Online Tools to Help You Market Your Books

Online Book Promotion Tools

Here are a few online services and tools provided by Google and others. You can use these tools to create apps, track interests, monitor website traffic, develop promotional tours, create new products, and more.

Blog Carnivals: http://www.blogcarnival.com - A Blog Carnival is a blog post where someone takes the time to find really good blog posts from other bloggers on a given topic, and then puts all those posts together in a periodic blog post called a carnival.

Data Wiki: http://datawiki.googlelabs.com - This service allows you to create a wiki based on structured data. Most wikis are currently based on unstructured data. I haven't tested this service yet, but it seems to offer the possibility of creating a database that you can create, edit, and share (and allow other users to edit and add to). I think that might be a great way to present structured data, like a listing of book printers, a series of recipes, etc. It's not clear right now, though, how you could monetize that content.

 

InstaComment: http://www.instacomment.com - Allows anyone to add a comment system to their website. It's fast and it's free.

Ngram Viewer: http://ngrams.googlelabs.com - This Google graphing program draws from the content of over 5 million books published between 1500 and 2008. It allows you to track cultural trends over 500 years of history by entering keywords or phrases and track the frequency of their use in books over any period of time during those 500 years.

For example, here is a link to an ngram I created to track the words: woman, man, and God between 1800 and 2008: http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content= God%2Cman%2Cwoman&year_start=1800&year_end =2008&corpus=0&smoothing=3

When you view the above graph, you'll notice that the use of the word woman varies very little over those 200+ years, while the word man has dropped precipitously, with a recent uptick since 2000. The word God has dropped even more, again with a recent uptick since 2000.

What keywords or phrases would you like to track? Are you curious how certain phrases have change in popularity over time? Do you want to know what terms have been most popular during the past ten years? This tool can help you uncover answers to any of these questions.

I compared the phrases book promotion and book marketing during the past 20 years and discovered that the words book promotion were consistently more popular than book marketing. At least in books. By contrast, the two phrases reverse positions right now in Google searches: More people search for the keyword book marketing than those who search for the keyword book promotion.

Quizmaker: http://www.attotron.com/pub/Quizmake.htm – Allows you to create an online quiz without writing any code. You begin by asking a question, give up to 5 answer choices, and enter feedback for each answer (so quiztakers can know when they are right and, if wrong, how they went wrong). You can ask a number of questions. Free service.

Snagsta: - Snagsta lets you create or search lists to discover things to do or enjoy. Some sample lists: Best chocolate shops in London, Winston Churchill quotes, 5 good and cheap restaurants in Paris. Think of the lists you could create to support your books, draw in visitors, or create a bibliography, work list, favorite websites, to-do list, step-by-step guide, etc.

John Kremer created a list of the 17 New Year's Days celebrated in January: http://snagsta.com/people/john-kremer/lists/new-years-days-in-january?listID=5932#

Alex Moore created a list of books about polar travel and exploration: http://snagsta.com/people/alex-moore/lists/books-about-polar-travel-and-exploration

Rebeccah Rumph created a list of little things you can do to help control the climate crisis: http://snagsta.com/people/rebeccah-rumph/lists/little-things-you-can-do-to-help-control-the-climate-crisis

Jonathan Alexander created a list of good sites for ebooks: http://snagsta.com/people/jonathan-alexander/lists/good-sites-for-ebooks3431

Robert Scoble created a list of what to do if you're laid off in a recession (with 1121 views): http://snagsta.com/people/robert-scoble/lists/what-to-do-if-youre-laid-off-in-a-recession

Leo Babauta created a list: Get Off Your Butt: 16 ways to get motivated when you're in a slump: http://snagsta.com/people/leo-babauta/lists/get-off-your-butt-16-ways-to-get-motivated-when-youre-in-a-slump

Note how you can put keywords into your title and the keywords also show up in the URL. Very powerful for showing up in search engines. You can add links to your website with each list item.

Sqworl: http://www.sqworl.com - Allows you to make a personalized homepage for yourself, take notes while comparing websites or web pages, create a step-by-step tutorial for other users (http://sqworl.com/7518ca). You can bookmark links to a series of website or web page thumbnail previews and then comment on them, thus allowing you to create a tour, tutorial, or commentary - and then share them with others.

 

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Free Teleseminars Alert!: http://www.bookmarket.com/audio.htm - Sign up here to get free email alerts on great book marketing, publicity, PR, and online marketing teleseminars.

 

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Useful Search, Keyword, and Alert Sites

Blue Backlinks: http://www.bluebacklinks.com - A great website for checking what websites are linking to your website. You can also use it to see who is linking to your competitors, websites you might want to create a relationship with, or websites targeting the customers you want to reach. Websites that link to your competitors are great places to start creating relationships for your website, books, or authors.

Inframutt: http://www.reallymagazine.com/ifm/inframutt.htm - Allows you to search Google for the LAST listings for a keyword rather than the first. In my experience, it showed the #6,000 listing rather than the very last. But still educational for seeing who rates worse or worst for your keywords.

Knowem: http://www.knowem.com - Check whether or not your name or brand is available on many, many social networks.

Now Relevant: http://www.nowrelevant.com - This search engine only shows results for items updated in the past 14 days or less. Great way to see what's happening now. Also allows videos and banner ads in their pay-per-click program.

Regator: http://www.regator.com - Features the web's best blog posts from the web's best blogs. A great place to find bloggers to connect with or comment upon.

SEO Quake: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/search/?q=seo+quake&cat=all&x=0&y=0 - This is a Mozilla Firefox add-on that allows you to see the Google PageRank, Alexa rank, and more inside traffic info for any website you visit. That can be incredibly useful in deciding which websites you want to partner with. It makes tracking traffic a lot easier than visiting different websites to uncover the info.

Trends Buzz: http://trendsbuzz.com - Track the current trends on Yahoo Buzz, Google Trends, and Twitter Trends.

Video Alerts: http://www.video-alerts.com - This website allows you to get an email notification once a day when new videos are uploaded to YouTube on any topic of your choice. You can use up to ten keywords to target your preferred videos.