Tag: self published marketing

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Part Two: 

Use Basic SEO

on your Website, Blog or Book Description

by Sarah Jarvis

If you have a website, I highly recommend optimizing your content, meta-data, H1 tags and obtaining quality backlinks, so when people go to search for good books to read on Google, yours pops up.

If you don’t have your own website there are still a few things you can optimize to help increase your visibility. I would imagine most authors just said, meta-what? Don’t worry too much about the first sentence, unless you do have a website and are interested in SEO. If that is the case I would suggest checking out The Beginners Guide to SEO by Moz.

For those authors who just want to do simple optimization on their blog or book description, here are a few pointers.

Sometimes when you are adding a description of your book or an about the author, your platform allows you to edit the HTML. If that is the case I highly recommend adding <h1></h1> around a descriptive title of your book. For example, my book is titled Moral Dissipation, but when writing about it if I was allowed to edit the HTML, my title would look something like this:

<h1>Moral Dissipation: Suspenseful Heroin Addiction, Romance, Fiction Novel about the Struggles of a College Graduate who ends up a Homeless Heroin Addict</h1>

Once the blurb is live you will no longer see the <h1></h1>, but those tags tell search engines it is a title and your description will rank higher in search engines for the keywords in that title.

You don’t want to make the title too long, because that looks spammy to search engines. You also want to make sure it sounds normal when read out loud or it might be considered keyword stuffing, which is another spam tactic you want to avoid.

On Amazon the Editorial Reviews section allows you to edit basic HTML when writing about the author. In addition to including the above heading, I also wrote an informative blurb about my book making sure to bold <b> </b> the keywords for which I want it to rank, such as fiction novel, romance, heroin addiction, and donating because I am donating 10% of my profits to organizations that help recovering heroin addicts.

If you have anything that stands out or makes your book different, put a bold tag around it.

Find more writing and publishing tips at Nothing Any Good.

About the Author

S.M. Jarvis is an author, mother, SEO analyst and waitress. She has just released Moral Dissipation, a fictional romance and suspense novel about heroin addiction. Moral Dissipation gives readers an inside glance at the life of an addict and how a single addiction can impact multiple lives. It also provides information about signs of opioid addiction and how to revive someone using Narcan nasal spray. 10% of profits will be donated to organizations that help recovering heroin addicts and their families. Read reviews and order your copy here.

Part One:

Target Your Facebook Advertising

by Sarah Jarvis

Most new authors don’t have loads of cash to throw into marketing and advertising. One relatively inexpensive way to get the word out about your new book is through Facebook advertising. However, this is only beneficial if it is carefully planned.

For those new to Facebook advertising I would not recommend bidding. There is an option on Facebook for you to promote your call to action and choose a daily budget. I would recommend choosing shop now for a call to action with a link to where your book can be purchased online and the smallest daily budget, which is $3.

Those are just some basic guidelines, now to the most important part, targeting. Before you choose your target market for your paid search you want to see how your author page or book page is performing organically. Your Facebook business page should have an insights tab at the top that allows you to analyze your likes, visits, posts, people and more.

Under the “your fans” section you can see the gender and age of people who have liked your page. These are broken into a bar graph that shows the percent of males and females in each age bracket that have liked your page. This is very important information that can be used in your paid Facebook advertising campaign.

For example, the book I wrote, Moral Dissipation, is a suspenseful romance about heroin addiction, and I can see that 41% of my Facebook author page likes are females ages 25-34. Even though I really would love males to read the book, because the majority of my friends who have died from heroin addiction are male, this data shows I should not target my ad to males.

Hopefully the 25-34 year old women who are targeting will share the story with younger people as well as males to help raise awareness, but the data shows I would be wasting my ad dollars if I targeted males or any other age group.

After choosing the gender and age to target I also highly recommend choosing interests. Facebook will let you target many, but I would recommend only choosing your genera and the topic of your book. For example, I chose romance novels and substance dependence awareness. For that $3 a day (for as many days as you choose) Facebook will only serve up the ad a certain amount of times, so you want to make sure it is shown only to people who will want to click through and buy your book.

Facebook also allows you to choose an image. However, they have weird guidelines. I attempted to include a picture of my book cover with one of my Amazon reviews that said share, share, share it might save a life. When Facebook accepted the ad it got a crazy number of clicks, but then was rejected for “having too much text.” I then had to add an additional picture over the bulk of the review and just leave the share, share, share it might save a life part for it to be accepted. It still performed much better than just a simple picture of the book cover or a picture of me holding the book did.

Facebook also allows you to write a small bit of text with your image and shop now button. If you had chosen a pay-per-click bidding option I would encourage you to write the price of your book here, but if you choose the fixed daily budget I would not recommend adding the price until viewers click through to buy the book. The more you spend per day, the more people will see your ad…but it is not always quantity that is important, the quality of your targeting will be a huge help.

Find more writing and publishing tips at Nothing Any Good.

About the Author

S.M. Jarvis is an author, mother, SEO analyst and waitress. She has just released Moral Dissipation, a fictional romance and suspense novel about heroin addiction. Moral Dissipation gives readers an inside glance at the life of an addict and how a single addiction can impact multiple lives. It also provides information about signs of opioid addiction and how to revive someone using Narcan nasal spray. 10% of profits will be donated to organizations that help recovering heroin addicts and their families. Read reviews and order your copy here.