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Unless you’re brand new to book marketing, you are aware that creating visibility is the foundation of any marketing plan that’s purpose is to sell. And, there are a number of ways to achieve your visibility objective.

Assuming you already have a book or other product to offer, the very first aspect of promotion is to create a website and offer valuable content regularly. This will create an information funnel leading traffic back to your site and product. While this is good, you need to know what you want this traffic to do and clearly convey it to the visitor.

You might be thinking that your purpose is to sell the book you just published. While selling your book is a good place to start, it should not be the end-all or your marketing efforts or expectations.

And, it’s important to know that most visitors will not instantly buy your book or product.

It takes time to develop a relationship with your visitors, and it’s the time invested in establishing a trusting relationship that stimulates the conversion of a visitor into a buyer. To accomplish this, you want to be able to keep in touch with your visitors on a regular basis through ongoing informational emails.

The ongoing connection and steady stream of valuable information is what will motivate a visitor to become a subscriber to your mailing list, motivate your subscriber to trust you, and motivate that individual to be more willing to purchase what you're offering now and in the future.

One of the most effective marketing strategies to create visibility and develop the desired relationship needed to sell your products/services is informational emails.

The informational email offers you an open line of communication with the potential buyer. But, be careful not to abuse this tool. Be sure to offer at least 75 percent valuable content to 25 percent promotion, In fact, to be extra careful, boost the valuable content percentage and lower the promotion percentage. And, be sure to provide content pertinent to the target market you’re aiming at.

Initiating an Email Campaign

The first step to initiate a successful email campaign is to offer the reader something of value, a free offering. This valuable gift can be an e-book, a podcast, a video, a workshop, a teleseminar, or other form of information that the reader wants or needs. This is your ‘ethical bribe’ that will motivate the reader to click on your CALL to ACTION, in this case subscribing to your informational emails.

The ‘ethical bribe’ or free gift is crucial to garnering subscribers. If you're not offering anything, there would be no reason for a reader/visitor to sign up to your mailing list. And, according to a number of marketing experts, including Jack Canfield, Jim Edwards, Brian Judd, and Daniel Hall, it's the mailing list that is the key component to selling what you're offering.

While the free gift may be the lure that gets the reader to subscribe, it's the ongoing connection, additional free offers, and providing valuable information that will make your subscriber trust you and be more willing to purchase what you're offering, whether it’s your book, your services, or an affiliate product.

A word of caution: Choose how often you send out your informational email or newsletter wisely. While you may run the risk of annoying some subscribers if you send them out too frequently, if the email provides great content the risk should diminish. But, even so, be careful. There are some subscribers who get overwhelme

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When thinking of book marketing, there are a number of rungs on the marketing ladder. The first involves creating a quality product, in this case a book. You want a book that you’ll be proud to offer for sale, and a book that customers will want to buy.

Once you have a finished product/book, you need to move onto the promotion basics. This rung on the ladder involves establishing a presence - you’ll need to create visibility and a platform. To do this, the first step is to get a website or blog. Next, you will need to join writing groups in your genre, groups in your target market, and other social networks, such as Twitter and Facebook.

After you’ve established a presence, the next step is to create an informational funnel leading back to your website. The purpose of this funnel is to bring traffic and inbound links, to your site.

The more traffic to your site the greater your visibility in the search engines. More traffic also means a greater chance of visitors purchasing what you’re offering.

When it comes to an informational funnel, content rules. Here are three strategies to increase traffic to your site.

1. Add Content to Your Blog

Make your presence known by offering information in the form of content on your blog. Content is what will make you an expert in your niche, genre, or area. But, just posting the content to your site will not create the traffic you need. Each time you publish content to your site, you need to let your social networks know about it.

Tweet it and post about it to Facebook and your other social networks. Be sure to always include a clickable url link that goes directly to the article. This is a part of inbound marketing – it leads visitors back to your site through an information funnel.

In addition, using effective keywords in your posts and the post titles, related to your site’s platform, will help the search engines index your content.

2. Article Marketing

Once you feel comfortable with adding content to your blog, you can now venture out into the article marketing arena to capture a larger audience. While most article directories have guidelines, they are fairly lenient. Follow the guidelines and post an article to one, ten, or a hundred different directories. Most of them don’t require original articles, so you can use articles you’ve posted on your blog.

Usually you will be allowed to include a brief bio in the form of a resource box. Make it short and sweet. Be sure it links back to your website or blog, whichever you want the traffic to go to (if you have more than one site).

Those who click on the link will be creating inbound links to your site which is a feature Google and the other search engines like. In fact, quality inbound links are an important aspect of search engine optimization (SEO).

3. Offer to be a Guest on Other Quality Sites

Another avenue of inbound marketing is offering your articles to other quality blogs or sites; you become a featured writer on the site by providing a guest article. It might be viewed as visiting another neighborhood. The particular site you are featured on has its own set of visitors, thereby broadening your visibility.

Do your research though, before you approach bloggers. Make sure the fit is right by checking prior posts on the site. In addition, when you approach the blog owner to ask about a guest post, let him know that you are familiar with his site.

And, be sure to always make it a win-win situation. Let the

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