In today's guest post, Kent Weber explains the benefits of a dedicated book landing page on your author website. You will notice references in Kent's article to earning affilate commissions from Amazon. See this page to learn more about the Amazon Associates affilate program.
6 Ways a Book Landing Page Can Increase Your Book’s Revenue
by Kent Weber
Warning: bold claim on approach. I believe this simple (and often overlooked) book marketing technique could increase traffic and sales revenue for the majority of book authors.
Seth Godin talked about these in the early 1990′s. The Software, SEO, Info-product and other ad-driven industries all utilize variations of this technique to great success. Most book authors do not. But could.
I’m talking about the dedicated landing page.
Book Landing Page: a Definition
A landing page refers to the first page a new visitor sees on your website, usually arriving via an ad or search engine. Specifically for books, we’re expanding on that definition a bit. A book landing page is a single permanent page (permalink) on an author website or blog which contains all the relevant information for a given book, including a link to purchase. For example:
http://www.YourAuthorSite.com/your-book-title
Surprisingly, a very large segment of authors do not leverage any sort of book landing page. Instead, most use one of these two popular but less effective alternatives.
The Sidebar Listing
You put a link to your book on your site’s sidebar, link to Amazon or a similar site, and rely on them to sell it. With this approach, at least your book is visible on every page in your site. But if this is your only strategy, I think you are missing an opportunity. Optimizing your Amazon listing is also important. But I believe there is important work to be done at each author’s website as well.
A “Books Page” Listing Each Book You’ve Authored
This approach is obviously more standard for multi-book authors. You put your seven books in a nice list available at one URL. I’m a believer in this approach as well, again, as part of the mix.In my opinion, a better approach is a probably a combination of the two, plus the key ingredient here: a single permanent page at your author site, with complete book information, all on the same permalink.
Whatever combo you use, there is a strong case that a permalink book landing page can grow your revenue. Here it is.
6 Ways a Book Landing Page can Increase Traffic and Revenue
1. It Can Hoist You “above the fold” on Google
Are you there already? Or do the top five spots for your book title belong to Amazon, B&N, and the three highest-traffic sites that reviewed your book? A dedicated landing page with all the info about your book, the title in the URL and a few links to it can go a long way to ensuring you rise to the top. Search engines like proper titles and long copy with headers, keyword variations and lots of updated content centered around a focused topic.
2. It Increases Your Odds of an Amazon Affiliate Commission
The more book searchers you redirect to your site, the more affiliate commissions you will receive. If you are traditionally published, a 6% affiliate commission on a $10 book might be more than half of what you make on the royalty itself.
3. It Gives Sharers the Correct URL for Linking
Many bloggers don’t want to link to your website. Understandably, they’d rather sell a book themselves. But plenty of reviewers, bloggers and most of your readers are not “Affiliates.” Readers on social media will often link to your book’s page if you show them where. Every link to your book’s permanent URL is also a thumbs-up to the search engines.
4. It Updates and Refines Your Books Sales Pitch
As new endorsements, reviews, media, interviews and supporting meta-data comes in, you will benefit from a designated place to add these.
5. It Delivers Ad Campaigns a Bench Mark
This is a landing page, properly so called: the arriving link from an ad or search with a call to action — “buy now” or even just “subscribe.” You may be producing lots of different landing pages if you are doing split testing for ads on Facebook, Goodreads or the like. The key is simply to have one main permalink where interest about your book can be directed.
6. It Jumpstarts a Relationship with Readers
Think social media engagement and RSS subscriptions. If they are on your site, you have a shot at engaging them. But you won’t get sign-ups if they are somewhere else. If you still need convincing, you might run a few searches at Google for your book title and then a few other books. Pick a few best selling titles and then a few lesser-known titles by first-timers. It’s a great tutorial.
The number and popularity of keywords/phrases you have in your title can certainly tip the scales of utility. For example if your book is entitled “Social Media” you can probably dispense with the whole exercise. But if you do a good handful of searches, the results are likely to convince most of you that a permalink book landing page is worth pursuing.
Finally, here’s an example book landing page for a recent book that demonstrates this exercise. It’s entitled Surprised by Oxford (Thomas Nelson Publishers, 2011). Full disclosure: the author is my wife. It's a great memoir with 125 Amazon reviews, averaging 4.5*+. And yes, she makes a well-deserved affiliate commission from Amazon for sales at her book landing page.
Questions: What are your thoughts on book landing pages? Do you have an experience you could share?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kent Weber is a book marketing consultant and blogger. His career as a marketing and sales executive includes experience in the content, software and book publishing industries, and as a managing director in a venture capital firm investing in similar companies. In his non-family time, Kent can be found writing on http://www.GoodBookMarketing.com or working with his favorite author at PressingSave.
Hi, Dana.
I love this post. I'm going to see if I can put these ideas into play when I make my website public!
Marlene Wynn
Posted by: Marlene Wynn | June 14, 2012 at 11:38 AM