How To Market A Book Online: Step 4, Your Newsletter

Have you ever had a book that you wanted to publicize online, but you just weren't sure how to go about it? 

For a newcomer, it can be pretty overwhelming when you hear people telling you you need to be doing all sorts of things, may of which sound over your head technically. 

I have worked with lots of regular everyday people and have taught them how to do online marketing, and I guarantee that you don't have to become a SEO wizard in order to get more traffic to your website. 

What a lot of people don't know is that the big goal with online marketing is to get a higher ranking for your site when they do searches for specific phrases (called "keywords") in Google and the other search engines. 

That really is the ultimate goal, and having success in that area will spill over into the other goal you have for your website and your business, such as:

• Getting more interested visitors to your website.
• Making more sales on your website. 

The key to all of this is getting a higher search engine ranking, and over the past few weeks we've been covering some specific steps that people with books can take in order to market their books online. These steps will work for anyone with pretty much any business or product, but the original question I received from a reader was about marketing a book online, so that's the slant we've taken in this series.

We've already covered the first 3 steps:

1. Set up a website for your book that will allow you to capture the email addresses of your potential customers.
2. Set up a blog for your book and post to it regularly.
3. Implement an article submission campaign. 

Now we're on to step 4:

Start sending out a newsletter to the people who have signed up to your list (these are the people whose email addresses you have captured). 

With online marketing, your ultimate goal is to get a higher search engine ranking for your website for the book, so that when people type certain phrases into Google your book’s website shows up high in the rankings (on page 1, the higher the better).

Then, after you get the people to your website, your goal is to get them to sign up for your newsletter. When they do that, you can follow up with regular email messages that help sell the book. 

The newsletter follow up messages are key--this is your chance to develop a ‘relationship’ with the potential buyers of your book, and it should be viewed as a long term investment. Whenever you send your subscribers information, it should be content that they find valuable or interesting, or else they’ll unsubscribe. You can use some of the content from your blog in your newsletters so that you don’t have to write entirely new content, but ideally some of it would be brand new, just for your subscribers.

It may help to look at some newsletters that you subscribe to yourself--

• What makes those newsletters valuable to you?
• What type of information do they include?

Seeing another person’s newsletter that you like can help you in developing your own newsletter.

Newsletters should be sent out on a regular basis (but not too often), one time a week or once every 2 weeks. They should be sent out on the same day of the week each week and ideally the same time every week--not on a Monday though. People usually have a lot of emails on a Monday, so it’s best to choose a day that’s later in the week, say a Thursday or a Friday.

You've probably noticed that these steps that we're covering interact with each other--the first step in this book marketing campaign was to set up a website that captured email addresses. It's this newsletter step that actually makes use of the work you did in step 1.