Why Marketing?

You need a web site, why is marketing even part of the conversation? The answer is that your site needs to lure readers into becoming followers, book buyers, and fans. We don’t want to throw up any old assortment of pages. We want a strategy that makes the site compulsively readable and shareable.

You Need a Web Designer who Understands Marketing

When I taught the first-ever Digital Marketing Bootcamp for UC Berkeley Extension, my students were expected to apply general marketing principles to the creation of their websites. What is their marketing funnel? Who are their audiences, and how does their content interest them? How do they develop their leads? I apply these same ideas to your website, equipped with over a decade of knowledge of the publishing industry. Your site is a tool to market your books and will be built with that in mind. We will develop a plan for your website that will be more than just a carbon copy of the info on Amazon.com. This design will be entirely customized not only to your books, but to you: your capabilities, habits, and interests.

Marketing services

Once your site is built, there are additional marketing services I offer.

Social Media

• Review and improve your marketing strategy on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Tumblr or Pinterest.
• Add Follow Me and Share This options to your website.
• Set up auto-posting so that your blog posts get pushed to your favorite social networks.
• Integrated feeds that pull content in from your favorite social networks and show them on your website.
• creation of images designed to help draw attention to your posts and help them go viral.

Digital Advertising

If you need traffic to your website, the fastest way to get it is with digital advertising. These are usually auction-based, meaning the amount you pay depends on how popular the search term you’re buying is. Because of this, the cost of digital advertising varies. Here’s a summary of some of the factors involved, including setup.

• Install and set up Google Adwords for your website.
• Run advertising campaigns on Google. This entails researching keywords, budgeting amount to devote to particular ad sets and keywords, and writing copy for ads. It also includes research and reporting on which are most effect and why, and updating campaigns to favor best-performing ads.
• Setting up Goals in Analytics to keep track of sales/conversions, so you know exactly how much return you’re getting on your investment, and we can shift your spend towards the ads that are working best.
• Designing banner ads to run on websites that your niche is particularly interested in.
• Setting up free advertising for 501c3 nonprofits.
• Creating ads for social media and researching most effective targeting to make the most of your budget.
• Optimizing ads that are running to reduce ad spend on the least effective and increase it on the ones that are working best.

Public Relations

As the Internet becomes more central in our lives, traditional publicity and digital marketing are merging. I am fortunate that I built my career as a book publicist for a small publisher so I know how to approach publicity outreach with the highest level of professionalism. However, as Bob Dylan sang, the times they are a changing, and emailing a press release with the subject “FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE” isn’t going to cut it in the digital age.

For more information on how I can assist you with PR, check out my other site, karmabennett.com.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

SEO is about helping your site get discovered by people using search engines like Google. Please note that if you need traffic fast, advertising is the way to go. But, the SEO work dovetails into SEO as much of the research is the same. This is a big topic so I’ve created a full page to go into detail on what an SEO campaign looks like. In summary, these are the SEO services I offer:

• Keyword research – to help you discover what you should be writing about.
• Image optimization – make sure your images are accessible so Google can see them and they will come up in search results.
• Content plan – beyond the basic content of your site, we can create content that is specifically to capture and drive interest in your unique audience. This takes the keyword research we’ve done and develops it into specific topics for blog posts and pages.
• Content marketing – writing the content that is specifically designed to appeal to those searching for your site.
• SEO Plugins – these tools provide additional features to help improve the SEO of your site. In addition to more granular control, they offer XML sitemaps, reports on dead links, and suggestions to improve every page or post. The latter feature is a great option for those looking to do their own marketing and SEO.
• SEO post edit – reviewing a single post or page to make sure it’s optimized for the chosen keyword.
• Backlink research – finding sites that want to link to your site, to give your site more authority.
• Competitor analysis – know of a successful author writing in your topic and genre? I can analyze their site and find out what is working, and what they are missing, so you can build on their success.

Learn more about what SEO is (and why you need it).

Email Marketing

They say list-building is the first and most important thing you should do to promote yourself. Everyone uses email, and no matter what changes with the web and social media, you can always take your email list with you.

• Create a mailing list opt-in on your site – I will put a form on your site that will allow your fans to sign up for your mailing list.
• Create a branded giveaway to entice subscribers – It’s a good idea to give something away in exchange for asking people to sign up for your email list. I can help you decide what content to share and design it in a way that looks professional.
• Consultation, coaching and editing – Not sure what you should say in your emails? Should a certain thing go in a blog post, an email, or both? What if you want your blog to go out to email subscribers automatically? I can help.

Site Review

Not sure what you need? I can review your site and point out ways it could be improved to be more professional and lead to more sales.