Internet Marketing - Denise Wakeman - Online Visibility Expert

How to Make Your Kindle Ebook Stand Out on Amazon

You're about to publish your fabulous Kindle ebook…will it stand out from the hundreds of thousands of other ebooks featured on Amazon?

Ebook Cover Image

One of the most important elements you need to add to your ebook is a cover image. While it may not be quite as important as your content, it is the first thing people will see, before they even read a description or review of your ebook.

You need to create a cover image and virtual book images of your cover you can use to promote your ebook.

There are a few ways to create your cover:

Hire a graphic designer – if you have the budget, then I recommend going with a professial designer vs. doing it yourself
Use Fiverr or elance and request bids for design services
Create it yourself with royalty free images

I'm frugal so I like to do it myself for low cost products like a Kindle ebook. When I create high fee products , I hire a designer (I highly recommend Heidi Frieder of ArtHead).

Back to ebooks.

For my $.99 ebooks I usually buy a royalty free image and create a simple cover. Make sure to choose a large image that is colorful so it stands out on the page. My favorite source of royalty free images is BigStockPhoto. I buy credits in bulk and buy images for blog posts, reports, and PowerPoint presentations.

You can see I'm not much of a designer. I create a simple cover with the image I purchased, title, my name and the URL for my website. The next step is to use the two dimensional cover image to create three dimensional images to promote your ebook. Take a screenshot of the cover image you've recreated so you have a jpg you'll need to create three dimensional promo images.

Kindle Fire, Virtual Book and Kindle Reader

Over the years I've bought several software programs to create 3D product images. They all required you to download software and then install it on your server. And, the results were not that great. Then, a few months ago I was introduced to a great online program called BoxShot King. Nothing to download, easy to use and more than 40 types of product images you can create in about 1 minute. Love it! The image above is a "package" of three product images I created with BoxShot King in five minutes.

BoxShot King also includes many extra graphics you can add to your image. In two of the images above, I added an badge that says "Free Bonus" since I offer access to free videos when people buy the ebook. Ellen Britt did a beautiful job on her ebook cover for The Littlest Angel, with an gold ribbon on the cover annoucing a bonus.

Product Images You Can Create with BoxShot King

Why is this important? The image reassures your buyer that your content is a "real" book and that they can consume it on their Kindle device. They don't have to imagine it, they can see it as it will appear on their reader. The 3D product image can be used on Amazon, your blog, social media sites and sales pages if you also sell your ebook on your own site.

While writing this post, I realize I need to update my ebook pages on Amazon to include the 3D images. I think they are more compelling and interesting than flate 2D images.

Would love to get your comments about using images to promote your ebooks. Do you create 3D images for your ebooks and digital products?

Filed Under: Business Branding, Internet Marketing Tagged With: Amazon.com, ebook, Kindle

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Free Keyword Search Tips for Bloggers

This is a guest post by Matthew Hooper of MatthewHooper.com.

Keyword research is a great way for you to discover potential content ideas for your website. Very often, blog owners either don't know the right phrases to be targeting or they target the wrong keyword. Great headlines, great content and a great message all sound, well, great but if nobody is finding your blog then you're talking to yourself. Furthermore, your efforts are all going out the window. This is where doing a bit of research can go a long way. Search traffic will keep coming long after you had published the post.

Free Keyword Search Video

In order to demonstrate, below is a short screencast on how to search for targetable keywords. The focus of this video is to identify keyword phrases using Google's free keyword search tool and then hone down the phrases in order to end up with a phrase that is less competitive.

(Can't see the video? To watch on YouTube, click here.)

A Word of Caution

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Internet Marketing, Online Visibility Tagged With: keyword search, seo

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Do Your Images Detract From Your Message?

This is a guest post from Marianne Cellucci of Net Atlantic.

When designing email newsletters and marketing campaigns, it is important that you consider the limitations presented by email readers. Many users, either by personal preference or email client defaults, are blocking images from being downloaded in the HTML-formatted messages they receive. Thus, it is a good practice for email designers to prepare for both image "off" and "on" scenarios. Here are some of the basics you need to know about using images in email:

Obstacles to Using Image-based Email Campaigns

Blocked or Disabled: It is estimated that approximately 35% of email recipients block all or some of their images; and, by default, several popular webmail services and email clients, such as Google and Outlook, are set to disable images automatically. Many users do not change the default, and therefore never see your images within your email marketing campaigns. Each email client has its own way of rendering blocked images: some display a box with a red "X" placeholder, while others simply gray out the area.

If you neglect to take these default settings into account, you run the risk of recipients reporting your email messages as spam; unsubscribing from your email list because they can’t read your message; and poor email deliverability since fewer messages are actually making it to the inbox.

Spam Filters: Spam filters can’t "read" images, so creating an HTML email that's nothing more than one big image, with little or no text, will trigger spam filters. With a rising surge in image-based spam, your legitimate email marketing campaigns can end up being blocked from delivery, or delivered to the junk folder. We strongly recommend that you avoid using images as your sole content.

Mobile Devices: Most messaging received on mobile devices are text based, so your images are never seen. As more and more portable devices are used for sending and receiving email, you’ll want to ensure that you’re sending both mobile-optimized HTML and text-based versions.

Workaround for Image Obstacles

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Internet Marketing, Online Visibility Tagged With: email marketing, email newsletter

How to Package, Promote and Profit from Your Expertise #BWELA

This past weekend I attended and spoke at the 5th annual BlogWorld and New Media Expo in Los Angeles. I had the good fortune to present a session in the Monetization track with my good friend Rich Brooks from flyte.biz.

Our topic was Hey Bloggers! How to Package, Promote and Profit from Your Expertise. To augment the session, we put together a list of many of the sites and resources we use to create products from our blog content and expertise.

Resource list (including slide deck)

Three wonderful bloggers who attended the session took notes and posted them:

Nicole Avery on Blog Coaching Boost

Andrea Vahl aka Grandma Mary on AndreaVahl.com (You'll see a crazy, silly interview with me and Grandma Mary at the top of the page. Scroll down for the session notes.)

Kristi Hines on Kikolani

As quite a few speakers noted in their presentations, if you're not generating revenue, then what you're doing is just a hobby. Darren Rowse in his session on Blogging with Heart (but Smart), made the point several times that you must think of your blog as a business and you must "create something to sell." In the last 2 years Darren has created 13 ebooks for his two brands: Problogger and Digital Photography School. He's created multiple streams of income for his business.

If you have questions about how to turn your expertise into products and add more profit to your business, let's talk!

Filed Under: Internet Marketing, Your Service Business Tagged With: #BWELA, blogging

How to Make Your Kindle Ebook Stand Out on Amazon

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