This free course will give you the solid understanding you need to pick the right digital path to take, and to plan and manage online campaigns. Once you complete this course, you’ll actually have key applications including a website, blog, Facebook business page and email marketing system, plus the expert knowledge and examples to use them to sell books and ebooks.
What’s in the course
- Course introduction
- Module 1: Building a digital platform
- Module 2: The digital marketing toolbox
- Introduction
- The 8 essential digital marketing tools
- Part 1: The web and discoverability
- Search, discoverability and metadata
- Two essential tools for search optimization
- How to boost your search results
- Metadata and book discovery
- Using metadata to improve discoverability
- Designing covers that sell online
- Website audit: Get your website marketing-ready
- Blogging: Creating content that spreads
- Blog software for publisher and author sites
- The 7 rules for successful blogging
- PROJECT: Build a blog and a website
- Summary
- Part 2: Social networks
- Introduction to social networks
- Facebook basics: Get started
- Facebook basics: Setting up a Page
- Facebook basics: Engage fans
- Facebook Pages: Customize
- Case Study: Top author Facebook Pages and their best posts
- EXERCISE: Study expert techniques
- Facebook Pages: Custom tabs and apps
- Facebook Pages: Promote to fans
- PROJECT: Build your own Facebook Page
- Facebook Pages: Measure
- Twitter basics
- How to use Twitter for marketing
- Analyzing tweets from the experts
- LinkedIn: The social network for business
- Managing it all: Social media dashboards
- Summary
- Part 3: Email and online advertising
- Module 3: Merchandising and marketing to ebooksellers
- Converting ebookstore browsers into buyers
- Anatomy of a Kindle Books page
- How publishers and authors can enhance their book pages
- Beating Amazon’s algorithms
- EXERCISE: Analyze and compare ebookseller sites
- Marketing support from other ebooksellers
- Case study: Working with Kobo to merchandise ebooks
- Summary
- Module 4: Building your own digital plan
Why this course will help you — even if you’re an experienced book marketer
Until recently, effective book marketing meant arranging for your titles to be prominently displayed in bookstores. You built relationships with those responsible for reviews in newspapers and magazines. Authors made themselves available for tours and for book signings. Careful negotiation helped your books to achieve good positions in retailers’ catalogues.
With ebooks, and even print books where they’re not physically available, the rules have changed.
- Bookstores are virtual, and carrying millions upon millions of titles – how do you achieve prominent positioning in this environment, where Google can deliver interested prospects directly to anywhere within a website?
- Anyone can be a reviewer – and prospective ebook buyers give at least as much weight (and sometimes more) to reviews by informed consumers as they do to those by professional reviewers
- How can authors “tour” the virtual world? How can they “sign” ebooks?
Everywhere, publishers are facing the need to change their marketing and selling to stay relevant in this digital world. Digital Marketing 101 for Ebooks shows you how— and it shows you how to take advantage of all the free opportunities now open to publishers and authors.
The program explains the jargon, introduces the key concepts, tools, and techniques, and gives you step-by-step instructions to set up and use each element.