for your Book and yourself as the Author
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by Olga Kellen
Your own web-site, built with lots of appealing, interesting and up-to-date information about your book, and possibly about yourself as author, is the answer to your book promotion needs - to make people interested in buying just your book, not any other book!
Of course, it goes without saying that your web-site has to be visible and easily found on the Internet. That's why you have to forget about free-for-everyone hosting sites or a free web-space your Internet provider offers you. Avoid imagining a free site put together by your high school son and the like. Such a web-site will never be treated as professional, will never have any position with Internet search engines, and will be close to useless for your book promotion since nobody could ever find it.
Also, don't be seduced by any cheap-and-quick offers like $4.95 a month for hosting with free web-design, etc. Such offers include no customer service whatsoever, and you'll still need to do a lot of technical stuff yourself or hire help, which will cost many, many times more than the offer says; the result (if any) will in all likelihood be misery.
On the other hand, you don't have to spend a small fortune on web-design, hosting, web-site maintenance and search engine optimization, submission and positioning to create traffic of visitors, either.
There is a solution to this problem in form of an affordable, all-in-one package of web-design, hosting, and traffic building, with search engine optimization and submission.
This is easily manageable by any person with little or no technical computer skills, and can be found at http://buildit.sitesell.com/book-publishing.html
This service lets you build a quite professional web-site according to your own plan and make changes easily any time, and at the same time gives you complete freedom from anything technical like designing, domain registering, hosting, etc. It's all included in the service, invisibly working somewhere in the background. Email service is also included.
You'll just have a simple friendly interface to put your Book & Author ideas into. You won't have to worry about whom to hire for designing, whom for hosting, and whom for maintenance, etc. – you are free to do what you want, any time you want. No technical skills whatsoever are required.
And the greatest feature of the package is – it brings Internet traffic to your web-site automatically! You know, of course, that having a web-site with no visitors is as useless as opening a coffee-shop in a desert. But to create traffic is an art and science by itself; it includes lots of things and skills such as optimizing your web-site for search engines, submitting to search engines and positioning with search engines. The things are also taken care of in the package.
This would really cost you a fortune if you needed to hire a specialist for your web-site who knew how to create traffic onto your site. Such consultants are very expensive, because they are not just average web-designers who can just create beautiful graphics for you. Without traffic, a web-site has no use at all, period.
For an affordable additional price, you can have e-commerce tools included in the package to be able to sell your book directly to customers on the Internet from your web-site. You can then collect all the profit, without sharing it with any wholesale or retail intermediaries. It's also easily manageable, with no technical skills required. Customer support is fast and efficient when needed (rare).
All these things-to-do for your web-site, that may look rather intimidating at the first sight, are very well explained in the package and are not frightening at all. In any event, managing this web-project for your book promotion and selling will still involve some of your time and effort, without doubt.
If you choose to have a web-designer create your web-site instead, make sure that she/he knows how to optimize your site initially for search engines. Think up-front of the future maintenance/changes as well – it’s better if the same person does the maintenance who worked on building your web-site. You’ll probably need to hire a web-promoter too, as it’s very rare that a designer knows promotion as well. Your ultimate goal is traffic, traffic and traffic. Traffic is the King of the Internet, not beauty or the price of design…