In this new blog series from AEP, “What’s Keeping You Up At Night?, experts offer their advice on the most pressing issues facing the educational publishing industry. AEP members may sign up for a free half-hour consultation with the experts for 30 days after their entry is posted.
The following question was posed to our current featured expert, Sameer Shariff of Impelsys Inc.
Q. How do you get your content discovered once you create an e-strategy and deliver your content online?
A. In the electronic space where more and more people are reading online, viral marketing tools like widgets and book previews provide good opportunities for publishers to market their titles across the web. Here are few ways you can use widgets and book previews to get your content discovered online.
1. Capitalize on web 2.0. Use widgets and book previews to spread the buzz around your titles on social networks and blogs. You can blog about your latest title, add a title’s preview link to your social network profiles or as status updates, and also tweet about it. Readers who include your content on their social profiles in turn send out access to your content samples to all the people on their respective networks. This helps in spinning out a viral web of individual content nodes without having to spend time, effort, and money to contact these readers and their networks directly.
2. Search Engine Optimization. Widgets also come with a ‘buy link’ option that allow readers to buy directly from your e-commerce portal and get traffic to your website. Most of the social media is indexed by search engines. As the number of people who include your content samples increases, it increases the weight of your content in search results. As these widgets are spread across the web, they increase the back links to your website that improves your web page ranking and search results.
3. Make new announcements. Each widget becomes a small window that a publisher can use to send additional announcements and updates to already existing network of readers without having to create additional marketing programs. For instance, promotional offers and discounts can be effectively communicated to readers to see immediate results on your promotional program. This can be used in addition to your marketing email campaign and as a tool to reach out to existing readers and their networks.
With widgets and book previews you can reach global marketplaces and build a presence in online communities that will help you understand your readers, their preferences and build direct relationships with them.
Submitted by Sameer Shariff of Impelsys Inc.
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Sameer Shariff is founder and CEO of Impelsys Inc. Impelsys is a leader in providing e-publishing solutions to global publishing market. Its revolutionary products and solutions help publishers large & small to create new online products & revenue streams without significant investment. Customers include leading publishers like McGraw-Hill, Elsevier, Wolters Kluwer, Benchmark Education, Marshall Cavendish and Houghton Mifflin among others.
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We find that it’s important to invest in providing lots of free resources on our website and to use them as the focus of promotion. These resources need to be relevant to your offering and not feel cheap or gimicky.
Time4Learning does a good job with this. Their Reading Skills Pyramid is very useful to parents in understanding the processs of learning to read. As a secondary point, it helps them understand the value of the Time4Learning online learning system
I think I’ll take your advice and get started with social marketing.
I’ve been focusing on other aspects of marketing a new ebook aimed at college faculty. Just recently I put an excerpt of the first two chapters on the sales page and on my blog.
Any suggestions about specific widgets?
Hi John
You can try out free widgets from iPublishCentral. You can log on to http://www.ipublishcentral.com and sign up for an account and start creating your widgets yourself. It’s simple and easy to use, a lot of help is available in the form of videos and FAQs. You can also check out the whitepaper on ’10 ways to market your book widgets’, it gives good tips on what you can do with your widgets once you have created them.
Hi John,
You can try out free widgets from iPublishCentral. You can log on to http://www.ipublishcentral.com and sign up for an account and start creating your widgets yourself. It’s simple and easy to use, a lot of help is available in the form of videos and FAQs. You can also check out the whitepaper on ’10 ways to market your book widgets’, it gives good tips on what you can do with your widgets once you have created them.
Sameer, thanks so much for the guidance on creating free widgets. I’ll check out the site.