Initial Sales

Personally, I don't see much value in posting a card at the supermarket or dropping leaflets into neighbors mailboxes. The time would, IMHO, be better spent learning Search Engine Optimizations (SEO) and CSS.

There are a lot of people on both sides of the fence when it comes PPC. For me it comes down to one thing. Driving visitors to your site is not the same thing as attracting the people who are in need of your product.

One guy said that he got around 10K visitors using PPC. Problem was he made less than a handful of sales--barely breaking even. This same guy then focused his efforts on SEO and although the traffic is 1/10 of what he saw with PPC he received 5 times the sales (and without the expense.)

It is used to layout your web page. The up side is that you can do a lot of things that used to require javascript (like roll-overs), but can be done with CSS without the bulky code.

Your right about search engines not having to deal with javascript, tables, and the like. It is also possible to move the content to closer to the top of the page.

My novel was just released through Fictionwise and eBookad and various other resellers. According to the latest Fictionwise data, the novel is in the top ten percent of 28,000 books and is the top seller for my publisher. In the romance genre, it's in the top 6 percent. I am ecstatic over this, but I worked HARD to get my book out there. I'm a first-time writer and no one had ever heard of me until I began promotion. I'll share some of the things I found helpful.

First--Get a webpage and keep it up to date with the book's progress and add a free excerpt for people to read.

Second--Optimize your site with all of the search engines. Design an effective meta tag. My site is creeping up in the romance site listings on Google.

Third--Join forums. And don't just promote and run. This is terrible netiquette. Talk with other writers and readers about your book and common interests.

Fourth--Add your book information to free online classifieds. Most will run the article for thirty days.

Fifth--Get an invisible counter on your site that tracks your daily visitor percentages and referrers. This lets you know what works and doesn't work.  

Sixth--Get reviews early. Send out ARC's. Do whatever you can to get your book out there.

Seventh--Join webrings in your genre. (This will take longer. Don't expect immediate results.)

Eight--Join banner exchanges with sites that cater to your target audience.

Nine--Design an effective signature for all of your emails and posts, including a link to your site. (If allowed.)

the size of your site (i.e. number of internal pages) also have an impact on your search engine ranking!

That's great advice. I know I tend to "linger" at sites with several interesting pages of content.

1. The BEST long term way to drive free traffic to your site is SEO

I got into a little bit of an argument on another board (no I'm not asking for help), and to prove my point posted some examples of results, here

Be aware that to do SEO, you need to learn at least some HTML, and results are not quick (3-6 months is not untypical)

The main alternatives are:

2. If you want traffic now and are prepared to pay for it, advertise on AdWords or pay per click search engines

3. Ezine advertising (if you can find suitable opt-in ezines and track your results from each)

4. Get your name/product in the news

You can approach local press

or a press release at prweb.com costs $119, and as far as I know (I could be wrong) is always carried by Google and Yahoo! news and others. This helps with SEO too, as these are important incoming links.

If you don't know how to format a press release go to
pressblast.com

5. Viral Marketing - getting people to pass on copies

This works better for some products than others, not just marketing topics, but I imagine it could be hard for a new fiction author.  There are some stories on these lines at ebookinterviews.com

Of course there are many other things you can do, but these are the main ones. For other ideas, some ideas less effective, but see Traffic4me.com for a big list.

BTW for SEO and PPC, before you spend time/money make sure you can POPULAR keywords that time in to your site.

I hate to harp on about it, but I bought The Rich Jerk yesterday and this crystallized some of my thoughts in this area. Anyway, the 2nd part of chapter 1, plus most of chapters 2, 3 and 4 are excellent reading for non-fiction (how-to) ebook authors.  The review is here

And BEFORE you start writing, you need to decide why you are doing it.

A. If you are writing in order to make money, then research how you will market it first. For example, it's no good writing an eBook about a subject which gets no relevant searches, if you plan to market using SEO, Pay Per Click or AdWords

Likewise if doing it for money, you need to have some hook that will sell it, and you should think about that before you start writing your eBook.

B. If you are writing for fun/love/hobby/etc. that's a different matter, and of course marketing is not really an issue (and if you make any money you might considere that a bonus)

But do NOT get the two mixed up. Be clear what your goals are.

If you don't have a database you can quickly build one by submitting articles online and having a link back to your site. You want to have something of very high percieved value that you can give away from your site. Of course, people have to leave their name and email address.

Build name recognition with those who leave their contact information. You do this with period messages that also have high value to the reader. Ezines work well.

I just released my most current ebook within the last 24 hours and have sold quite a few by focusing first on those who are in my database. To see the newest ebook and how I have it set up visithttp://www.turningpointpresents.com/101nocostlowoffer.htm