As indie authors, so much of our work and efforts go into online marketing, and content on the web. With that in mind, here are some tools (both free and paid) that can help you build your platform and promote your books.
Book Advertising
“Changes to Amazon Advertising: What Authors Need to Know” on Jane Friedman: A breakdown of new advertising modes, the improved dashboard, and better advertising targeting
“How to Put Together a Killer BookBub Ad” on Smart Marketing: Guidelines, tips, and tricks to advertising on BookBub
“How to Set Up Local Book Links for your Ebooks” on ALLi: “Helping readers find your ebooks in the online store of their choice will increase the chances of making a sale, so it makes sense to provide convenient local book links on your author website to all the stores where your books are available. Indie author and and author services provider Russell Phillips offers advice on how to set these up.”
“Introducing Books2Read Reading Lists” on Draft2Digital Youtube: “B2R Reading Lists are customizable carousels of books that draw from your Universal Book Links, allowing you to showcase a collection of books grouped by any theme you want.”
Headlines and Reader Reviews
“Book Promotion: Do This, Not That – March 2019” on The Book Designer: What do do about reader reviews, and how they work with Amazon
“10 Sure-Fire Headline Formulas That Work” on Copyblogger: Tips for how to write blog post headlines that entice readers
“Emotional Marketing Value Headline Analyzer” on Advanced Marketing Institute: “This free tool will analyze your headline to determine the Emotional Marketing Value (EMV) score. As you know, reaching your customers in an deep and emotional way is a key to successful copywriting, and your headline is unquestionably the most important piece of copy you use to reach prospects.”
SEO
Cyfe: A dashboard to monitor all social media, web analytics, marketing, sales, etc.
SEMRush: A marketing toolkit to help with SEO, social media, paid ads, and more
Moz: A tool for SEO
Screaming Frog: “The Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a website crawler, that allows you to crawl websites’ URLs and fetch key elements to analyse and audit technical and onsite SEO”
Google Structured Data Testing Tool: Add structured data to your website to improve search results.
Google Analytics campaign URL builder: For tracking custom campaigns, such as which version of a campaign works best (email, video, etc.)
Google About Me: Update your Google profile for Drive, Photos, and more
Any other tools you’d recommend? Please share in the comments!
