You may be a savvy blogger, or maybe you’re still digging in your heels about starting your blog, but no matter where you fall on that spectrum I have to tell you that blogging is a critical piece to your author marketing.

If you want to sell more books, I urge you to get on the blog train.

Why?

Because blogging is a great way to connect with current fans, and it’s also a great way to put a piece of yourself out there to draw in new fans and buyers.

Author websites are important for book marketing and they can help you sell more books.

Look at it from a reader’s perspective. Because, to them, author websites show them who’s serious and who’s not, they establish which authors seem to be in it for the long haul and which authors they should feel comfortable investing their time and money in.

So let’s talk about 5 important features that separate successful author websites from unsuccessful ones.

And by successful I mean those that sell more books, versus those that just eat up money in hosting fees.

If you’ve spent any time on the Amazon website, you’ve no doubt seen the via the Amazon Marketing Services the “Sponsored Products” and “Product Display ads.” The Amazon Marketing Services for authors (also called AMS)  is a fabulous opportunity to gain more visibility for your books. And if you plan it right, the Amazon ad system can really help to expand the reach of your book so you can gain more readers!

In terms of Amazon ad system preferences, my nod goes to the sponsored products, for reasons I’ll explain in the video below. One of the things I’m hoping that Amazon will change soon is that the Amazon ad system is currently only open to indie authors. I think this is a shame because every author could benefit from using this, not just the indie authors. I’ve written Amazon a few times about opening up this dashboard to all authors. I’m not sure they’ll take my suggestion, but hopefully soon they’ll change Amazon Marketing Services for authors.