Associates Help Page

Generating Book Sales From Your Web Site

Authors generally develop two types of web sites, a brochure type site that provides information about a title and the author or a topic oriented portal type of site that relates to their book in some way. 

Brochure type sites look nice and would be supportive to other efforts to promote an authors book, however they can't be depended upon to generate the amount of traffic needed or would rank well in the search engines enough to generate book sales.

We strongly recommend topic oriented portal type sites that match a controversial or high interest topic that serves the  same market interest demographics that an author's book appeals too.  

As an example, for a fiction book such as "The Garden of Good and Evil" which is based loosely on history and characters in the city of Savanna, Georgia. We would recommend developing a site for tourists and  residents of the city interested in  learning more about the city of Savanna. 

It would include valuable information on interesting places to visit and local history of the town. Content is king on the Internet and the more and higher the quality, will create a very popular site where your book banners and book covers can be placed prominently on all the pages. Articles relating your book to the town and reasons to buy the book to prepare for a visit or tie it in for local residents would be very helpful to increase sales. 

For preparation to design such a site, you would visit all the other sites on that topic and decide to make yours the most comprehensive, attractive and helpful. You would include important features that the others provide, and add in extra value not included on the others. In this example the site would become a very valuable resource to the city and you would want to propose an exchange links with the local Chamber of Commerce, City Web sites, other web sites about the city and other businesses in the town that have web sites. 

Links from other web sites to yours are easy to get if you have a quality web site that would relate and be helpful to the visitors that come to the other sites. Besides providing visitors to your site from those sites., search engine algorithms include the number of sites linking to you to determine how well they will rank you. So a site that has 5 links to it will probably be on the 10-20th page listings for a search on that topic, while a site that has 200-300 links to it will probably be on the first search page that comes up and will be seen and clicked on by those searching for information on that topic.  

An example of a link request e-mail would be as follows: (Some authors have collected as many as 3,000 e-mail addresses of sites related to their book topics, we recommend that you personalize each and send about 10 a day over the next 10 months, so as to not be considered spam by your ISP. While a few people are ultra sensitive to legitimate business e-mails may complain, so not be discouraged, no Internet Service Provider would legitimately consider 10 personalized e-mails sent a day for business to business link exchanges to be spam.)  

Subject: Would you like to exchange links?
Date: Sun, 20 Jul 2003 15:39:14 -0700 (PDT)
From: "Dr. Claude Lindquist" <lindquistsystemsgroup@yahoo.com>
To: webmaster@american-book.com

Would you like to exchange links? Our site information is:

Category: book seller

Our website: http://www.lindquistsystemsgroup.com

Our description: LINDQUIST SYSTEMS GROUP providing DSP & Filters (design, research, workshops), Computers (hardware,software, networking, internet, website, video), legal (experts, patents, licensing, malpractice, injury), and Book (DSP, filters)services since 1972.

Our link code is located at: 
http://www.lindquistsystemsgroup.com/reciprocallinks.htm and reads <a href="http://www.lindquistsystemsgroup.com"> LINDQUIST SYSTEMS GROUP </a> providing DSP & Filters (design, research, workshops), Computers (hardware, software, networking, internet, website, video), legal (experts, patents, licensing, malpractice, injury), and Book (DSP, filters) services since 1972.> A shorter link is available.

We have included your link at http://www.lindquistsystemsgroup.com/linkslsg.htm for your inspection and look forward to hearing from you soon.

Regards,
Dr Claude Lindquist, Director

There are several million web sites on the Internet today. Most are not professionally designed for high search engine ranking in mind in fact very few are. It takes time and a professional level effort to build a web site that attracts large levels of traffic but the invested time to do develop such a site correctly does  provide tremendous rewards.

While almost every junior college offers classes on web site design, few colleges or technical schools teach the principles involved in site design to attract Internet traffic. However there are specialists trained that are very successful in these skills. Watch out for the scam companies that say they will provide it when they contact you through spam. Because there is such a great need for this service, and few people understand how it works, the scam companies spam people to have them sign up for "packages", we advise you decline these.

We recommend going to http://www.searchenginewatch.com/ and becoming a student of this most important aspect of web site promotion and ongoing development. These tips and techniques are required to succeed and do make all the difference in a well designed web site getting the levels of traffic needed to meet the authors book sales and royalty & associate income goals!  

For more information on how to promote others to sign up as Associates and use their web sites to sell more of your books please click here.