From ZERO online presence to book sales in 3 months — how I marketed and ranked my site

I’ve always wanted to write a book. As far as I could remember I told myself that I’d be an author one day. I would write something and people would read it and they’d come back for more. Then life got in the way and whilst I did do a lot of writing for my law degree, it was nothing like I had imagined. When I read Obama’s book Dreams From My Father I thought to myself once again, I want to write a book and if law is all I knew then I’ll write a legal book — just like Obama. But just like Obama, what started out as a collection of law essays quickly turned into a more personal journey.

Through the many twists and turns and reinvention of my business I decided to self-publish a guide on a single aspect of the law and a very niche one at that: Australian immigration law and specifically, partner visas. But the topic of the book is irrelevant for this post because I’m going to go through what I did to market the book after self-publishing.

I’m going to tell you exactly what I did to go from zero online presence to double digit book sales within 3 months. I skyrocketed my book’s landing page to the front of Bing, Yahoo and Google.

Not bad for someone with no publishing contacts, extremely limited online presence and no existing readership. I wrote a jam packed book and I am selling it for a top dollar price. I’m not talking about an ebook for $2.99. No, I wrote a practical legal how-to book akin to a textbook and I’m selling it for $60.

Most of sales are now coming from a Google search and majority of people land on the page and blog because of Bing search results. If you recall, Bing is baked into Microsoft Edge which in turn is baked into Windows operating systems. Considering how many people own a Windows computer there is a big slice of the pie that is being neglected if you think Google is the only search engine that matters.

Did you know that Google pays Apple $1 billion a year to be the default search engine on Safari browsers? Meanwhile, Siri, the helpful assistant uses Bing for all her searches. Yahoo, despite what’s happening now with the buyout and all, is the default search engine on Mozilla’s Firefox browsers and depending on your region, other search engines are default. For example, if you’re Russian Firefox will make you use Yandex, if you’re Chinese, Firefox will use Baidu. The point is I leveraged these other search engines to rise to the top of Google because Google doesn’t love you until others love you.

Oh and it doesn’t hurt that whilst leveraging those search engines, I made book sales too.

So hold on tight, I’m going to give you a whirlwind summary of how I ranked my book website and sold books along the way.

I’m not going to cover how I self-published, the process of writing, formatting or converting. Nor will I cover website design and choice of themes, copy to convert customers etc. You’ll find the answers to those variously in other posts I’ve written and have yet to write.

I am only focusing on the things I did to rank my book’s website.

Let’s get started!

The aim of my game is to be everywhere. You want to make a mark in the internet world and not with a slow build up, but with a bang. You want the top 20 search results for your brand to be your various profiles spread across the internet. That is my goal: domination.

Website on-page optimisation

What is website optimisation? Basically making it faster and user friendly to whoever is surfing your site. Google prizes user experience and showing pages that will solve what the internet user is searching for. If your site doesn’t do it, it’s not going to be shown again.

First consideration is about design. Whatever theme you choose or whichever content management system you use (I use Wordpress) you need a mobile friendly site. I go for responsive websites rather than having a separate subdomain that shows a mobile site. I just think that’s where we’re headed these days and I’m sure I’ve read somewhere that redirecting to mobile sites even if it’s on your domain can have an impact on rankings. But don’t quote me on that. I just have a preference.

Then after developing locally and transferring the site to a live server, I ran my site through 3 separate testing tools: PageSpeed Insights, GTmetrix and Pingdom Tools.

These tools will tell you exactly how fast your page loads and what you can do to reduce those times as well as what you can optimise to make it a better experience overall.

Page speed, mobile friendliness, optimising your site with meta keywords, title tags, schema markup, image sizes etc. These are the lowest hanging fruits that you can do right now to turbo charge your website.

But take this what the tools say with a grain of salt. PageSpeed Insights has now been widely discredited to be inaccurate and most of the times, the fixes you make may not be picked up and you’ll continually be stuck on a poor score. That’s why I use 3 tools in order to see what should be done.

Do this once or twice and you’re golden. Improve these and Google will lavish attention on you.

Social media strategy

Part of the ‘being everywhere’ strategy is claiming and owning all the social profiles out there. You can use tools like Knowem to see what you haven’t claimed. I claimed all the ones that were relevant to what I’m selling. I mean one could make an argument for using Instagram to market a book but given the nature of the platform and the product that I’m selling, I see little return on the effort being put into it. But someone prove me wrong please.

I then created an IFTTT network to link up all my social profiles. Don’t know what this is? It’s a way to automate syndication of your blog content (which is important for your content marketing strategy discussed next). IFTTT stands for If This Then That and I had it hooked up to my website via RSS.

When you publish a post on your website, it will trigger the recipes in IFTTT to then repost it out to your connected social profiles. This means all you have to do after pushing publish is wait 1–5 minutes (depending on your set up) and you’ll see it go out across the internet like a flood.

Being everywhere constantly, check!

I also use Buffer to schedule my content. As much as I’d like to be on social media all day, I do have businesses to run. Buffer helps out and I just load it up, set a schedule and it syndicates to my profiles.

Social signals

Social signals tell Google that your site is so awesome that people are talking/sharing it and your awesome site should go to the top of the page. How do you generate social signals? You buy them! No, joking. Don’t do that. People used to do this and they still do (check out Fiverr and you’ll see) but these are so fake that not even a robot would be fooled. Also it looks bad for you social media profiles when real users come looking and see that it’s covered in fake likes and comments.

To get my social signals, I ran a book giveaway on Facebook, using a boosted post ad and had it running for 2 weeks. It was an impressive campaign that made people like the post, like the page, comment and engage with the post.

Here are the results:

Here’s the post:

And here you can see that having a mobile responsive site is so important because majority of the visitors accessed my site through mobile:

Blogging and providing value with free worksheets (sneaky email capturing methods)

Next step was all about generating traffic to the site so that people will a) read about the book b) buy the book or c) give me their emails for a second chance to sell them and d) make the search engines see that my rankings should go up.

There’s no point writing a book and hoping for the best. You have to actively promote it and getting the word out there. And that’s why I have to keep blogging in order for the search engines to know that it’s a live site that is constantly updated with fresh content.

But what do you blog about? You blog about issues that are interesting to your readers. You could create a customer profile and a persona to try and write directly at these people but I’ve gone with the over-delivering route. Add so much value in the free stuff that they can’t help but to think that paying money would unlock the juiciest bits of info. The logic is, if the free stuff is this good, then the paid stuff must be out of this world!

So don’t be afraid to give more. I’m not saying give out all the secrets of your book or whatever product you’re selling. Give just enough to pique their interest.

I answer reader questions on my blog, I clarify tricky points, I write news updates and I give out free worksheets.

Free worksheets are the best because you get an email in return for them. And email marketing is where it’s at now. It’s the modern day equivalent of getting someone’s phone number because with an email and with email marketing, you get a direct line into someone’s inbox and an opportunity to be right in front of their faces. That’s why when I do give away worksheets, I make sure I get something in return. It could be an email or it could be a tweet, Facebook like or any sort of action on their part in return for the freebie.

Creating a downloadable sample

Because my book is priced higher than most books, it’s quite common for people to want to try before they buy. That’s why Amazon has that helpful ‘Look Inside’ feature so people can see what they’re buying. I’m 100% certain that the high price tag is a major concern for people who arrive at the site and in keeping with good sales tactics of eliminating obstacles to a ‘yes’, I created a sample PDF of my book.

I chose pages and bits of chapters to illustrate what will be in the book and compiled it into a new PDF. I uploaded it to the site and mention it all over the joint to not take my word for it and see the sample for themselves. I blasted this out on social media and to all my profiles — creating links back to my site as I went.

Then I submitted the PDF to any place that will take PDFs. That’s right, I wanted to dominate the internet and plaster my name and my book’s name all over the place. There are so many services and sites out there that will let you upload PDFs and then create a link back to your website. Take advantage of these and use them! I submitted the sample to over 30 sites such as issuu.com, calameo, SlideShare to name a few.

Lead magnet — to collect emails

Not so much a ranking strategy but as I’ve said before, email marketing is where it’s at. I created a lead magnet mini guide that talks about the partner visa. In order to receive the ‘8 secrets of a partner visa’, people must give me their email addresses.

Lead magnets are great marketing opportunities because you have an interested and captive audience who will read every word of that lead magnet. They also gave you their email addresses. I embedded heaps of trip wires in the lead magnet and once again over-delivered with information. I even added a sweetener to the deal by giving them a discount code.

I use SumoMe for the pop-up and use their ‘smart’ setting to display it when the user tries to leave the site. Check out how it works on the site.

Blog commenting

This is purely to get backlinks from relevant sites and the jury is still out on whether this continues to be effective. I used sites like Drop My Link and Put My Link to find relevant blogs and sites to comment on. It’s a tedious job but if it has an impact, it’s worth it. I took it as a learning experience and learnt about Google search operators along the way.

YouTube

Video marketing! What can I say; it’s apparently the new way of doing things now. Some still say content is king and I agree but you can’t deny the effect of videos and visual marketing. People prefer to SEE than read advertising copy. This would also be a little experiment of mine to see if I could rank a YouTube video and boy did I do it right. Although I’m not at the top of the page (I am on page 1 of the results for a highly competitive keyword) I’m still getting site visits from YouTube.

Anywhere that people can find you is great!

I won’t go into how I created the video but you can have a look at it here or below:

After 48 hours of going live it propelled to the top of page 1 for ‘how to apply for an Australian partner visa’ and bottom of page 1 for ‘australian partner visa’.

It’s so purple and pink that it stands out from the rest of the videos and I’m sure people can’t help but be curious about why there are 2 bears hugging each or a breaking heart puzzle. It was a deliberate design choice.

Bloggers and affiliates outreach

At the beginning of this post I said I didn’t have a readership or any contacts in publishing. That is still true. But what I did have was a list of emails of referral partners for my business. I simply introduced them to the book and offered them a commission on all sales. That’s all it took — a simple hello here’s my book, here’s the commission structure, let me know if you want in.

Press release

Press releases are not dead despite what everyone says. OK, maybe a little dead but from a ranking perspective, they aren’t. I wrote a press release and had a service send it out to over 400 outlets on the launch date of my book. That’s a backlink to your website from all these media outlets! On the day alone I had 50 visits from Australia — my target location — and people were reading about what I had to offer. I got one sale on launch date :)

Infographic

I love infographics, don’t you? They’re a great way to condense a large chunk of information into a pretty format that’s pleasing on the eyes and easy to understand.

I have very limited Photoshop and Illustrator skills but I managed to pump out this infographic in one day. The infographic was a hit! I sent it out across my network again and to date it’s been the content that has the highest number of clicks.

And you know what? I then submitted it to infographic submission sites like visual.ly, deviantart, infogra.me, bestinfographics.info etc. I submitted to over 10 sites and added it to image sharing sites too such as imgur, pinterest, 500px.

Udemy course

Another good method to get your book in front of a tonne of people is to use other people’s platforms. Udemy has over 11 million students, 40,000 courses and more than 50 million enrolments. That’s a lot of people! And you can access these people by simply creating a course. Get yourself in front of these eyeballs and the rest is gravy.

I won’t go into the specifics since I wrote another post about it so go over there and read. It’s just another step in the ‘be everywhere’ strategy with the added benefit of making more money if you choose to sell your course. I opted for a free course. It’s all explained in the other post.

Kindle ebook

When I wrote my book I had designs for it to go on sale on Amazon. Being an avid Kindle reader and lover, it’s only normal that I want my book on there. But I had major difficulties in converting my beautifully laid out PDF book into the mobi format that Amazon requires. So I benched that idea until I realised that I could write a whole new book just for Amazon!

In the spirit of lead magnets, the Kindle ebook has many references to my main book and gives readers a taste of what to expect. Have a look at it here.

I’ve been able to access the millions of Amazon customers by simply creating a whole new piece of content. Of course I included the best practices in this Kindle ebook and managed it like a mini book launch. I embedded links in the Kindle ebook to direct them to my main book’s website and created a few upsells and sales landing pages. I then, you guessed it, asked for their email addresses!

I do all of this so that people can come to the site and see the book. The rest depends on if the site converts enough to get sales and how I then market to the email addresses that I’ve collected along the way.

But the best part is it’s another income source! It’s passive income. As I write this I’ve just collected more dollars in royalties. Once it’s up there, I don’t need to do much to advertise and promote it because it’s currently sitting on the best seller list for my categories. Ah the beauty of Amazon.

The process for the Kindle ebook creation and Amazon self-publishing journey can be found here on my other post.

Conclusions?

So there you have it. All the behind the scenes stuff that I did in order to get my site ranking and get more sales. From zero online presence and no one knowing anything about me (also no author credibility), I’ve managed to sell my books and put my book’s site on page 1 of multiple search engines. All in 3 months.

A note on analytics + results!

I use Google Analytics, Google Search Console (formerly Webmaster Tools) and Clicky to cross-reference and see where all the traffic is coming from.

I use ProRankTracker, SERPfox, SEMrush to track rankings in the search engines and here are some screenshots. They might not be as impressive as others but for someone who just started and doing it to get book sales, I think I’ve achieved quite a lot in 3 months.

If you’ve found this helpful, share it with your author friends! Share it with everyone! Also, ask me questions, I’ll be happy to help.

Onwards and upwards!