David Mathison: Drive Your Online Book Sales (continued)

You can create an affiliate program where organizations that fit with your tribe use their lists to sell your book. It's essential that your do all the work for these partners. They use their connections to sell your books. You then give them a percentage of the sales.

David Mathison: Drive Your Online Book Sales

David Mathison, author of Be the Media, sells all his books himself, not through retailers—mostly through his website.

The book is the most expensive and the lowest margin in your information empire—so repurpose your content create more opportunities to get your message to people.

How do you drive traffic to the website:

• on-page: keywords, placement, format
• off page: quantity/quality inbound links

Use Google Toolbar find higher ranking sites, then make relationships with those sites so they link back to you. You can also use My Yahoo or iGoogle to do this: stream an RSS of your blog onto your homepage. Having these high ranking sites link to your site will raise your rank. Digg also help to attract quality links to your site.

POSTED BY MELISSA HILL

David Mathison: Building an Effective Author Website (continued)

Tips for author websites:

• The key to an author site is to get contact information. To do that you need to offer something of value, like a free download.
• You need a way to drive people to your site.
• For search engine optimization put important information and key words at the top.
• Promiscuously place a button to buy the book.
• Find services like Paypal of One Shopping Cart to manage sales. Sales Force helps you manage your customer information.

Posted by Melissa Hill

David Mathison: Building an Effective Author Website (continued)

If you have a fan base, don't sign a publishing contract. Control you audience and control you rights. If you can do it yourself, why sign away 95% of your profits to a publish who probably won't do much for you?

If you do sign with a publisher, have an attorney to help you guard your rights as an artist. A strong platform gives you the ability to negotiate with publishers. So focus on audience building.

David Mathison doesn't sell through Barnes and Noble so that he retains all information about each person who buys the book. That allows him to see how they're using the book and what other services and products they need.

Posted by Melissa Hill

David Mathison: Building an Effective Author Website

David Mathison, author of Be the Media, talks about developing a web presence.

• New technology like blogs and podcasts makes writers as powerful as the world's largest news organizations.
• The most important thing, more than finding a publisher or agent, is building platform. The author website is one of the best ways to building your customers list.
• Instead of aiming for millions of fans, aim for 1,000 true fans.
• Everyone should have products that they give away for free to build a fan base.
  
• To have the widest fan base you must have an array of products with different values.

Posted by Melissa