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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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Merriman-Webster.com notes that both the words, marketing and promotion (the terms, or the present day meaning), came into existence around the 15th and 16th centuries. Interestingly, although both marketing and promotion seem to be used in place of each other, and marketing is regularly used in place of promotion, they are separate processes. Well to be more clear, promotion is a process under the marketing umbrella.

Marketing, according to BusinessDictionary.com:

Management process through which goods and services move from concept to the customer. As a philosophy, it is based on thinking about the business in terms of customer needs and their satisfaction. As a practice, it consists in coordination of four elements called 4P's: (1) identification, selection, and development of a product, (2) determination of its price, (3) selection of a distribution channel to reach the customer’s place, and (4) development and implementation of a promotional strategy.

So, marketing is taking your product from the idea to the sale. While you may not think that marketing is necessary in the idea stage of a product, think again. If you don’t produce a product that your target market will be interested in, you most probably will not get to the “sale’ stage. This means the product will need to be saleable in every aspect, from the product itself, or in a writer’s field, its content, to the package, price, and distribution. All this takes marketing research.

Promotion on the other hand is the marketing process of bringing your product or service to the attention of your target market. Promotion encompasses the needed strategies for actually selling your product. Promotion is done through publicity and advertising – in essence, through visibility.

Visibility can be done using online social networking, taking advantage of services/sites such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Digg. It can also be accomplished through traditional promotional techniques, such as ads, business cards, and flyers, as well as through inbound (organic) promotional strategies: providing valuable blog and article content, reports, e-books, and newsletters.

Organic promotional strategies are those that bring visibility to your product/service through processes mentioned above such as blog and article content. This type of promotion may take a bit of time to establish, and involves work, but its long-term benefits will be worth the time and effort. This type of promotion creates trust and reliability. You will develop a relationship with the potential customer/reader. She will come to value the information you provide, and look forward to it.

Digital-Web.com defines organic traffic as:

Organic traffic, as the name implies, is traffic that comes to your Web site naturally and without being driven there by a specific marketing campaign. In essence, Web site visitors are there because they found the site and thought it had something they wanted. And like anything organic, organic traffic isn’t there instantly; it takes time and nurturing to grow into something healthy and with longevity.

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Related Articles:

Copywriting and Marketing at Its Best

Focused Keywords and Your Content

Inbound Marketing: The New Boy on the Block

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Great Writing Tools and Programs:

Writing, Publishing, and Marketing - You Can Do It

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5 Comments on Marketin and Promotion: Are They the Same Process?, last added: 8/4/2010

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