Thursday, April 18, 2013

iUniverse Grow Your Book Website Traffic in 4 Easy Steps

One of the iUniverse best marketing tools for an author to have is a book website or blog. It can house in-depth insight about the author's book, while encouraging interaction between and among readers. This can lead to one of the most enriching relationships an author can have.

Here are four important actions to take to boos your website or blog's online discoverability while encouraging a steady stream of traffic.

Step 1: Optimize Your Book Blog

Optimization simply means making your blog noticeable to search engines like Google or Bing. This stage is about locating the right keywords that your readers are using to look for book titles similar to yours.

To do this, you may use the Google Keyword tool (which is free) or keyworddiscovery.com to get the top keyword suggestions for the type of article you'd like to write. These tools return the top searched keywords and phrases that relate to your topic.

Choose the key phrase that isn't too competitive but still gets a lot of regular searches. Plug it into your blogs title, meta tags, and image descriptions. Using “stop words”, insert the same phrase throughout your text.

Step 2: Exchange guest blogs 

The process of trading blogs with someone else has become fairly typical. Writing a themed blog for someone in exchange for one they write for you is a two way street. You get the benefit of having their regular readers read your post in exchange for your readers getting to know their work.

Another cool side effect is the fact that the two sites will now be linked together. This connectivity adds to a better ranking in search engines.

Step 3. Integrate Twitter into your blogging efforts

With the ease and popularity of Twitter, one of the fastest ways to leverage your account into more blog traffic is to do a free gift or run a viral contest. All you need to do is post a simple tweet.

Something like:

“Get a free copy of BOOKNAMEHERE when you subscribe to my blog @DOTCOMHERE and retweet this message.”

or

“Enter to win a signed copy of BOOKNAMEHERE when you subscribe to my blog @DOTCOMHERE and retweet this message.”

Step 4: Be Positive, at all times

Everyone has heard that, “You can attract more bees with honey than with vinegar.” You can apply this maxim to direct traffic to your blog.

Look up other blogs in your same genre, maybe even on your same posting website. Read their blogs and post an insightful, sincerely positive comment about them. Do this for a couple of their posts. When an individual notices your comments, they can click your name to see your profile and blog.

Include a simple, plain hyperlinked version of your name as your signature, but be careful and make sure your comments are specific because this can be misconstrued as spamming and can get your comment deleted.

For more book marketing tips, head over to the iUniverse Writers Tips and learn from the experience of iUniverse self-published authors.

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