Top 7 Tips to Promote Your Book for FREE

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Do you want more readers for your books and articles?  There is a cornucopia of free and effective promotion tools for writers on the Internet. You can achieve these marketing goals through online activities in a fun way, as most writers already like to hang out in cyberspace, networking and blogging.  Be Patient and Start Early.  Self-publishing can mean connecting with readers on a one-by-one basis.  It may take a few months to see a large uptake in traffic.
If you have a book coming out, give yourself time to create a fan base.  Don’t just start two weeks before your book becomes available - or worse: after its launch.

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1. Join Book Communities
As an author it is a MUST to be a member of these communities and a free (other than your time) way to introduce your book(s) and show your book titles.  Join Goodreads, Wattpad, Bibliophil, Scribd, BookMoch or Shelfari. More on my blog about book communities and for direct links.
Post snippets (or chapters) of your book to excite potential readers at Wattpad – see my blog about Wattpad: 15 million readers before her book was even published.
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2. Use Your Signature
Never send out an email without your author’s signature. You have probably heard this advice before, but: do you use the gains of e-mail signatures to market and promote your books?
Every day you send out emails to friends, business colleagues, your lawyer or accountant, potential clients, potential readers … If you have an email signature, you are constantly sending people “passive” marketing, spreading the word about you, your brand and your books. Create your email signature right now!
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3. Involve Social Networks
Most important of all for your success is to have LOTS of FOLLOWERS on SOCIAL MEDIA.
Show up on Google+, Twitter, Pinterest, Tumblr, Facebook and Linkedin.  Important:  Click on “public” when posting on Google+ and your content will be immediately picked up by Google’s search engines. If you share interesting links (and your blog posts), and offer great free information, you will quickly become a favorite in these social networks. Your followers and connections on Social Media will later become your fan base, read and subscribe to your blog posts and newsletters and read / buy your books.
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4. Comment on Other Blogs
Take the time to find bloggers who write about topics similar to those you write about. When they have something good to say or you can add something to what they have written, leave a comment on their blog. Each time you do so, you leave behind a link to yourself, your website, or your blog. If people who read your comment find what you have written interesting, they will click on the link to find out more about you. They may then decide to become regular blog readers or subscribers, newsletter subscribers, or book buyers.
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5. Start and Maintain a Blog Yourself
Blogs serve as the best tool for increasing online visibility as these are constantly updated and thus attractive for search engines. The more visible you, your book, your website, and your blog become, the more traffic (readers) your blog will attract. This means more buyers for your book now or when it is released. To create a successful blog, write about something you feel passionate about and do so often and consistently. That’s all it takes.
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6. Contribute Content to e-Zine Article Directories
Recycle parts of your blogged book manuscript or blog posts into short articles you can post in content farms or e-zine article directories, such as Ezinearticles.com, Amazines.com, or Blogs of the Week and many more.  Almost all have a resource box for a short bio and a link back to your website, book, blog, or subscription form. These articles are picked up by other bloggers, newsletter editors, e-zine editors, etc., and each time your resource box is featured. Readers click on your links to find out more about you, subscribe to your blog and newsletter or purchase your book.  You can even use an e-zine article distribution services, and get your articles distributed to hundreds of e-zine directories at once, making it available to hundred-thousands of new readers and possible book fans.
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7. Optimize your Amazon Page
The first step of all you can do to climb up to bestseller status:

- “autograph” Kindle books
– choose the best categories for your books and update them regularly
– add tags/keywords/subjects to your book listing for more exposure
– add lots of reviews, “About the Author” and additional information to your Amazon sales page
– get the most out of your Amazon Central account, create a brilliant authors page
– find out which part of your books your customers highlight the most on the Kindle and post it on your website or blog
- If you want your writing to stand out from the thousands of competitors, good article, book or blog headlines are one of the most important things you can do to entice people to read further.

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No Money? No Problem!
Success in social media book marketing, using the tools described here, doesn’t require any financial investment.  Depending on your level of involvement, it may demand a strong time commitment, at least in the beginning.  Yet, as more you use these marketing tools, as faster you can handle them and as more visitors and buyers you will get.

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