How to market your self-published books? Launching a website, preferably a Bluehost site, is the key!
If you want to make a decent living with self-published books, you need to learn how to market your books. Well, publishing books is necessary, however, without marketing your books, you may struggle to sell enough copies to earn a few thousand bucks per month. There are thousands of books published on a daily basis. If you don’t market your books properly, your titles will get lost somewhere down in the stack. Marketing is the key. That’s where comes the issue of launching a personal website.
How to market your self-published books? There are numerous dos and don’ts for marketing your titles. One of the crucial steps to make your books known to the world is to have a dedicated website. Yep, you need to launch a website. This gives you’re a unique brand name. It might sound too much to the non-technical self-publishing authors. However, the whole process of launching a site and maintaining it properly is not all that complicated.
Honestly, there are so many aspects to take care of when you go for marketing. In this blog-post, I will share with you briefly on how to start a WordPress blog/site to market your books.
Let me share with you some important tips to launch a website to market your books (or whatever you want).
How To Launch a Website/Blog?
Launching a website/blog requires two crucial steps-
- Buying a domain name (such as example.com) from a domain reseller, such as Bluehost. Cost – about $10/year.
- Buying a web hosting – about $40/year.
You may get a free domain name (for 1 year) if you buy hosting with Bluehost.
How to Buy a Domain Name?
A website’s domain name is like the name of a company. When you buy a domain name, you basically register your company’s name. A successful purchase of a domain name is like having a unique company name.
Well, you need to decide a domain name. Then check its availability on Bluehost (or any other reseller like Dotster or Namecheap). Not all domains are available. Also, some domain names are quite expensive. I prefer to work out a reasonable price for the domain names. I run multiple sites, so I am quite used to finding suitable domain names for good pricing. Further, a good number of .com domain names are already taken. In that case, .net domains are also okay. The simple domain names would cost you about $10 to $20 per year. It’s recommended to buy a domain privacy. That will protect your real name, address, email, etc. from the online scammers. The domain privacy will cost you about $15/year.
How to Get Web Hosting?
What web hosting, btw? Just having a domain name is not enough. A domain name is just like a name of a company. Just because you have registered a company name doesn’t mean you have a place to set up your office.
That’s where comes the web hosting. Web hosting provides you an online space to store your digital files.
One of the best web hosts on this planet is Bluehost. There are so many reasons to choose Bluehost, such as-
- Bluehost domain/hosting pricing is very much reasonable.
- They give you free domain name if you buy hosting with them (1 year).
- Customer support is great. Their online chat support is available 24/7.
- They give you free SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) to make your site secure.
- They help you set up your site, create your account, install WordPress. They practically do everything to support you running a site without much trouble.
Let me tell you. I have been in online business for nearly a decade. I have 15 sites running. All hosted on Bluehost.
If you are looking for launching a website, go with Bluehost. You can simply start chatting with a Bluehost representative. They will guide you through the whole process. Make sure to get WordPress installed as WordPress sites/blogs are the best.
Develop Your Site
Once your website is launched, you should develop your site. This includes installing useful plugins, creating pages, and posts. You should regularly publish relevant blog-posts.
You should install Site Kit by Google plugin and add your site to the Google Search Console. This will help your site to be discovered by Google search. Don’t forget to submit your sitemap to the search console (Yoast SEO plugin will help). You can also add a plugin for email subscribers. Antispam plugins are also helpful (Antispam Bee is my favorite plugin).
You can also consider displaying Ads on your site. Google AdSense is one of the best programs to monetize your sites.
Create a “About” and “contact” pages. Publish blogs about your activities. It’s okay to get personal as people like the personal touch. You should start sharing links to your books. In particular, you should share affiliate links (from Amazon) of your eBooks and paperbacks (this is known as affiliate marketing). You may want to create an affiliate account with Amazon. You earn from the sale of the books and also get commissions when someone clicks on your link and buys a book. Amazon gives you 4% of list prices for each successful click-through purchase. What’s more, for each customer clicking your link, you may earn commissions on anything he/she buys within 24 hours of a given click (check out Amazon’s cookie policies).
You might be feeling lost in this short post. Stay calm! These steps are worth learning, and it’ll help you in the long run. After all, you want to have a long-lasting career with self-publishing! It all starts with publishing books, and marketing your book with a dedicated site with Bluehost.