Just thought I would share my experiences over the last couple of months, in relation to getting free advertising for my books.
On March 1st, after going over my sales results for the softcover version of “How to Research Investment Properties” which is being sold through an Australian publisher, Equilibrium Books – and the sales stats from my books “Creating Financial Security through Property Investment”, “Finding Eternal Peace” and my six other E-books that are being sold through the American online POD publisher LULU at
http://lulu.com/DebraLohrere, I decided that something drastic needed to be done to increase my sales.
I started researching the net to find sources of free advertising. The main options I found are as follows: Text ads, Banner ads, FFA classified ads, email ads, traffic exchangers, viral advertising, ezine advertising and article advertising.
Here are some of the sites I am using:
http://megaresponse.com/cgi-bin/show?222162 Once you have joined for free, you can log into the members area, select mega submitter from the pull down menu and send your add & website link to over 200,000 FFA classified ad sites with the click of a button.
http://www.freeaddepot.com/?aff=6912 When you join they send you between 5 & 10 emails a day which have a link to click on to earn points. You can then redeem these points for either text, banner or exit ads. For the whole month of March, I used all of my points to get free banner ads – and clocked up over 800,000 free banners. I found that statistically I got 1 click for every 30,000 banners. In April I alternated between text ads and banner ads. The site doesn’t give stats for the text ads, so it was hard to gauge how they went.
Traffic Exchange Sites
http://www.trafficexchangenetwork.net/?ref=10http://www.trafficswarm.com/go.cgi?472917 - I have clocked up more than 3000 exchanges over the past couple of months, by surfing for 30 minutes every few days.
http://www.trafficroundup.com/newuser.php?ref=writeinvestSome of the other sites I have joined for free text, email and viral ads are:
http://adsjust4u.com/aju?16688&joinhttp://adfactory.gti7.com/?3889http://admailerpro.com/show?12972http://targetadsdepot.com/?aff=writeinvesthttp://www.opportunity.com/r/writeinvesthttp://ads4ever.net/join?16688http://mmp.gti7.com/?Id=3889http://adsjust4u.com/aju?16688&joinhttp://www.20millionhits.com/servlet/index20?member=writeinvesthttp://www.20millionbanners.com/servlet/banners?member=writeinvesthttp://www.freetrafficboost.com/g.o/writeinvesthttp://www.bigbooster.com/7million/join.php?referrer=98222A lot of these sites give the ability to have more than one add, so as well as using them to advertise my home page and book store pages, I also used them to advertise each other.
At the start of April I decided to branch out into article advertising. I initially wrote eight articles, one on goal setting, four on financial security and property investment and three religious articles on the power of Forgiveness, Prayer and Worship. I started submitting these to free article sites such as:
http://ezinearticles.com/ ,
http://www.isnare.com/ http://www.free-articles-zone.com/ - I eventually found over 100 free article sites to submit to.
In mid April, I was asked to write some articles to advertise seven new Christian web sites, so I wrote another seven articles and started submitting them also.
The beauty of articles is that you can submit then to article sites, and then anyone who is wanting content for their ezines, or websites is free to download them and use them, as long as they keep your byline (with your author info and link to your site) in tact. It is a great way to get recognition as an author and traffic to your site. Altogether I have submitted approximately 1500 articles. These have resulted in over 200 links to my homepage and 150 to my storefront – and this number is growing daily. The most amazing thing though was that the Google search on my name (Debra Lohrere) which was a good indicator, because I have such a unique name, went up from finding around 200 finds at the start of March to finding 18,600 today. This figure is going up everyday, as more of my articles are being utilised.
I won’t be able to check on the sales for my Equilibrium book until the end of the quarter, but my E-Book sales have definitely increased as a result of this advertising assortment. I imagine that it will take a good six months to get the free advertising networks grow, so the number of free ads that I get daily should keep increasing as time goes on also.
I hope this helps for anyone wanting to use the internet to build author recognition
