Sunday 22 January 2012

Increase Book Sales Online Via the Money Word Matrix

The money word matrix is a little known but great SEO method that could get your book page seen by people looking for a book like yours. But this isn’t simply about finding high traffic keywords and phrases.

Book Marketing with SEO

Briefly, search engine optimization (or SEO) is a means of using keywords to get a webpage discovered by a person looking for information on that webpage. Keywords in this context are basically a search term a person might use before stumbling across your webpage, which in this case might be an author blog. So if I wanted to find a ‘cheap Kindle thriller’, I would Google this search term in order to find such a product. A series of websites containing these search terms would be displayed. This search term is known as a ‘keyword.’ Or ‘key phrase.’ Good use of keyword phrases lies at the centre of getting relevant traffic to your blog or website.

Ways to Make Money Selling Books Online

But search terms you are using might not necessarily be what everybody else is using, which is where the Google Adwords Keyword Tool comes in. Sign in into your Google account and browse to this invaluable SEO resource.

In the tool bar, put in words or phrases that relate to your book. In my case, I have written psychological thrillers available as Kindle and print copy. I might put in the following phrases: Kindle thriller, crime ebook or psychological thriller. Being a virtual unknown (at this point), no one is going to use my name to find my thrillers or the title of my books, so this would be of little use to getting my books found.

Your list might resemble the tags readers use to tag a book on Amazon, and the principle is similar, as such tags are used to make books more easily found. But to make your book discoverable on the internet is different to making it discoverable on a publishing platform, such as Amazon.

Google Keywords Tool and Kindle Book Sales

Once you have put your list of words and phrases into the Google’s SEO tool, it will return with keywords people are actually using, as opposed to ones you think they’re using. As well as search volume of each keyword per month, the tool will also list synonyms and alternative terms to your suggestions.

Make a note of all relevant keywords given, preferring the ones with the highest search volume, anything over 1000 per month (I take the global results rather than local). Try more search keywords into the tool to find more keywords. Expand your keyword list until you have a good list of keywords and phrases people are using that relates to your book.

But it doesn’t end there. Now for the money word matrix part.

Earning Money through the Word Matrix

SEO experts will tell you that including a high search volume keyword or phrase in your webpage does not guarantee that it will be found, as lots of other websites could be using the same keywords. Your webpage, as a result will be buried beneath a pile of other webpages using the same keywords as yours. The way around this? Find a keyword that is not often used on the internet. This is what the matrix is all about.

The best way to establish if a keyword phrase is often used in the internet is to enclose the phrase in speech marks in the Google home page and see how many search results come up. This will be displayed in small text below the tool bar. Anything over 10,000 results is pretty high. Below 5000 is OK. 1000 or less is very good. The principle of the money word matrix is that the higher the search volume and the lower the competition, the better the keyword phrase choice would be for promoting your book.

Ideal Keywords for Book Marketing

As well as using highly-searched words with low competition, tag on a few words to short key phrases with high search volume to create lower competition, such as the following:

Thrillers with good reviews, suspense novels set in England, Contemporary novels less than £1, abduction novels set in England, mystery murder books. And so forth. These are known as long tail keywords. The more specific your key phrases are, the more relevant to your website your traffic will be. Remember to do research before committing. Not all long tail keywords have low competition.

Good Use of Keywords on Your Author Blog

Use the strongest keywords in the title of your blog post or article. Dot the other keywords around the page informing about your book, but not too much or the text won’t flow. 6-12 keyword phrases within a 600-1000 word article will suffice. With increased traffic to your author blog describing your book, you can link straight to your books for sale on Amazon or Smashwords, or whatever. I prefer to use an image link.

Increase Sales of Kindle Books

The money word matrix is an invaluable SEO technique for selling your books on your author blog. Using keywords with high search volume (more than 500 per month) and low competition on (less than 2000 or so) will help your author blog rank higher on the net. This means your ebook will be more discoverable by people looking for a book like yours.

Articles on Book Marketing

Make the most of Amazon's Look Inside Feature
Write the best opening for your novel
Pricing your novel
Writing dialogue in fiction

2 comments:

  1. screenplay competition-Many legitimate screenplay contests require someone to pay a nominal amount or if you search hard enough you can also get contests which organize such things free of cost.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Enter your script into our Screenplay Contest, Top Screenplay Competitions in any category you choose. You may also to submit your script into multiple competition categories.

    Screenwriting Competitions

    ReplyDelete