Today is the first day of a 30 day experiment.

Have you heard of the show "How to Boil Water" on the food TV network? A complete novice at cooking is led through the steps of preparing meals by an expert chef. BUT the chef can only give instructions, can't assist her.

The complete novice at Internet Marketing would be me.

I’ve wondered, with all the buzz about social marketing, search engine optimization, websites, blogging…, well the list goes on and on, is Internet marketing worth the time and trouble if you’re an author? Will it help sell books?

So I've given myself a goal: 3000 unique visitors in 30 days resulting in 100 sales.

Right now I have two websites (well actually I have more but these are the two I'll be working on.) One is about our novel, Over Time, http://www.OverTimeTheNovel.com. It gets about 30 visitors a day.

The other is http://www.58WaysToFindMoney.com, and sells a business oriented report (not quite long enough to be a book). It's less than a month old and receives 20 visitors a day. The sites are very different in all sorts of ways. Over Time is fiction, a hard copy book, and priced less than $15.00. 58 Ways is strictly business, an ebook, nonfiction and priced at over three times more.

I'll be concentrating on a new different Internet Marketing technique every few days, while keeping up the work and maintaining what I've learned and done previously. This will be a challenge there is no doubt about it.

For example today, and probably tomorrow, I will be concentrating on setting up lenses through squidoo - thank you Tiffany Dow for Social Marketing on Squidoo

Tiffany recommends that you set up more than one lens and tie them together. So I will be putting up some humorous lenses “Ask Ms. Money: Advice for the Fiscally Forlorn” for 58 Ways. I’m not sure what I’ll put up for Over Time yet.

Next might be myspace, maybe social bookmarking - not even sure what that is - key words, optimizing for search engines, radio interviews, press releases, copy writing, web design, landing pages, squeeze pages and stuff I don't even know about right now. By the end of 30 days, hopefully I will have used at least 15 different IM techniques, maybe more.

I chose two very different sites and products, because I want to demonstrate that Internet Marketing works for both, or doesn’t work, or works for one better than the other.

Beginning stats:

February 24

Overtime - 30 visitors, Google Page Rank 4/10, amazon rank 1,525,221

http://www.58WaysToFindMoney.com - 20 visitors, Google Page rank 0/10, amazon n/a

Thanks again Tiffany, your Social Marketing on Squidoo was great.

Dee Power

Dee Power is co-author of The Making of a Bestseller
Overtime, the novel, and several other nonfiction books.
Coming soon - Your Ebook: From Cyberspace to the Bookstore Shelves