Remember how I’ve been telling you for years and years that Amazon’s bots have been banning authors for inexplicable reasons and giving them no recourse to reverse the malicious actions?

Much to no one’s surprise, it’s still going on.

read more Amazon is Still Banning Authors for No Reason

Amazon ReviewsAll authors want book reviews because they show social proof on the world’s biggest online bookstore. That has an indirect effect on sales, and can help an author obtain an advertising slot with BookBub or one of the other big ebook advertisers. Readers also want reviews.

read more How to Prevent Amazon From Deleting Your Reviews by guest @IolaGoulton

Conversion optimization has always been a hot topic in internet marketing. To be honest, all of us already know the best call to action phrases or marketing techniques out there! Yet, here you are, reading through this post in hopes of improving your conversion rates.

What are you missing? There may be a lot of ways to improve your conversion rates, but we cannot stress it enough; targeted call to action phrases work, and it has been proven.

read more 20 Call-To-Action Phrases That Will Boost Conversion Rates Fast

One of the most difficult parts of book marketing (if not the most difficult) is getting reviews for your book, particularly quality reviews that exceed one sentence. Why is this? Because each potential reviewer is a busy person with a lot on their plate, so their time is valuable.

read more How to Get Your Email Subscribers to Leave Quality Reviews—Legitimately

Guest Post
by Ellen L. Buikema

While perusing Facebook, I noticed a post in the Indies Unlimited Fans Group that piqued my interest — the new “add your video” option for your book’s Amazon sales page. I state upfront that technology and I do not always have an easy relationship, but this looked so promising that I thought I would give it a try. Please note that not everyone is seeing this option on their books’ pages yet.

read more Adding a Video to Your Book’s Amazon Sales Page

Lately I’ve had people reach out to me saying, “I’ve been told I need to pay someone to help me with SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Can you help me with that? If not, do you have someone you could recommend?” Well I don’t really “do SEO,” but I am happy to help any website get better search rankings for free. It’s not as complicated as you might think:

1. Use a website platform that handles Search Engine Optimization for you automatically (like Squarespace) and submit the website domain to Google and Bing for them to crawl and index.
2. Use your website to share a steady and consistent stream of great content that naturally uses keywords in the content itself that people would use to find you.
3. Create and schedule a steady and consistent stream of compelling social media posts that link to your great content on your website.

Websites that end up as top results in searches have the most traffic, and are indexed with the strongest legitimate use of keywords in the page titles, headings, and body text. Getting indexed properly of course requires that your website have the proper formatting. Google is ranking websites higher in search results that also have SSL security to protect users, as well as being mobile friendly with responsive web design coding. All of the popular CMS web hosting platforms keep up with such things so you don’t have to think about them.

Once your website is indexed by the search engines and you have that consistent content stream giving you traffic from social media to your website, only then should you invest in an “SEO specialist” whose main role would be to run ad campaigns for you.

As you have heard us say many times before, “it’s all about the content!”

read more What Authors Need to Know About SEO

Audiobooks are big, and they’re only getting bigger. In 2016, the annual sales of audiobooks were 2.1 billion dollars, and sales increased to 2.6 billion dollars in 2017. (Source) With podcasting also on the rise, it looks like audio is where the market is flooding to right now for content consumption

read more The DIY Guide To Turn Your Book Into An Audiobook

Relevancy is everything in today’s marketing landscape. Things move at lightning speed in the digital world, so what worked for your business last year may not be very effective anymore.

Failing to adapt to change and sticking to the status quo can bring certain death to a business. For example, Kodak was once a powerful brand that controlled 90% of the United States’ film market in the 1970s. However, they never adjusted their marketing message and relied on old strategies to keep them afloat. Kodak failed to realize that customer’s priorities change. Today, consumers are interested in the actual story of a business, in addition to their product. Kodak failed to adapt to the changing priorities and nearly had to shut its doors after it declared bankruptcy, giving a whole new meaning to the phrase “Having a Kodak moment.”

read more 4 Signs You’re Using Outdated Marketing Techniques

For years, critics have bemoaned the decline of reading among both children and adults, but new data actually presents hard numbers on how this behavior has actually declined. According to analysis conducted by Jean M. Twenge, PhD, of the recent Monitoring the Future report, kids these days have all but stopped reading.

“Wait, we’ve heard this before,” you might think, and you’re not wrong. Even when preteens, teens, and young adults became somewhat early adopters of digital reading tech, the paper-only crowd still voiced concern. Now, though, the evidence straight from the survey respondents themselves points to a decline in long-form reading, regardless of whether it was paper or digital.

Instagram is primarily a photo sharing app and it is owned by Facebook. It is a place where people augment the the pics they take on their smartphone with a myriad of customization options. The New York Public Library is taking a calculated gamble that people might want to read ebooks on Instagram too.