Digital Marketing: An Author's Best Friend? by Guest Blogger Nicole Allen

Many authors have numerous story ideas running through their mind—but they don't know how to market themselves in this day and age. How can an aspiring author rise above the ranks in a digital world? Digital marketing may be an author's new best friend.

The written word remains one of the powerful forms of media until now. Even with the existence of photos, audio, and videos, nothing sends a message across more efficiently than words. This is why the world constantly needs authors of different kinds—authors of books, poems, articles, prose, among many others.

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The writer's mind is unlike any other--even with the development of artificial intelligence, there's still no skill that can compare to the writer's ability to weave thoughts and feelings and put them into a string of words with such beauty and power. Now, more people discover that they have this talent and wish to share their writings with a bigger audience.

The author's dilemma

Many authors face the same dilemma—they have the desire to launch themselves as self-published writers, but they don't have the foundations to begin with. They don't know how to promote themselves, or find an audience that would appreciate their work. In this scenario, it is important for any author not just to master their craft. It is also essential for them to understand the basics of digital marketing to succeed in getting recognized.

What is digital marketing?

Digital marketing, explained simply, is a set of techniques that authors can use to promote themselves online. Now that information is best accessed on the internet, businesses and professionals use the power of internet promotion to get more clients, bring in a larger audience, and to rake in more customers.

As an author, you can also utilize digital marketing to find more readers for your work. We will be discussing the two main techniques for digital marketing.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

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Search engine optimization or SEO is one of the main ways to get readers for your work. Have you ever tried to input a phrase on Google and seen a list of websites that seemed to match the phrase you were looking for? Most likely you clicked on the top three links that you found. These websites have utilized SEO strategies to become the top link during your search. If you're ever wondering what kind of tactics are currently being used and implemented you simply need to look at some highly competitive niches. Take a deeper look into the gold IRA niche, addiction niche or the car insurance niche. These types of businesses have lot of money set aside for research and development and often times are at the cutting edge of SEO R&D.

SEO is comprised of these processes:

●      Content creation: This is the process of building content for your website. In order for potential readers to find you, you need to create content that matches the keywords that they might be looking for. An example would be making a blog post about "romance novels" or "children's book about being thankful". It is important to use these keywords as you create your content. As you do this, there is a higher chance that you will get ranked at search engines.

●      Link building: This next process is creating links within your website, and creating content that links back to your author website. Link building is important because it helps search engines crawl through your website to understand it better. The better your website is understood, the more chances it will also be ranked in the search engines. To perform link building, you need to link to other articles or content within your website as you make blog posts. You can also ask to guest post in other people's websites and asked to be linked back to your website. This strategy also helps in your ranking.

The continuous process of content creation and link building is essential if you want to promote yourself as a budding author.

Social media marketing

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Another source of potential readers is through social media. At present, there are 2.62 billion users who are constantly checking their social media. One way to leverage this as an author is to promote yourself using a variety of popular social media accounts such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram.

Similar to SEO, you can also post useful content in your social media accounts to attract an audience. You can also post links that lead to your website through these social media accounts. When you have a large following in your social media accounts, the likelihood of your audience clicking through your links will be higher. Alternatively, you can also pay for sponsored posts where your ad will appear for with targeted interests in your niche as an author.

Tips for Digital Marketing as an Author

Do proper keyword research.

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If you are a budding author, it may not be wise to use your name as a keyword to target when you are right keywords will also increase the possibility that people will land in your website.
writing blog posts. It may be best to use popular but low competition keywords to use. There are apps that can help you understand what people are searching for, such as Google Keyword Planner or SEMrush. Finding the

Post consistently and regularly.

It is also important to have a posting schedule both in your website and social media. Letting your audience know that they can expect you to always be around also keeps them hanging around for more. Search engines can also detect websites that regularly post content. When crawlers notice that you put fresh content consistently, they will rank your websites better.

Be engaging with your audience.

Sure, you may have caught you audience's attention, but it is also essential to keep them interested. As an author, it is important to always engage your audience with interesting content, respond to questions, and to understand what they want. Interacting with your audience gives you a better feel of what direction you should go as an author.

It is possible to succeed

The questions most authors ask when overwhelmed with SEO and social media strategies is "Will I succeed?" The simple answer is "Yes!" as long as authors are always willing to adopt to changing technologies and techniques that affect their profession.

About the Author

Nicole is a freelance writer and educator based in Michigan, and believes that her writing is an extension of her career as a tutor,  since they both encourage learning and discussing new things. When she isn’t writing, you might find Nicole running, hiking, or swimming. She has participated in several 10K races and hopes to compete in a marathon one day.

Disclosure: The author has links to specific organizations/companies in the article ,which are in no way affiliated with this website or its owner.