Do you advertise online?

Just wanted to see if any of you do advertise online yourself or leave that to your publisher. If you do advertise online, where and has it helped you increase sales?

When my POD book first came out in 2004, I bought a few banners at the flat rate and, while I noticed a traffic increase at my web site, I didn't see that the traffic translated into sales. Perhaps if I sold my books directly off my site rather than sending people to Amazon that might have been different.

Most ad space on most sites costs far too much money for a person footing the bill for his own POD book. Banners used to be cheaper, but now the click through costs send them out of my budget fairly quickly.

I've seen very little return from them, but I think a publisher with an online book store to which the add clicks are sent my have more action.

Malcolm

Do you think it would have helped you if you sent your ads directly to Amazon instead of your site?

What did you think of CPM (pay for thousand impressions) as compared to CPC (pay per click)?

How much should a first time author be willing to pay for advertising? If online advertising did not work for you did you try other means of advertising? What was the best method?

Thanks

The problem with either CPM or CPC, is that the pricing is set up for the budgets of corporations, not individuals. To get a "reasonable" amount of traffic, I would have to pay hundreds of dollars a month. Since POD books don't make hundreds of dollars a month, that's not a viable use of money.

Yes, it might have worked better to send people straight to Amazon with the banners.

Malcolm

Malcolm wrote:

The problem with either CPM or CPC, is that the pricing is set up for the budgets of corporations, not individuals. To get a "reasonable" amount of traffic, I would have to pay hundreds of dollars a month. Since POD books don't make hundreds of dollars a month, that's not a viable use of money.

Yes, it might have worked better to send people straight to Amazon with the banners.

Malcolm

Actually that is no longer true. The price of online ads has been decreasing every year. I don't know what kind of pricing you have come across but I can give you the example of ibookdb. At our current rate of 60$/year for our text ads, the CPM price comes to about $1.50 and is constantly decreasing because our visitors are increasing.

It's a little more than double of that for out top placed text ads but I don't have enough data points yet to actually have a real estimate.

For google adsense, you can set low budgets like 1$/day and still get significant ad impressions and clicks depending on your keywords and ad copy. Advertising on Myspace is expensive but I think Facebook has some options that are cheaper. Though it is just easier to use site targetted advertising from google rather than direct with Facebook, MySpace or other large Social networks. Also adsense is on most major book related sites and you can site target your ads and save more money.

If you're making the text ads work, that's great. I've seen no impact from them--or banners either.

My experience--and from what I read--is that it's difficult enough to get a person to remotely consider buying fiction from an unknown after they read an entire web page or display ad about it. Getting them to click on a small text ad or banner is very unlikely. Heck, I read hundreds of books a year, and I don't click on those kinds of ads because the odds of the book being very good AND within a genre I read are very small.

Malcolm

I just wanted to clarify my answer, my "advertising" online is FREE promotional stuff such as my Author site on Blogger, icons and such on MySpace and Facebook. It seems to get me quite a few "hits" and my sales numbers on B&N are on par with some of the indie books whose authors spend lots of dollars with ads.

Chelle wrote:

I just wanted to clarify my answer, my "advertising" online is FREE promotional stuff such as my Author site on Blogger, icons and such on MySpace and Facebook. It seems to get me quite a few "hits" and my sales numbers on B&N are on par with some of the indie books whose authors spend lots of dollars with ads.

What do you think of Myspace and Facebook vs. your own site. What has been better in your opinion?

I continue to advertize via the Internet, but as yet, it has not translated into significant sales. As someone once noted, "You only have to succeed the last time". So I will continue my efforts, knowing that God honors His Word. --Joe