Promoting your work on the internet

This document is intended to offer guidance on how you can use the internet to promote your book. It is not a complete list of all the options available, but it does suggest a series of activities which will get you published on the internet and increase the visibility of your website. Since it is not comprehensive, please do send me your own suggestions so that I can include them and expand the coverage of the document.

I have included information in several sections and these can be regarded as sequential, in that it makes sense to address them and complete them in the order that they are presented. In each case, I have indicated roughly when each activity might be addressed. There’s a lot to do before the book is published, since it takes about three months for an existing website to be comprehensively indexed by search engines. The first four sections, therefore, need to be completed three months before the publication date! These activities, therefore, would be ideal tasks do while the book is being edited. Your priority, of course, is to respond to the editor’s requests, but you can be doing the rest in the meantime.

I have indicated at the start of each section roughly how long it might take. Please do not regard these sections as in any way representing equal amounts of time or work.

What I have not done, except in a few areas where I have included examples, is try to recommend particular websites, hosting packages, directories, etc. In most cases I have indicated how to search for such resources, but I will leave it to you, the author, to choose which particular sites and resources to use. Clearly, books from different genres need slightly different approaches and different focuses for their promotion, so the detail will always be your own choice. In certain cases the resources are so important and so general that I have referred to particular products, such as Web CEO,
 

1.                             Website.

 Domains

The first thing you need to promote your book is a website. There is no substitute for this, because most of your marketing will be accomplished via the internet. By far the best way to accomplish this is to buy your own domain name and maintain the website yourself using specialist software. If you are not computer literate, learning how to use the software is going to be a significant task, but there really is no substitute for doing all of this yourself. If you need to refer every edit of the website to a webmaster, tasks in sections 4 and 5 will be virtually impossible.

 It is possible to do everything suggested below using a free site, but it is unlikely that you will be indexed or ranked as thoroughly if you use a free resource. This is because you will be registered as a sub-domain, rather than your own domain name. For instance, I registered my own domain name and the url looks like this: http://www.yourname.co.uk. I also have a free site on Lycos.co.uk and its url looks like this: http://www.members.lycos.co.uk/yourname/. If you see a / character in the body of the address, it’s a sub-domain, and many search engines refuse to index such sites, because they are really lower level pages of someone else’s domain.

Software

The best known web creation packages are Dreamweaver and Frontpage. You will have to buy these and learn how to use them by working through a tutorial. If you are used to word processing or, even better, desk top publishing, then you will find these packages easy to pick up.

It is possible to get free web design software. Type free web software or free web design software into a search engine and follow some of the links. I cannot recommend anything, but it does exist.

Word – html

Web pages and indeed whole sites can be created in Word by formatting the text and then saving it in html format by choosing the Web Page option from the document type in the Save As.. command. It works and it can be effective, but in general you will spend a long time formatting the pages and still find that you cannot really control their appearance. Also, it will generally take much longer to do things in Word than in specially designed software.

Autobuild sites

Try typing “free autobuild web page” into a search engine and examine some of the links. I cannot recommend any of them, however. If you sign up for a Yahoo Geocities site there are tools that allow you to build pages directly on your site. Other free websites offer similar arrangements. Using these free systems, however, will make the steps outlined in 3, 4 and 5 below very difficult and in some cases impossible. It is also worth remembering the point about subdomains in the next section.

2.                              Hosting

Hosting is what you need to allow other people to access your site. Once you have built your site it can be seen on screen, but only on your own computer! A host is a computer that is switched on and connected to the internet all the time. You lodge your own site on the host and then other people can access it via its own unique url.

url

This is a website’s name and stands for universal resource locator. The full url contains the domain name that you register. You choose whatever name you want, but there are a couple of issues to think about. Obviously you can’t have a name that already exists. Whenever you try to register a name the hosting site will check that the name is available. Remember that domain names come in different types - .com, .co.uk, .net, .biz etc. The .com sites will be indexed most effectively, but they are usually the most expensive ones. But the name you pick should do two things:

a)      It should be unique both to you and to the internet, such as yourname, i.e. your own name without any spaces. This makes it easy to find exactly where the site is stored, indexed etc. When you type that one word into a search engine, you know that no-one else will be using it – or indeed looking for it! If you are called John Smith, however, you might choose johnsmith992 rather than johnsmith, for obvious reasons.

b)      Instead of your own name you might want to create something which relates to your book. You could use words from its title or its genre. This may help your site to appear on general searches, but then you will have a problem when the next book needs to be included.

Obtaining domain names

Try typing any combination of these words into a search engine: cheap, web, website, host, hosting, domain. There are thousands of hosting services available. On www.streamline.net, for instance, the cost is about GBP30 for two years of hosting with the domain name registration included. The deal you choose depends on where you are and the type of domain name you want. Most hosting packages will also include and email service. This is a good thing, since it will be allow you to direct the book’s traffic to that address and keep it separate from your private material. Once you have your website, a registered domain name and a hosting deal, you can publish the site.

Publishing the site – ftp

The host you choose will provide you with information on how to upload the files that make up your website. Usually this is done by a program that operates under file transfer protocol. The method is just like logging into an email system. You have a user name, usually your domain name, and a password. If you use web design software, the whole process is made very easy and works through a window where all you have to do is press a publish button and the files are transferred. If you use Word to create your site, you will have to find each file separately using a window that looks like My Computer.

Free subdomains

Many companies offer free websites. Amongst the best known are Lycos Tripod and Yahoo geocities. Some of these even allow ftp access just like paid hosts. Some, however, only allow you to transfer files a few at a time to the host, which can be tiresome. But these sites still work!

In general you will only get a subdomain, however. I have a Tripod site at:

http://www.members.lycos.co.uk/yourname/

This format of this url is worth noting. What it means is that there is a website called member.lycos.co.uk and within that there is a subdirectory called yourname. There are two consequences:

a) free websites often include advertising banners that obscure part of the page. This why they are free.

b) Because they are subdomains, search engines will often not register them as something separate and different from the main domain. Hence your own content and name will not be indexed separately from the details of the main site. My own Lycos Tripod site, however, has been effectively indexed for some years!

Because of these limitations, however, it is a bad idea to use free sites as your main method of promoting yourself.

But free websites are very useful to you. The first point is that they are free and can get indexed in their own right if you are lucky. The second point is that you can link to and from these sites from your main site. The internet is driven by links and these come for free. My advice here is that you create a main website with all of the details you want to publish and then create a second site which contains just one page of information about your self and your book plus, of course, a link through to your main site. Publish this second site on several free providers. If you write the content carefully you may never need to update these sites once you have published them. Finally, link to these sites from the home page of your main site so that you achieve this:

To create a link to a website, simply type some text, highlight it, choose Insert Hyperlink and then place a copy of the url you want to link to in the relevant box. If you click the hyperlink in this sentence, for instance, it will take you to my site. I use five or six free sites to make links in this way. Each site has to be submitted to search engines separately, of course.

3.                              Keywords and attributes 

A web page, when published on a host, is indexed by search engines. Programs called spiders or crawlers follow links through the internet, going where the connections offered take them. When they come to a site, they list and sort the text and especially the links they find on it. They also recognise a site by its attributes. If you are using specialist web software, you see these when you edit the Page Properties. If you use word, you will have to insert them as html tags. These are what are often called the meta tags. They look frightening, but there is an easy way of generating them for your site. Type something like “free meta tag generator” into a search engine and the system will create the tags for you so that you can copy the html code onto your page. (Be sure you are in html mode when you do this.) But there are things you have to provide before even the free generators can do their job. First you have to decide what to include under each of the headings below. Finally, if you type something like “meta tag advice” into a search engine and read a couple of articles you will get an idea of what to include and what not to include in the tags below.

Keywords

These are the words that will be used by search engines to index your site. Keywords are individual words or sometimes phrases separated by commas. Take a look at the keywords I have used for my site in Appendix 1. I have used a lot, probably too many. But my advice would be to use words and phrases drawn from three areas:

a)      Yourself. In my case, name, Name, Your, Your, Your Name, your name, yourname etc Notice how I have included the website name yourname as a keyword.

b)      Your book. Include the title, relevant place names, character names, content indicators, etc

c)      Publisher and general information. Include Wild Cherry in the keywords and general terms referring to the book’s genre, style or target audience.

Title

The Title tag does exactly what you would expect. Write a sentence to describe and summarise the entire site. Be sure to use some of the words from the keywords you have chosen. Do not write gibberish, however, or stuff the sentence with keywords. Keep it sensible and write for people not machines.

Description

This should be a short paragraph to expand on and provide more detail on the website and its contents. Again use the keywords regularly, but write in sentences.

Word file with contents

An essential thing to do when you have decided on your keywords, title and description is to create a word processor file with the text you have chosen. Save it as something like “Mysitemetatags” so that you can find it easily. When you are doing the linking work later on you will often be asked to provide a site description, title and keywords. Having them stored in a word processor file means that you can easily access them, that they can be copied and pasted each time to avoid typing errors and, crucially, that they will match up with the ones you have on the website to assist indexing and linking.

4.                              Search engine submission

Now you have a domain name and a published website complete with its meta tags. The problem is that no-one apart from you knows about it! Try typing your special word, in my case yourname, into a search engine and see what comes up. Try typing a number of your keywords into the search engine and see if you appear. You won’t, at least not yet. The next step is to promote the site by submitting it to search engines 

Submit a site links

Somewhere on search engine pages, usually right at the bottom and in a typeface so small you can barely see it you will find the phrase “Submit a site” or words to that effect. Often when you click on this link you will be presented with an opportunity to have your site indexed by the search engine. You will probably have to go through a string of pages offering express listing for a price but, if you keep trying, you will usually end up at a page offering free submission, but usually without a guarantee that you will be included. It does work, however. You will need your Mysitemetatags file open so that you can copy the site details without having to type them. And don’t just work on Yahoo, Google etc. The world is full of search engines. Type “Search engine” into Google and see how many are listed. In general, submit your site once to each engine. Do not try to spam them with repeated submissions. This process, one site at a time, can easily eat up months of work. There has to be an easier way….

Web CEO

And there is, but it’s not without its flaws. If you type “Search engine submit” or something similar into a search box you will be bombarded with thousands of free multiple submitters and even more paid ones. Some of them may even work. My advice is to use something that takes a little more time but feels much more reliable. It’s called Web CEO and it’s currently available in a free version and a paid version with more features. I use the free version. Type “Web CEO” into a search engine to find it, download it and install it.

The next step is to create a project in the software based on your own website. Web CEO’s own tutorials are very easy to follow, so I will not include any particular commands here. But the essence of the software is that it has a list of thousands of search engines – a list that’s regularly updated for you. Having supplied Web CEO with details of your website, which, of course it reads from your own published site, it then allows you to submit the site, sometimes page by page, to whatever search engines you choose. It also gives feedback on which submissions have succeeded and which have failed. You then only need to follow up the failed ones via the manual submit a site method.

Which ever method you use to submit the site, allow sometimes as much as a month before the results show up. To test how well you are doing, try typing your special keyword, yourname in my case, into the search engines.

5.                              Linking strategy

Now that the search engines know you exist, you have to work at getting more noticed. A good guide to how well you are noticed is your Page Rank. This is a scale from 0 to 10. If you have a Google toolbar installed on your computer, the Page Rank indicator is the little green horizontal line in the white bar. Page Rank is a complex mathematical construct, named after someone called Page who did a PhD on how to calculate linking popularity and then went on to found a company based on the research. He called the company Google.

When the spider programs visit internet sites, they crawl through the links following them out of and hopefully back to the original site. Page Rank is really a measure of how frequently the spiders crawl back to the same sites. In other words it’s like a measure of how popular sites are. More popular sites get higher Page Ranks and these sites tend to appear more frequently towards the top of search results. So what your site needs is links to other sites and links back from them. This is called a linking strategy and the process of establishing and maintaining links is endless, time consuming, very boring and utterly essential.

A links page

The first thing you need is a links page on your website, if you don’t already have one. It’s just a page devoted to a list of links to other websites. Internet etiquette requires you to offer a link from your own site to any other site that offers to list your own . Sometimes you will be asked to provide a link to your own site. Below is an example of a link back to my own site.

<p><a href="http://www.yourname.co.uk"><u>My book about lizards by Your Name</u></a></p>

It looks a bit strange but it’s really quite simple. The p and /p tags just open and close a paragraph. The u and /u tags open and close underlining. The a href links to a url and the text Mission - an African novel set in Kenya by Your Name is where the hyperlink is inserted. You can copy the link above, replace the url with your own site and the text with whatever you want. Save the text in a file and then you can copy it whenever you are asked to supply a link to your site. So where do you link?

Free directories

These are the easiest place to start. Type “Free directory” or “internet directory” or “book directory” or anything else involving “directory” and you will find thousands of them. They are organised in categories like search engines used to be. Find categories relevant to your book. Literature and books are obvious, but also check out art, arts, artists, writing, writers, specific genres and relevant place names. When you get to the right place, look for the “Submit a link” or similar text and follow the instructions. Never pay for a link! Always take the free option, which always means that you have to link back from your own site. Here’s my advice on how to go about this.

a)      Have your own website open in your web publishing software. Have the links page open.

b)      Have the word processor file “Mysitemetatags” open as well.

c)      Open your internet browser in another window and navigate to the directory sites.

d)      Find the relevant category.

e)      Click the Submit a site button and select the free option.

f)        Copy the directory’s suggested linking code and immediately paste into the html view of your links page. (Note: if some of the characters don’t paste correctly, paste them into Wordpad or Notepad first and then copy them again. I don’t know why these errors sometimes happen!)

g)      Go back to the page view of the links page to check that the link appears correctly.

h)      Publish the web site.

i)        Return to the directory page and enter the details for your own website from the standard text in your “Mysitemetatags” file and submit the link. (Sometimes you might be asked for a ready-made link. In that case use the href tag above.

j)        Repeat steps c to i as many times as you wish.

The process is literally endless. Once you have a hundred or so links on the links page, create another!

Classified ads

Type “free classified” or “free ad” or something similar into a search engine. Listed will be thousands of sites categorised by type of advertisement offered. Create a standard short advertisement for yourself and your book. Make two copies of this text, one containing the url of your website and one without it. Some of the sites will not allow a url in the text of an advert. In the second copy of your test, therefore, include the site name, but without the http://www at the beginning. In my case, I include yourname.co.uk and generally I get away with it. At least you now that anyone finding the ad can enter your own special keyword to a search and find your site. Classified ad sites often get indexed, so they enhance your internet linking. Some of them will demand a link back to them. Never refuse.

Free site, submit and link back

Some sites are dedicated to linking. Type “Linking site” or “Free link” or something similar into an engine. There are thousands. Use as many of them as you wish.

It’s also a good idea to register your site for a free banner exchange. The provider will give you some code to place on your site and in return your details will occasionally be displayed on other people’s sites. The banners can be a bit dominating, but if included low down on your home page they will do the job you want without distracting visitors to the site.

Blogs – create and link back

Create blogs which link back to your site. Type “Free blog” or something similar into a search engine. Create the blog and link to your own site. Link back from your site to the blog. See below under Press releases for a tip on standard text.

Register with favourites sites

Blogs have their own rules, their own search engines and their own favourites sites. Technorati and del.icio.us are the best known. Personally, I have only just started using these as a linking method and would be grateful if someone could tell me how to use them more effectively for linking.

6.                              Book and writer sites

Google books – need ISBN

Register with Google via the little Sign In button at the top right of the search engine screen. Via this account you can set up things like gmail. An important aspect for us, however, is the Google books affiliation that is offered. You can register yourself as an author and include the ISBN of your book. From this you can link to purchase sites etc. I am still not clear how useful this is, except that linking to Google can do no harm! There is also an area called Web Master Tools which have some very useful bits of software that allow you to enhance your site and monitor more closely how it indexed or located.

Editred

Editred is an example of a writers’ blog site. Search for “Writer blog” or “writer resource” or anything similar to locate these sites. Usually they ask you to pay if you want to use all the facilities, but what we are interested in to start with is merely to make a page for ourselves, include a description of the book and some extracts, have it indexed and then create links to and from our main site. There are many of these sites, but not thousands.

Ezine article sites

There are many sites that provide libraries of off-the-shelf articles aimed at blog or ezine publishers who want to fill up their respective publications. You can join for free, publish your articles and hope that someone likes them enough to publish them more widely. Include your bio with a reference to your book and a link to your website, of course.

7.                              Press releases

A standard text

Develop standard material based on your book and your website. Type these into a word processor file and call it something like “Mybookdetails”. Include:

            Description of yourself

            Description of book

            Synopsis of book

            Some background material about the book

            A few extracts of varying length

You should produce two or three versions of the descriptions. This is because some of the press release sites ask for 100 words, some 200 etc  etc. Again, having this text as standard means that you don’t have to retype it every time, that it is error free and that is consistent across your different entries. In fact it’s not actually a good idea to keep using exactly the same text. Small variations actually help, but big ones will reduce the focus of the indexing.

Free press releases

Now that you have your standard text type “Free press release” into a search engine. There will be many results. Register on the sites and follow the instructions on how to create the press releases. Some of the sites are really quite effective in distributing them. Again, link back to your own site by including your url and, when the press release is itself indexed, link to it from your own site by inserting a hyperlink from your home page.

Issue press releases at least twice, once when the book is through its editing but not yet available. Call this release something like “Latest novel by xyz is about to be published by Wild Cherry”. When the book becomes available, issue another release entitled “Latest novel by xyz published by Wild Cherry is now available”. These press releases will get indexed and when you link back to them it will enhance the presence of your own site.

8.                              email campaign

Your friends will learn to hate you for this, but it is essential. Once the book is available, write a short press release of your own and include a link to your website plus a link to your book’s page on amazon etc.

Go through your address book and any old address books you still have and create a list of email addresses of anyone and everyone you have ever met. You won’t make any friends by doing this, but the chances are people will be interested to learn that you have published a book.

You can find people you have lost contact with. Remember that old boss you always hated? Well the chances are the person is still in the same job. Go to the institution’s website and search for a staff list. What about that person you remember from such and such a place? What about the people you have lost contact with? They can all be found. I used to work with someone called “Ethel Smythe”, for instance. Google the name with the quotation marks around it and check out the links one by one. If you can’t find the person’s email address at work you can often work it out. I used to work in City and Islington college in London. Email addresses there are all @candi.ac.uk. find any address for an employee on the site. If you an address such as john.smith@candi.ac.uk, then the person I want is ethel.smythe@candi.ac.uk.

When you have your list, use cut and paste techniques to send an individually addressed email to each person to promote your book. If they reply, take the time to reply again, but this time with a short personal message. Ask them in your original message to disseminate the email about the book to anyone they think might be interested.

9.                              Listmania

Register as a customer with amazon. Once you have done this, you can create Listmania lists among which, of course, will be your book. Listmania lists appear randomly alongside other people’s searches. You might just get your book more noticed.

10.                          Reviews

On amazon and other literary sites, write reviews of your favourite books. Review your own book and those of other Wild Cherry authors. Don’t over sell anything. Be frank and be honest. If you don’t like something, don’t review it. If you do like something, say so. It’s amazing how these things get indexed. Then, of course, link to the reviews from your website.

Conclusion

This document is a start. There are still many more things I could advise you to do. I have done most of what is included here and my site at http://www.yourname.co.uk has a Page Rank of 4, but it took three months to achieve that! Don’t expect instant results. And finally, please feed back information to me via my website if you think you have other tips that should be included in this document. Good luck with the book!

Glossary

Domain name – a unique name that identifies a website.

Exact search - typing a series of words into a search engine separated by spaces with the whole list enclosed in double quotes. This will produce results based on the exact phrase between the quotes.

ftp – file transfer protocol. This is the method by which the files that make up your website are transferred to the host computer.

General search – typing a series of words into a search engine separated by spaces. This will produce results based on each separate word in the list.

Html – hypertext markup language. This is the system that allows Internet Explorer and other browsers display websites on a screen. Html is a series of codes that carry instructions on the style and position of elements of a web page. You do not need to learn the commands, but you do need to be able recognise some of them, as explained in the text.

Page Rank – a number from 0 to 10 used by Google to measure the “popularity” of a website. This then determines how often the site appears in search results and how far up the list it appears.

Sub-domain – a particular sub-division of a website. There might be many sub-domains within a single domain.

url – Universal Resource Locator. This is the unique address that identifies a site or page on the internet. For example, http://www.yourname.co.uk. Sometimes these can spread over three or four lines.