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How Self Publishers and Authors Keep Information Fresh and Useful

Let's try something to discover the impact of your website. It's just a small exercise to capture a snapshot in time of your website's performance. To demonstrate this, perform a keyword search for words related to your books and information? Does your website show up in the results? The goal is to have your website featured on the first page of results. If it doesn't, you may need to do more work.

Once you created your website, be sure to keep the content engaging. After a few months in business, you can discover new information about your book's impact and appeal. While learning about your book's status, put what you've learned on your website to draw even more customers. For example, you may have only received book reviews by a few friends, family and local book reviewers. Now, after being on the market for a while, new reviews are posted at the online book store pages. Include those reviews on your website and in your marketing plans.

Also, keep book descriptions alive as you learn from your newsletters, blogs, and customer feedback. In other words, remember the old saying? "Don't rest on your laurels." Keep getting better and making discoveries. 

What you originally used to describe your book may evolve into something more meaningful. You might have more of an emotional connection with customers that definitely needs to be reflected on the website. I like to update my website at least monthly as new information gives fresh opportunities for search engines to find my site.

Another great way to keep current information flowing is to have your blog and Tweets update and feed into your website every time you post something new (hopefully a few times per week).  As you post fresh and exciting information such as: excerpts from your book, positive comments from customers, helpful information related to your books or even information of where your books are sold, they will post to your website. When people search for information with keywords related to your posts, they will be led to both your blogs, tweets and website.

Rename your book website pages for more impact. When people search for information, the results are a list of websites with that information either in the title or in the page description. I found out I can get more hits by ensuring the page title contains key words. If not, you might consider renaming your book's page title. For example, suppose you have a book titled Carrots are Healthy that describes about the many health benefits of eating your vegetables. However, the book's page has the notional title of http://www.mypublishingcompany.com/books/veggiebook. After doing research, you find that there are many other books about vegetarian food that are getting way more hits. You might find that their pages are http://www.vegitarianfood.com. Do you see the difference in the title string? This happened to one of my books. My website is the publishing company, then it is further divided into books or training. Each of those titles are subdivided into individual book titles or training titles, making the title string longer. I remedied this by creating a new page just featuring the book title. This allowed better placement in search results. 


Experiment and find out what's best for you. Don't get tempted to sit back and count on early success. In the same way, don't get discouraged by lack of success. Try new approaches to improve your products and marketing. 

Jeffrey W. Bennett, ISP is the owner of Red Bike Publishing. Jeff is an accomplished writer of non-fiction books, novels and periodicals. He also owns Red bike Publishing. Published books include: "Get Rich in a Niche-Insider's Guide to Self Publishing in a Specialized Industry" and "Commitment-A Novel". Jeff is an expert in security and has written many security books including: "Insider's Guide to Security Clearances" and "DoD Security Clearances and Contracts Guidebook". See Red Bike Publishing for print copies of: Army Leadership The Ranger Handbook The Army Physical Readiness Manual Drill and Ceremonies The ITAR The NISPOM

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