How to Use Article Marketing to Promote a Book

Article Marketing is a perfect marketing tool for driving traffic to just about any type of website, and that includes websites of authors who have newly released books!

I actually get excited when an author who wants to promote an e-book or hard copy book asks how article marketing can serve them, because the book itself presents you with a ‘content opportunity’ (likely multiple times over)!

There are 3 main things that an author needs to attend to when trying to promote a book:

1) Writing the articles.

2) Crafting a resource box that references the book and links back to the website.

3) Setting up your website to capture email address (and then follow up to sell the book). 

Let's go through these 3 steps:

Promoting A Book: Writing Articles

This is the easy part!

Just rework some of the content from the book and present it in an article.

Why rework the content? Simply to make the book content make sense in an article.

Books are written in chapters and usually the chapter is just as long as it needs to be–there's no word limit when you're writing a chapter or a book so you don't really have to monitor your word counts.

But with article marketing, you know that there is a word limit–usually the upper limit is 1500 words, and ideally the article would be between 700-800 words. So, you will have some editing to do when you decide to use content from your book in your article.

That's the reason why you need to rework content–since your book is not published online (most likely it's a download or a hard copy book), you don't need to worry about any "duplicate content" type of stuff.

It's fine to use parts of your book verbatim in your article if you like–the only reworking that you really need to do is to make the article the appropriate length and to make sure that the information conveyed in your article makes sense in that new format. 

The only exception to this would be that if you want to use one part of your book in multiple articles, you will definitely want to rework that content so that each article is 100% unique and there are no parts that are exactly the same. 

Here's an idea– let's say your book is about how to conquer depression, and you have 5 chapters (or more) chapters that deal with coping techniques for depression. You could have an article entitled ‘Five Ways To Beat Depression’ where you list the 5 coping techniques and give a brief synopsis of each one.

And you could write 5 more articles, each highlighting just one of the coping techniques.

So, in any one article obviously you wouldn't be able to convey information of the same depth as in your book, but with the article you give the reader just a taste of the information you are providing in your book.

This is a bunch easier than sitting down to write each article from scratch and having to come up with topics off the top of your head!

Yes, if you have a book that you're trying to promote, you have a definite head start when you're doing article marketing.

Depending on how long your book is, you could produce quite a few articles using this technique.

Promoting A Book: Your Resource Box

In the resource box you could say something like “Article was excerpted from my ebook ‘[your ebook title]’, by [your name]. For more powerful ways to overcome your depression, go to [your url]”.

Now, that is just a partial resource box, so you would want to flesh it out with your own information. 

Remember, in every resource box you will include:

• Your name
• A little author bio info
• A reason to click through to your website (and you've got that part covered–you e-book it the lure!)
• Your website URL

You can get creative with how your phrase things, but remember to mention that the article was excerpted or based on your ebook, give the title, and give your own name and the URL.

Promoting A Book: Capturing Email Addresses at Your Website

You will have traffic going to your website from your article. What do you want to do with all that traffic?

A smart thing to do would be to set up an email capture page at the URL you’re linking to and then sell your book via follow up email messages.

Now, you have to think of a great reason why someone would want to surrender their email address to you–why should they give that information away to you? What will you give them in return? 

Here are some things you could offer your readers:

• The first 10 or 20 pages from your book. That gives the reader a bigger taste of what they can expect should they decide to buy the book.
• A free report that you put together based on information in the book.
• A newsletter
• An e-course 

Promoting A Book: Letting the Momentum Build

Article marketing is a prime way that authors promote their books. It's cost effective, has long lasting results, and results in targeted traffic to the website (which makes sales more likely). If you're using article marketing to promote a book, you should:

• Start writing and submitting articles consistently each month.
• Be patient–it will likely take 3-4 months before you start to see a traffic increase. This is due to the way that search engines work–search engines do not re-evaluate incoming links on a daily, weekly or even monthly basis. Usually it's more like 3-4+ months, so although you're building links from Day 1, you won't feel the results from the search engines until they've had a chance to re-evaluate your site's rankings based on the incoming links.
• Keep the momentum going. After you've got a few months of article marketing under you belt, keep up the good work! One of the beautiful things about article marketing is that it has a ripple effect:
  

  For example, an article I distributed about a month ago has so far had around 100 views on the SubmitYOURArticle.com article directory. Not bad, some achieve more, some achieve less. But that's the whole point of having a consistent article marketing campaign, where you distribute a few each and every month.

  Multiply that by 12, allowing for the fact that the view rate will be higher when the article is first distributed, and over the course of a year, I'd expect this to be at around 1000 views just on the one directory.

  Multiply that by say just 10 other popular article directories, and that's 10,000 views in a year – just for a single article.

  Now, if you multiply that by 8 articles a month – or even 2, 3 or 4 – over the course of the year, and the numbers get crazy! (and I'm no mathematician, so I won't try, but I suspect the word 'compounded' would get used a bit ) – and this is where the click-throughs and traffic growth to your site comes from, when you implement a consistent article marketing campaign.

  This also illustrates why those who submit just one or two articles, and then give up and hold their hands up to complain article marketing 'doesn't work' – usually because they "haven't seen any traffic growth" – are not only in no position to make such a judgement, but I would also suspect they would go on to achieve very little until they place at least some value in consistency, persistence, and faith in tried and tested online marketing techniques. 

So, write articles, submit them consistently over the long term, be patient, and keep the momentum going! 

This is a fabulous way to market a book and drive traffic to a website. 

Photo Credit: llibreria – bookstore – Amsterdam – HDR Originally uploaded by MorBCN

Related Resources:

A Step-By-Step Guide To Turning Your Articles Into An E-Book
Get More Marketing Mileage Out Of Your Articles–Turn Them Into An E-Book!

Posted: Monday, March 2nd, 2009 at 12:00 am

Subscribe to Creative Article Marketing (RSS)

article distribution service, article marketing, article submission service, submit article, submit articles Comments: View Trackback RSS

5 Responses to “How to Use Article Marketing to Promote a Book”

1. Justin Brooke Says:
   March 28th, 2009 at 11:03 am

   Article marketing can be used to promote a number of products, services or even ideas. So it’s no wonder that this can be used to promote books as well.

2. Marketing Forums Says:
   April 15th, 2009 at 7:07 pm

   A fantastic read….very literate and informative. Many thanks….where is your RSS button ?

3. Steve Shaw Says:
   April 15th, 2009 at 8:18 pm

   Hi–Thank you, and the RSS button is at the upper right. You’ll see “Subscribe via RSS” beside it. Thanks for asking

4. Ricardo A. Says:
   July 21st, 2009 at 8:21 am

   I like the idea of building up momentum. I guess the articles we write take a life of their when sustained for a minimum of 3 – 5 months.

5. Venkatesh Iyer Says:
   August 1st, 2009 at 2:47 pm

   Today article marketing is one of the best ways to boost your web site’s search engine ranking and getting more traffic. The easiest way to do this is by writing enticing content and submitting it to as many directories as possible.

Leave a Reply