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Diary Of My Heart, by Stacey J. Jones
Q. I have had horrible luck promoting a book of poetry that I just released. Does anyone know how to promote a website without a budget? - Stacey http://www.diaryofmyheart.com
A. Stacey, I hope you write poetry better than you do cut and paste web design... Before you start promoting your website, you should make sure the website looks good. Currently your site has a number of errors, and much too prominent pasting of multiple affiliate ads. For a website that is dedicated to promoting your book, I would not have any affiliate advertising on your home page, other than links to buy your book. The large xbox and game rental advertisements are very distracting.
Your links page is difficult to read. While you have probably made some very good choices on other books for people who like your book, you should probably post each of those giant Amazon recommends ads on it's own webpage, and write some words of your own to describe the books.
Probably web design isn't really your forte, so see if you can find a friend to give you a hand at cleaning up some obvious HTML errors on your site. Maybe you can trade an autographed copy of your book to a friend for an hour of help with your site.
Congratulations on getting the same domain name as your book's title. Many authors are unable to do this, it is good that you took care of doing this quickly.
When building your site, try to focus on giving people a real reason to visit your site, and even better a reason to return in the future. A great way to do that might be to post some samples of your poetry so people can read an excerpt. Also, those extra words on your site may help you get more free visitors to your site. If some of your poetry has to do with current events, those might be the best to post since they may have words that people are searching for.
Another way to increase the text on your site is to type in the text from your back cover, instead of having it just as a graphic picture. Keep the front cover, and crop out the back cover part of the image. Use your website to expand your biography, and help visitors to get to know you better by writing about things like:
How about a poetry of the week mailing list? Getting into email newsletters is tricky, you dont want to be at all involved in any kind of spam, but if you build up a nice list of people who ask you to send them poetry on a regular basis, those people might eventually buy this book, or your next book.
You could also promote your book and site providing copies of your book to people willing to write a review of your book, and post the reviews on their own websites. Additionally, they may give you permission to use their reviews on your site, in return for a link back to their sites.
You might also look at some of the free host blog sites, and use one of them to promote your book, your site, and your thoughts. You might find them easier to use than you current web design system for making a nice looking, text rich site.
You might also want to try using a wiki. Using a wiki, like http://www.chat11.com, can be a great way to build an interactive information rich website quickly and easily.
I have provided a free checklist of over 40 website promption techniques here: http://www.garnetchaney.com/promotion.shtml Many of these techniques can be applied to your site for little or no money.
Good luck!
- Garnet
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