Writing for Your Wealth

Whether you’re selling biographies, cookbooks, or crime novels, the internet is doubtlessly the most cost-effective way to promote your books. If you’re an author in this day and age, you know you’re supposed to have a website, a blog, and maybe you’re even Twittering, MySpacing, and FaceBooking too. But do you have a mailing list yet?

Believe it or not, out of all the online tools you can employ, a mailing list is probably going to sell more copies of your book than anything else.

The Power of Mailing Lists

Those in the internet marketing world know all about the power of newsletters, and you won’t catch a successful ebook author, software distributor, or even online candle company without a list.

Why a list?

A list…

• is the easiest way to build a personal relationship with your fan base.
• lets you send messages right to a person’s inbox (where they’re more likely to be read than blog posts competing for attention in a feedreader).
• reaches the folks who may be interested in your message but weren’t ready to buy the book the first time they visited your site.
• makes it easy for your fans to forward news of your books on to friends.
• reminds readers you exist! (Hey, people get busy and don’t necessarily remember authors they read a year ago, but if they’re getting messages from you every month, they’ll remember to check out your new books when they’re published.)

In short, a mailing list is the one tool that’s essential for anyone selling anything online.

How to Start up a Mailing List

The easiest way to start a list is to simply add a sign-up form to your existing website or blog.

That sign-up form should be prominent too. It’s easier to get people to sign up for a free newsletter than plunk down $20 for a book right away. And once you’ve got them on your mailing list, you’ll have a lot more chances to sell that book (and the next one, and the next one, and … you get the idea).

As for the technical details, you’ll need some software to automate subscriptions, unsubscriptions, and the mass sending of messages.

You can sign up with a company such as Aweber (I use these guys, and they’re something of a gold standard in the internet marketing business). It does cost money to sign up with them, so if you’re pinching pennies, you may want to look into some of the free options. Even a yahoo groups mailing list is better than nothing. (The downside with the free lists is that the company will add advertising into your messages.)

Through the use of a wizard, an outfit like Aweber makes it easy to set up an “opt-in” box (the form that goes on your site and tells people how to sign up).

Aweber also lets you set up messages ahead of time. For example, with the list I have on this site, I wrote the 7-part “Writing for Your Wealth 101″ e-course back in September, but if you sign up today, you’ll get the daily messages as if I were writing them each morning this week and sending them right out to you.

What to Write About in Your Mailing List

As you might guess, just sending emails to people that say “buy my book” isn’t going to be that well received. You’ll probably get a lot of unsubscribe requests that way.

The best thing to do is to send out helpful information related to your niche. Send the sort of stuff your fans would be thrilled to get in their email boxes once a week, twice a month, or however often you decide to communicate.

If you send valuable information (or, for my novelists out there, entertainment), nobody is going to begrudge you a “sales pitch” mixed in here and there. There’s nothing wrong with putting a “Oh, and if you want to buy my book…” P.S. in each newsletter.

The marketing gurus say a person may need to be exposed to a product up to 7 times before deciding to purchase–this is why getting people to sign up for a newsletter that you send out regularly has so much potential to increase your book sales.

I’ve mentioned blog carnivals in a couple of posts as a method for building links, and folks have asked what they are. I actually didn’t know myself until last year, so don’t feel bad if you haven’t heard of them. Here’s a short definition and a bit on how they can help increase links and traffic to your site.

What is a blog carnival?

A blog carnival is a collection of links submitted by bloggers. They highlight recent posts across the blogosphere that are related to the carnival’s theme (i.e. personal finance, diet and fitness, writing, etc.)

Posted on blogs themselves, carnivals are ideally published on a regular basis (weekly, bi-monthly, monthly). In the best case scenario, the hosts rotate, so each week a link to one of your posts has a chance to appear on a different blog. (Sometimes they’re published on the same site each week which limits the usefulness of the links–you may want to submit a couple times, but there’s less SEO benefit from submitting frequently).

You can usually volunteer to host an existing carnival, and of course you can start one up yourself (this may be worth doing if there isn’t anything out there in your niche).

How useful are blog carnivals for increasing links and traffic?

I regard any link to my site from another regularly updated site as a good thing, and when we’re talking about a blog in a related niche, it’s even better.

However… when your link is one of dozens listed in a blog post, you may wonder how much it’s going to count for in the broad scheme of things. Honestly it probably won’t matter much. It’s certainly not going to take your blog from a 10,000,000-something search engine ranking to a top 10 ranking.

Still, every little bit helps. As they say, don’t look a gift link horse in the mouth.

Blog carnival links are free, and it’s easy to submit your posts for consideration (just head to the aptly named Blog Carnival site to browse the list and find related carnivals).

Other reasons to participate in blog carnivals

It’s always worth thinking beyond the links. Blog carnivals can provide an opportunity to network with fellow niche bloggers.

When your post appears in a blog carnival, you can head over and see all the other bloggers writing in your niche. If you go visit these related sites, you might find some good people to strike up relationships with. Leave some comments on their sites, and maybe drop them a line. This could lead to blogroll link exchanges and–even better–guest blogging opportunities.

If there’s one question I get a lot when people find out I make a living from running Google Adsense on my sites, it’s the one along the lines of, “Why do my earnings suck?”

Some people are so disheartened from trying to make money online that they’ll flat out state that a normal person can’t make money with Adsense, or you have to have tons and tons of traffic to make anything. Well, I’m not sure how normal I am, but I don’t get zillions of page views a month to my site, and while Google isn’t the only way I make money, I do make enough from that program alone to cover all my monthly living expenses.

So…. what’s the secret?

There are lots of places where people go wrong, but here are perhaps the three most common problems I see, AKA, “Why your Adsense earnings suck.”

1. Site isn’t a good tie-in for pay-per-click revenue

This is the biggest one and honestly the hardest to fix. (2 can easily be changed and 3 isn’t that bad either.)

Sites that don’t have a clear commercial tie-in don’t tend to do well with Adsense. For example, if you blog about writing, exactly what products would people buy related to that? Heck if I know (books and other not very expensive items, I’d guess), and that’s why I don’t have Adsense on this site.

This doesn’t mean that sites focusing more on teaching and less on consumer-oriented stuff can’t make money (some people make a lot of money creating their own information products and selling them), but sometimes it’s not even worth putting Adsense ads on such sites.

I love Adsense because it’s perfect for introverts like me who don’t want to deal with the hassle of selling products, but you really do have to choose a niche and write content with related products and services in mind if you want to do well with the program.

2. Horrible ad placement

This is probably my favorite Adsense “problem,” because it’s such an easy fix. If you want to make good money with Adsense, you really need to get your ads as close to the content as possible. It’s a bad idea to “trick” people into clicking, but you don’t want them to easily ignore those ads either.

The small 480×90 banner ads are easy to ignore (the Internet has “grown up” with that banner size, and we’re all pretty good at blocking it out), and tower ads aren’t particularly effective if they’re stuck over in the side bar. It gets even worse if your ads are below the fold (meaning that people have to scroll down to even have a shot at noticing them).

What really does work is the 250×250, 300×250, or the monster 336×280 ads wrapped right into the content of your article or blog post. It’s hard to miss, and you’ll get a lot more clicks with this type of Adsense layout.

A lot of people don’t want to stick these big ads in right next to their content for fear of looking spammy or perhaps alienating a community of readers. It’s your choice, but if you want to make money, size of ads and placement can make a huge different. Putting ads where “they won’t bother people” is the same as putting ads where nobody will notice (and click) on them.

3. Not enough search engine traffic

You don’t have to get zillions or even millions of page views a month to make a nice living from Adsense (I average a little over 10,000 views a day, across all the sites I run Adsense on). You do, however, have to have some traffic.

And ideally that traffic will come from the search engines.

I know we all like to go out and comment on each others’ blogs so they’ll comment on our blogs and we’ll look popular, but someone returning a comment isn’t a likely candidate to click an ad and buy something from the shop on the other end.

You want someone who typed in “how to make mead” and landed on your blog post on “How to Get Started Making Mead in Your Own Kitchen.” They’re a much better candidate to click on the nearby ads for home brewing kits. They found your site because they were specifically thinking of getting into home brewing, not because they were just returning a comment to be cordial.

The best way to fix a lack of traffic (especially a lack of search engine traffic) is the tried and true method: get links to your site. This can be done through article marketing, guest blogging, forum posting, blog carnivals, and other methods. Pick one you like and put some quality time into working it.

Make sure your site follows all these rules (okay, they’re just guidelines… suggestions, if you will), and your Adsense earnings won’t “suck” any more!