It’s that kind of “tweaking” that is essential in creating marketing messages that deliver results. Which is yet another reason why I am a HUGE fan of blogs, (especially the self hosted Wordpress variety offered by Easy Author Websites ) because of the easy to use interface and the ability to “tweak” your marketing message.
