Archives: March 2004
eBook Website Sales Copy
One of the things I've been trying to beat into our authors is the necessity of having good sales copy on their ebook website that causes visitors to hit the "buy" button.
In recent weeks, I've given several resources and tips for finding tutorials and services that will help you learn how to write good headlines, sub-heads, body copy and closers.
There is no one better than Sir Gary Halbert at writing this type of sales copy.
Yes, it's long. If you are not inclined toward long copy, do not make the mistake of assuming everyone else does either.
Scientific tests over decades of direct marketing have proved that well written long copy sells better than short copy.
Moreover, the idea of learning how to write good headlines and copy isn't about length, it's about solving your visitors' problems and selling them a solution to those problems.
Gary and many others out there teach you how to do that.
Scroll to the bottom of the above link and subscribe to Gary's newsletter. You will learn so much from his newsletter, IF you pay attention!
Meanwhile, on that page, you can see many examples of his work. Even if you have a disdain for long copy, you can adopt the techniques to short copy and still have visitors hit the order button.
Good luck in your learning process!
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eBook Website Linking
I have spent most of the month of March on optimizing your ebook website for higher search engine rankings.
The reason is simple: from my experience working with dozens of authors who use our service and software to build their ebook websites, the two most common problems they all have is:
1. Lack of long term marketing and selling effort (more than a year)
2. Little knowledge of how to get traffic to their site.
Since search engines are so significant, or can be, to get traffic to your site, it is critical that you spend a certain amount of time each day or week on linking, optimizing, testing and tuning.
I have recently come across Ken McGaffin's website and his Linking Matters Special Reports.
As Ken has devoted this entire site to website linking, I thought you might want to take some time to review his special reports, his articles and concepts. Once you have done that, be sure to get into action with your own linking campaign.
Take the long view and trust me when I tell you, the longer your website exists, the more traffic you will gain from search engines.
As for converting those visitors into $ales, be sure to read yesterday's blog article.
Devote 10 or 15 minutes a day to your linking strategy. That is much easier than trying to spend 3 or 4 hours every week on Saturday.
Good luck and feel free to contact me if you have any questions or would be interested in help with your linking plan.
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Writing
Due to unforseen events, I've been able to write more, both in time and quantity of words, in the last 3 months than I ever planned.
In fact, due to circumstances, I've written as many or more articles published right here on this blog in the month of March than nearly 2 months of my former ezine / newsletter.
So you're getting a lot more content than I promised in your signup.
All the writing effort has helped be become even more comfortable and confident in my writing. I've gotten to the point where I know in my mind who I'm writing to, what they want to hear and hopefully helping them as well.
Many of our eBook authors aren't so lucky. Especially once they get out of their comfort zone.
In fact, I see many eBook self-published sales websites that are downright terrible at trying to sell their ebook.
While an author may have subject matter expertise in their focus area, it's apparent that most ebook authors are totally out of their element when writing sales copy for their website such that it causes a prospective buyer to hit the ORDER button.
There is no shame in that. Especially if you haven't practiced, tested and tuned, which I find that most ebook authors don't do.
With that in mind, may I advise you to seek professional sales copywriting help. This particular person is Karon Thackston.
I enjoy her writing style. However, there are dozens of copywriting guru's out there on the web. Many like Karon, sell books or ebooks on how to write effective sales copy. Get one or three, read, practice and implement their methods.
Having done this personally about 3 years ago, I can attest to the tremendous value of these educational resources.
If you do a search for "copywriting course" you'll come up with dozens of options.
But be prepared: you're sales could increase by 800% or more!
Wouldn't want that, now, would we?
;-)
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Excellent Self-Publishing Article
In trolling the USA Today site recently, I came across this timely article on self-publishing.
In it the author, Laura Vanderkam, does a fine job of outlining the upside and downside of self-publishing.
But most important, she and some of the authors she interviews, gives us a very honest, straight shooting fact about self-publishing (printed books that is):
Few will succeed.
Which support, at least indirectly, my theory that self-publishing digital products, such as ebooks, makes much more sense and can be accomplished easier than the print counterpart.
Not that it is easy to do on the web only. It's not.
However, on the web, it is easier, in my humble opinion, to make friends and connections and joint ventures. It's also cheaper to advertise on the Internet than in print publications.
At any rate, the USA Today article is a good quality view on the self-publishing business. I hope we all continue to give traditional print publishers challenges to they continue to improve!
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Convenient Tool
I'm short on time today, but wanted to let our subscribers and readers know that Yahoo has released a toolbar.
I've been using it for 2 days now and find it immensely helpful. But, I am a regular and avid user of Yahoo features, including the free email.
At any rate, if you aren't aware of this and are a regular Yahoo user, you should go check out the new Yahoo Companion toolbar.
You can configure it so your most used features are actually on the toolbar, a single click away. I love that part of it.
They also have built in a web search field and feature, which I've been using a lot too.
In fact, it's almost replaced the use of my Google Toolbar for search. Why?
Three reasons:
1. I'm tired of Google's search results providing unrelevant results.
2. Google needs competition.
3. Yahoo's search has quite different and relevant results (so far).
Anyway, this obviously has nothing directly to do with eBooks or self-publishing, but thought it might be helpful info.
Have a great weekend.
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eBook Website Optimization
Ok, so you're not going to let me get away with just telling you to go to a search engine and find out how to write page titles and meta.
Here is an excellent article on writing solid page Titles and meta tags.
The author takes you through some basics and gives you solid info on how to do this work.
It's not hard, just a bit time consuming.
However it is necessary if you have any aspirations of having your eBook website found in the search engines. And it's mandatory to learn and do if you plan on having your eBook website rank high in search results.
Good luck!
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Search Engine PPC Fraud
For our eBook authors who are trying innovative methods to acquire visitors and customers, you may have ventured into the Pay Per Click search engine advertising game.
I call it a game, because it is one of the fastest ways to drain your credit limit if you aren't very, very careful.
Four years ago, I built my first personal website. While I was managing web developers, software engineers and project managers, I hadn't the faintest idea of doing my own website.
So I bought MS FrontPage, a 4 inch book on it at Amazon and off I went.
The site featured some products that I wanted to sell as a reseller. I controlled the inventory and ordering process so I just wanted visitors and sales.
I wrote decent sales copy and hoisted up a PPC campaign at (then known as) Goto.com, now known as Overture / Yahoo.
Unbeknown to me, I was in for a real education. Inside of 5 days, I had a $500 charge on my credit card. Not a single sale.
I was ignorant and foolish. I also believe I was a victim of what is known as "click fraud".
I learn fast though.
Fast forward to last year. My partner and I decided to launch a new website and use PPC. I was leary and just wanted to optimize the site for organic search results. He convinced me otherwise as he had written a nice software tool that captured every IP address and domain name for every click coming into our site, on our site and leaving our site.
We used FindWhat for our PPC program and had, thanks to Dave's tool, a 45% click fraud rate. We had the data and provided it to them. It was shocking to tell the truth. FindWhat gave us back that portion of our investment, but once it was used up, we closed the PPC campaign.
This discussion forum thread talks about PPC issues, specifically the recent Google legal case and other matters, including click fraud.
Spend some time reading that thread and the associated links therein before you launch a PPC campaign. Otherwise, you could very well be foolish and ignorant, and you might as well just make a cash contribution to the American Red Cross.
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Keyword Intelligence
For eBook authors trying to market through or on the Internet, you must know who your target audience is and reach them to achieve online sales without "bricks and mortar" marketing.
One of the ways to discover and target your market is to do keyword research. There are a lot of keyword research tools on the Internet.
But how do you know where you stack up against them in the search engines?
One way is to manually input your keyword phrases in a search engine and note what websites rank in what positions.
That takes a lot of time and effort, to say the least. Most eBook authors I talk to are not willing to put in THAT kind of effort.
So their sites languish, gather few sales and they give up.
Don't be one of them.
Learn how to write page titles, meta descriptions, meta keywords and on page elements. Again, search for the keyword phrases in the prior sentence to find websites that will teach you how to do that. There are hundreds or perhaps thousands of websites to do that.
But, once you get your website optimized, then tracking and tuning your position in a search engine becomes one of your key activities.
Google Alert is one tool that can help you monitor and track what websites rank in what position and which ones change. Google Alert does this each day, so your intelligence is fairly real time.
I've been using Google Alert for about 6 months now to track some keyword phrases in a certain market where I have a website that generates revenue for me.
Google Alert will send you emails whenever there are new sites entering the top rankings for your chosen keywords.
Go sign up for an account and start tuning your website!
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Additional eBook PDF Production Resources
I wrote a piece yesterday (see 3/21/04 post; it's also in the Producing category nav on the left) on some PDF creation resources.
As I was clearing out my email inbox, I found this article on various PDF creation options free or not.
The list there is much more comprehensive and should give ebook authors lots of options to get your text into an ebook PDF format.
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Free PDF eBook Creation
One of the most frequent questions we get at Knowledge Download has to do with the creation of PDF's.
We offer a PDF eBook creation service. While we offer that as a convenience to authors or people who don't know how or want to mess with buying and / or learning how to create PDF's, I'm the first one to say that in today's market, we're expensive on that front.
There are many "free" PDF creation websites and functions out on the web today.
Here are three:
Fast PDF
GoBCL
Adobe Acrobat 6.0 30 day trial
PDF Guy - free conversion
The first and last ones on the list state they convert your files for free. The second one, GoBCL apparently only does html/pdf conversions.
So if you don't want to buy Acrobat, you have several options to get your text or manual into PDF and sell it as an ebook.
No more excuses!
:-)
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Motivation
For novice authors or producers of info-expertise, one of the most difficult challenges is simply getting started.
The grip of fear sets in once you've "decided" to get started.
Staring at a blank screen in MS Word.
Nervously tapping the keyboard or desk. Your mind racing on 20,000 thoughts.
If you have any of these symptoms, get over them and just get going. As the Nike theme says, Just Do It.
Just getting started is the most difficult aspect of entering this business. I know. I've suffered from those fear issues when I first got started.
And I did once again two days ago.
Why?
I'm doing an audio ebook / recording of some learned experiences in the last two years. I've not done one of those before (audio).
But as I loaded my MP3 recorder, put on my mic headphone, my hands were trembling.
Then I received several emails from subscribers and readers telling me of their troubles of just getting started. They reminded me of my own problem at the moment!
Not that I am a proven big named author or anything, but when I first started writing my ezines, newsletters and ebooks, I would be very nervous. Soon enough, that faded.
However, with recorded audio, there is no turning back and frankly, I don't want to spend the $$ on expensive audio editing tools, nor the time on learning how to use them.
So I want to record and say the right things first time. With audio you don't have the simple luxury of editing like you do with MS Word.
Long story short is that I took my own advice and just did it. I've got 4 chapters done. I had to re-do the Intro 3 times, but the great thing is I gained confidence with the software, the mic and the recordings.
No more nerves.
So if I can do it, so can you!
Get going!
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eBook Websites
It has come to my attention that a lot of our readers and ebook authors are still in the early stages of learning how to optimize their websites for search engine benefit.
One of the simplest things you can do is to create a site map of your ebook website.
A site map is simply a list of all the pages, or major pages of your web site.
The Knowledge Download site map gives you a good example.
You'll notice that on every page of the KD site, in the bottom footer I have a link to, among other key html pages, our site map.
On the site map I've put all the major pages that I want to make sure the search engines find and spider.
The site map is an easy way to create a simple list of html pages with appropriate "anchor text".
To ensure the search engines find all the pages you want them to find, create yourself a site map and link to the site map from every page.
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eBook Websites & Yahoo Search Engine
Now comes the beginning of a very challenging period for people in what is called the "search engine optimization" field, or also known as search engine marketing consulting.
In this thread on WebProWorld, comes very strong suggestions, in part with some emails and posts from Yahoo representatives, that websites promoting affiliate programs will be banned from the new Yahoo search engine.
That ban would be on both the spider and results index databases.
It's official and painful: optimizing your eBook website for Google is going to get you entirely different results on Yahoo.
When MSN comes out with their new search engine later this year, you will have three major search engines to contend with.
The smart money suggests to build and optimize your ebook website for the search engine who will:
a) be easiest to optimize for
b) deliver you the most qualified traffic
Most of us will begin to specialize, as it will be simply too hard to reverse engineer, then build an ebook website for all these major players.
As for the Yahoo ban on sites with lots of affiliate links, if you are such a webmaster, you might as well get rid of the affiliate links, unless you are a heavy email marketer.
Google has made it known for 5 months (well, Google hasn't said squat, but it's message forum fodder and tested by some well respected SEO guru's) that Google has been penalizing sites with a lot of affiliate links.
For you newcomers, the reason for all this is for those search engines to "force" you to buy pay per click ads on their sites. Basically they have cut off the "free" traffic for affiliate selling websites.
For those of us who are info producers versus affiliate promoters, this is not bad news. I do have a website that we use affiliate marketing to generate traffic and sales. So for us, likely it means our affiliates won't be delivering much anymore.
The web is changing again and for ebook authors and promoters, it's time to start changing with it!
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eBook & Information Publishing
Many of our KD authors are busy writing, producing, publishing and selling their ebooks.
It is a lot of fun to watch people with expertise in various industries and markets go into new areas like reducing their expertise to writing.
One of the hottest areas of publishing your expertise and information is in teleseminars and online webinars.
Also known as web conference, eseminars, teleseminars, teleclass, online workshops and distance learning, these media are ideal tools to leverage sharing, teaching and mentoring your expertise.
In late January, I launched Trainers Link to further support the info publishing industry by providing an independent website that lists valuable educational "virtual events".
Trainers Link is not affiliated with any infrastructure provider, conference call service provider or webinar provider. While it takes an enormous amount of time to sift through all the possible teleseminars, I try to bring listings of truly educational events, and not just sales pitches for other products or services.
If you are unfamiliar with this type of media, you should go to Trainers Link and check out some of the virtual events that are scheduled.
There are a lot of them, so don't get overwhelmed. Also, most charge a fee, so be sure if you don't want to pay, that you locate some free events.
Once you've become familiar with them and if you want to add a fine complimentary offering to your ebooks line, then feel free to contact me and I can help point you in the right direction.
Keep up the good work!
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Welcome
Knowledge Download has been blessed to receive a substantial number of new subscribers in the last month.
Welcome to you all!
I would like to welcome you to our site, our software and our blog.
The KD site and system is a collaboration among several people, although my name is up top.
At any rate, please know that in this blog, which has essentially replaced the ezine, I've written more and given more tips and advice in the 5 months since we installed the blog software than in the 2 years prior in the email ezine.
For what that's worth I shall leave up to you.
However from the feedback I'm getting from our authors and readers, it seems that plenty of people are enjoying the info.
I've been trying to post something worthwhile nearly every day for the last 3 months. At times it can be hard, but I'm trying.
If you have any feedback, go here and send me an email.
I'm always open to new topics and ideas.
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eBook Website Optimization
Many of our authors and would-be authors are still learning how to "optimize" their ebook websites for maximum value in the search engines.
If you haven't yet read my recent blog articles on the topic, look on the left navigation and click on Search Engine Optimization.
While I have some skill with search engine optimization (SEO), I don't have the time nor patience for the testing aspects to learn myself exactly what new methods or techniques work best.
Fortunately, my last employer is a professional in the SEO industry. A phone call gets me caught up. Unfortunately, he swears me to secrecy so I can only benefit from that knowledge on my own sites.
One of the things I do is monitor the online forums focused on SEO. I'll share some insights with you soon about a new service I am involved in that is coming to a browser near you that will be immensely helpful in keeping tabs in the SEO industry.
Meanwhile, yesterday I found this article on Sitepoint that blatently spells out the keys to improving, no, beating, your competition on Google rankings.
So for you ebook authors or soon to be ebook authors, make sure you read that article and follow directions.
My former boss told me two months ago about most of the items in that article. And a few more. Sorry, I can't share.
But the Sitepoint article gives you MORE than enough to do to get your site ranked up higher.
Oh yea, and a disclaimer: you may be reading this blog in 2007. The Sitepoint article won't have any value then!
Heck, it may not have any value in 2 months!
Get on it!
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eBook Digital Libraries
The march of public libraries move to ebooks continues.
In this article, the San Jose Public Library is now offering up to 10 ebooks to their patrons at one time.
This is made possible by technology from Overdrive Systems, who is the now dominant provider of Digital Rights Management and software solutions to book publishers and libraries.
The announcements of US community public libraries moving to offering ebook checkouts is growing weekly.
A smart author who self-publishes must consider the larger implications of this and similar library announcements.
Having participated in numerous technology revolutions in my career, I can see the future of this growing movement.
First off, Overdrive has considerable partnerships with book publishers and other technology companies. Overdrive and it's partners are also driving the standards behind, and considerably influence The Open eBook Forum, an industry standards body of sorts.
One can conclude from all the behind the scenes action in the print publishing industry that one day all print books from major publishers will be in ebook format. And via Overdrive and it's partners, those ebooks will be distributed through libraries, Amazon and other channels.
While the print book market is far from saturated in the ebook space, one day it will be.
Then where will Overdrive and it's technology partners look to add to grow their titles lists?
My opinion is self-publishers.
I speculate that one day qualified experts who self-publish in print and ebooks will be able to get their works into the public digital libraries of America. You won't need the big NY publishing firms to publish your work.
So get busy and start writing and promoting your ebook! One day with time, patience and persistence, you may very well find your work being distributed through all these new online channels!
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eBook Website Copy
One of the key aspects of selling and marketing for eBook authors are the words on your website, otherwise known as sales copy.
What is your sales copy like?
Does it yammer on and on about features and how great your eBook is? Or does it clearly spell out all the great benefits your reader will gain by owning and implementing what you will teach them in your eBook?
Among my 15 or so websites, for the ones that actually sell a product or service, I try very hard to focus on benefit selling. I've spent the last three years, on and off, studying and practicing writing headlines and sales copy.
I'm also an ezine and newsletter junkie. I subscribe to almost 50 of them. I don't always get to read them, but certain ones I do.
I've studied what many people consider to be the best: Gary Halbert, Ted Nicholas, Bob Bly, Nick Usborne, Dan Kennedy, Joe Robson and many, many more.
Among my favorites is Debbie Weil. Debbie specializes in B2B copywriting, but from her ezine and website you can learn so much.
After you subscribe to Debbie's ezine, you should go to your favorite search engine and input some of the other names above. Go to their websites. Read and study their headlines, sub-heads and the copy in between.
Regardless of whose style you emulate, and do feel free to emulate, you should pay attention to the formatting and calls to action, as well as how they clearly spell out the benefits of whatever they are selling or promoting.
Then get busy and implement some changes on your own eBook selling website! Test, tweak and test again until your sales and visitor conversion ratios start to become meaningful.
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Yahoo
You may or may not be aware that Yahoo has ceased using Google results in the Yahoo web search feature/function.
That happened about one month ago.
Last year, Yahoo acquired Overture and Inktomi. Along for the ride were search engines All The Web and Alta Vista, both of which were acquired by Overture in 2002.
Since making the Inktomi and Overture acquistitions, Yahoo apparently has been busy figuring out the best way to integrate these different technologies, algorithms and indexes.
Whatever they have done, it has seriously changed the search engine landscape.
Many of my friends and colleagues have seen a drop of as much as 40% of their web traffic since Yahoo switched away from Google.
None of the search engine optimization firms have a firm grip on what or how best to optimize a site for Yahoo's new crawler and index.
In fact, from many of the online forums, it is apparent that the new Yahoo search index doesn't have a lot of sites even in it's index.
If you find that to be the case for your sites, don't dispair. Until last week (3/3/04) there wasn't even a way to submit your site to Yahoo's new search engine.
Now there is.
Click here to go to the new Yahoo submit page.
There you will see "Free URL submission". Use that if your site is not in their index.
You won't be able to use it however, unless you are a registered "member" of Yahoo. All that means is that you have one or more of their free accounts.
Good luck!
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A Good Directory
I just came across this earlier today:
The Web Savvy Directory
It is a free directory where you can, if your site is halfway respectable, get a free listing and link to your site.
As mentioned below and in my posts on the search engine value of getting your ebook website listed in directories, as many of these directories that you can get your site into, the more traffic will surely build.
Sales follow traffic!
Good luck.
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eBook Links
From time to time, and especially as new subscribers keep growing, I like to remind readers that we're wide open for link exchanges.
BTW, I'd really appreciate it, if you like this eBook Self-Publishing blog, that you would link to it from your website.
If you are interested in exchanging links with my main site, please go here to my Add URL page and let's do it!
Of course, you have to have a site that is reasonably within the topics of Knowledge Download. I'll leave that to you. If you submit a link because you learned of it from this blog, send me a separate email to let me know that. I'll give it special consideration.
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Blogs for eBooks
Many authors are not really aware of the blogging phenomena. However, many authors are.
Blogs have received much higher visibility in the last year and now the push is on for blogs in the enterprise.
For eBook authors, I would suggest starting a blog.
It creates a dialog with your readers. It gives you a chance to offer tips, ideas and build credibility.
This article from the Web Hosting Industry Review tells of a recent Pew Research study that blogs have failed (so far) to achieve the heightened expectations the media have created in the last year.
That is great news!
Many of us tinkering with blogging have feared an overwhelming mass of blogs on all topics that would drown us out.
That blogs are not growing at this time, failing to meet the media expectations, is identical to years past where we had the media hyping "the year of the LAN", the "Paperless Office", "Web sites putting Wal-Mart out of business" (the dot com boom).
Now, in all those eras of technology (having lived and worked in this industry for 20 years, I know this), once the media hype finally died down, they had done a fine job of educating the market and solid leaders emerged to ultimately meet the hype.
Blogs are the same. Now is the time to move in.
If you are an ebook author, I highly suggest you get busy adding a blog, drop your email newsletter or at least use it to promote your blog, and stake out your turf!
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Search Marketing
Among the tips the last three weeks have been everything from titles to meta to inbound links.
The great thing about investing time to "optimize" your eBook website for maximum search engine value is, in general, the results of your efforts often last years. That is, if you do a good job and your competitors aren't too hyperactive.
There are many tools out there that can help you accomplish your goal of optimizing your web site. Axandra IBP is a fine tool to help you along the way.
IBP has a freeware version that you should download and give a try.
Axandra seems to do a great job keeping their tools updated with the latest methods needed to maximize your ebook website's value.
Get busy!
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eBook Marketing - Search Engines
Many of our eBook authors are uneducated about how to drive traffic to their sites.
I started a series of articles and posts last month (Feb. '03) describing some methods of getting one of the most important aspects of having search engines send you traffic: building inbound links to your sites from directories.
Since I didn't map or plan out this series, I'm kind of shooting from the hip as time permits so as to help our eBook authors achieve greater traffic flow and ultimately, sales, of their ebooks.
One of the key aspects of optimizing a website, including eBook websites, is to write correct page titles and meta descriptions and meta keywords. This article from one of the more respected search engine firms tells you all about this topic.
They do an excellent job in this tutorial of informing you of the what and how.
But one item I want to stress that the MarketLeap article doesn't really adequately adress is the importance of using keyword phrases in your titles and descriptions and keywords. Think of the terms your users might enter into Google to find the subject or topic of your site.
Do not use your name, your ebook's name (unless it's keyword rich). Rather, use the more common language terms a typical user might look for.
If you go to to this keyword suggestion tool and enter in some sample keywords, that tool will give you some alternatives and the keyword counts used aproximately 2 months ago.
Use the right keywords in your titles, meta keyword and meta descriptions and you'll be sure to grab more traffic!
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