Evaluating Your Current Online Visibility

For today's guest post, I'm delighted to have writing, publishing and marketing expert Roger C. Parker share his tips for evaluating an author's online presence. This article was originally published on ActiveGarage.com and is reprinted with permission.

The first step in marketing and promoting your book is to evaluate your current online visibility. Your ability to market and promote your book is based on your ability to promote yourself and your book online. Online visibility brings up the topic of your author platform.

What’s your platform like?

Your author platform refers to your ability to promote yourself and your book online -- where books are sold and product and service decisions are made. Your platform is a measure of the quality and quantity of your website presence plus your ability to keep in touch with clients, prospects, peers, and opinion-makers.

•  Start by asking, What shows up when you enter your name, or your firm’s name, into a search engine like Google.com or Yahoo.com?

• Then, enter the keywords, or terms clients, prospects, or the media use when asking questions or searching for information about issues and topics in your field. Does your blog or website show up on the first page, or two, of results? Are there a lot of results, or just a few?

The stronger your platform, i.e., the more visibility you already have, the easier it will be to get your book published and into the hands of readers who you hope will turn into prospects and customers.

Questions to ask when evaluating your online platform

The best way to evaluate your online platform is to evaluate your current web presence by asking questions like the following:

1. When did you last update your website? Visitors and search engines like frequently updated websites, beginning with the home page. Just as you wouldn’t buy your daily newspaper if the front page always looked the same, your website needs to be constantly freshened with new content.

2. Can you update your website by yourself? Your ability to promote your book and your career is based on your ability to easily update your website yourself, without needing to contact and pay money to a webmaster or web designer.

3. Do you have a blog? Blogs are no longer fashionable options for sharing the details of your daily existence. Today, blogs are fundamental marketing tools that permit you to develop and share your expertise by easily and efficiently adding text and graphics by yourself, without incurring the costs and delays of paying someone else. In an age of WordPress blogs, there’s simply no excuse for a website you cannot edit and update yourself.

4. Does your site offer a sign-up incentive? It is essential that your website contains an incentive for visitors to sign-up for your email newsletter or tips. Unless you have a way of capturing your visitor’s e-mail address and permission to contact them via email, you’ll only get one chance to sell the visitor before they go elsewhere and forget about you and your site. Capture their e-mail address and permission, however, and you can convert that one-time visit into a long and profitable relationship.

5. How often do you send e-mail updates? Do you remember E.R. on television, the drama that took place in a hospital emergency room? Remember the oscilloscope displays tracking the heartbeats of the patients? Each time their heart beat, the trace rose to the top of the screen. But, it never stayed there. The rise to the top was quickly followed by a drop to the bottom of the screen. The same effect happens with your marketing. Each time you send out a tip or a newsletter, your visibility rises to the top of your prospect’s attention. But, the more time that goes by between your e-mail contacts, the more likely you won’t be visible when your prospect is ready to buy. Short, weekly e-mail updates are far more effective than monthly or quarterly contacts.

6. How often do web visits turn into sales? Are you able to track the conversions, or sales, that originate on your website? If you’re not able to track your website’s performance, how do you know what it’s contributing to your firm’s profitability? If you can’t track your website’s performance, you can’t test your offers, your prices, and your headlines? You’ll never know which keywords to include in your headlines and body copy. Websites and testing go hand in hand; making it easy to test each variable until it delivers maximum sales for each of your product and service offerings.

7. How helpful and relevant is your site’s content? If your website consists primarily of empty claims about how great you are, it’s probably not contributing much to your bottom line. Success today is based on sharing genuinely helpful information with clients and prospects. Givers get. The more information you share, the more you will be viewed as an expert in your field, paving the way to book sales and back-end product and service profits.

8. Is your site’s image unique and accurate? Content is king, but content, by itself, isn’t enough. The design of your website says a lot about you, pre-selling the importance of your words, projecting a distinct and appropriate look that differentiates your site from the competition and resonates with prospects, inviting repeat visits. If your website looks old and tired, however, your message will look old and tired.

9. How well are you using web audio and video? Are you taking appropriate advantage of streaming audio and video? It’s a mistake to think that everyone wants to read as much as you do; today’s world is dominated by iPods, podcasts, and online videos. If you’re not taking advantage of them, your profits will suffer. It’s imperative that you offer prospects their choice of message formats.

10. How regularly do you submit articles online? Your website is just one of your online marketing tools. Articles that you write and submit to article distribution sites like www.ezinearticles.com permit you to expand your search engine visibility and drive addition traffic to your website.

11. Are you taking advantage of social marketing? How effectively are you using Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and other specialized sites to cultivate relationships and referrals from clients, co-workers, friends, prospects, and subject area experts? It’s never been easier to create quality connections with others who share your interests or challenges and drive traffic to your blog or website.

Conclusion

Once you have realistically evaluated the effectiveness of your online presence and author platform, you’ll have a baseline, or starting point, for moving forward. You’ll be able to plan a realistic enhancement of your author platform and search engine visibility. This will pave the way to building your brand and selling more books by taking advantage of the historically unique combination of amazing technology and low cost online marketing opportunities currently available.

About the Author

Roger C. Parker helps others write books that build brands. He’s written over 30 books, offers do-it-yourself resources at Published & Profitable, and shares writing tips each weekday. His latest book is Title Tweet! 140 Bite-Sized Ideas for Article, Book, and Event Titles.

Comments

[Dana Lynn Smith]

Thanks for sharing these great tips Roger.

Authors, I'd also like to add that it's really important to get started on these items as soon as possible because it takes time to build an online platform. If you are still writing your book, don't wait until it's published - now is the time to start building your platform!

Dana

[MaAnna Stephenson]

Dana and Roger, this post is so good, and covers so many of the crucial basics, that I sent it to all of my website design clients. I also shared it on all of my social networks. Thank you so much for providing such helpful info!

[Roger C. Parker]

Dear MaAnna:
What a nice surprise! Thank you so much for your kind words, and your virtual pass-along.

Your efforts are appreciated! The assistance helping others you offer on your website, http://www.justthefaqs.net/, looks like it can help a lot of individuals build their online brand and their following.

Thanks again--Roger

[MaAnna Stephenson]

Roger, I'm always happy to pass along the good stuff, and Dana certainly keeps me updated with great posts, and introduces me to nice folks like you.

[Lynn Dove]

This is one of the most helpful marketing websites out there for debut authors (such as myself). Great advice, timely as well. Keep it up!
Lynn Dove
www.shootthewounded.org

[Dana Lynn Smith]

Wow, thanks Lynn! I am fortunate to have so many experts contributing to this site through guest posts.