Marketing Challenge the First Week

Back in February I said I was going to challenge myself for 30 days and use the Internet to market two of our books. Well dismal failure, not that Internet Marketing doesn't work, it does, I just didn't do it.

You know how it is. Lots of good intentions but no follow through.

So.

I'm doing it again. But a little differently this time. I've signed up for a challenge. It's called bum marketing, because it's so uncomplicated that even a bum could do it. No, that wasn't my name for it.

It works rather simply. You select a product, in this case I'm selecting our new book The Publishing Primer: A Blueprint for an Author's Success. You could select your own product or promote someone else's product. If you promote someone else's product make sure it's offered through an affiliate program like clickbank, commission junction, or even amazon.com.

Set up a website, a blog on blogger or a squidoo lense about your product or the product you've selected to promote. The website doesn't have to be new or even relate to the product. I used brianhillandeepower.com and set up some new pages.

Now here's the easy part, at least for us writers. Write 250 to 500 word articles about your product. Develop a bio that intrigues readers of the article to click on your website, blog or squidoo page for more information, a free report, or additional articles.

The tricky part is the title of the article and the first paragraph. You want to include key word phrases that will be indexed by the search engines. You also want your title to grab the reader. Sometimes that's a contradiction.

For practice I wrote an article "Weddings on a shoestring budget - flowers for your wedding"
the key word phrase is *weddings on a shoestring budget*. The article showed up on google on the first page for *weddings on a shoestring budget* the day after I submitted it to an article directory.

I'll keep you posted on my progress.

Dee