There has never been a better time for a single person or a small business to become successful without a great deal of starting capital. On the internet, great content wins the high-value search engine real estate, and as a writer, you’re already ahead of the game when it comes to producing original content.

Free Ad Space

The best thing about having your own content-rich website is that you create an unlimited amount of highly relevant ad space to offer your book. Not every page of your site needs to be a sales pitch for your book. Instead, write content that appeals to your reading demographic and display your book and a brief summary in one of the left or right columns.

Online Sales

There are several options when it comes to selling your book from your website. If you have physical copies of your book and wish to sell them direct to the customer through your website, you can use Pay Pal or a merchant account that accepts credit cards to process your payments.

Third Party Publishers

You may prefer to send customers to your publisher’s site or other eCommerce site such as Amazon to make the purchase. In this case you won’t need to worry about payment processing. You can either add a text or image link to you’re book’s page or, with Amazon, use one of their pre-made buttons and earn an additional commission for the referral.

Anchor Text

Relevant anchor text is an important part of your overall SEO strategy. If you choose a text link to your book, give the text link a strategic search engine optimized name as opposed to “click here.” The anchor text for a link is extremely important when it comes to search engine optimization.

Image Anchor Text

With an image link, give the image “alt” tag the strategic name. Do this by adding your text in the “alt” box of the EWB image gallery before inserting the image. In this case, the alt image is “Best Book on Public Speaking.”

Turning an Image into a Link

To make an image a button, select the image, click the hyperlink button and assign the address where you want to send your customer.

Pay Pal

Pay Pal is becoming increasingly popular for a few reasons. There are no setup fees or monthly fees with Pay Pal. You only pay a fee when you make a sale. The standard fee per sale is 2.9% plus a $0.30 transaction fee. If you haven’t looked at Pay Pal for a while, it’s worth looking into again. In the beginning, your customers had to have a Pay Pal account in order to pay you. Now anyone can make a credit card payment whether they have a Pay Pal account or not.

Pay Pal ‘Buy Now’ Buttons

Pay Pal offers “Buy Now” buttons for single purchases that only involve copying and pasting a piece of code below your product. When buyers click the “Buy Now” buttons they are taken directly to Pay Pal to make their payment and then returned to your site.

Pay Pal ‘Buy Now’ Wizard

Easy Website Builder is great for selling one or two products using Pay Pal. If you need a more robust shopping cart to sell multiple items Quick Shopping Cart is the perfect choice. The Easy Website Builder 'products' module gives you a wizard with a built in ‘Buy Now’ buttons. Add the title, image, description, and price and a Buy Now button is automatically generated and configured to take customers to your Pay Pal account.

Shopping Cart with Pay Pal Payment Processing

If you offer quite a few books or products that you will ship directly from your site, you may want to have a shopping cart on your site so that customers can fill their cart and pay for goods at one time at the end of their visit. If this describes you, Quick Shopping Cart might be a better choice for you and also supports Pay Pal.

Take a tour of our shopping cart product
75 Reasons to Choose Quick Shopping Cart

Shopping Cart with Merchant Account Payment Processing

While Pay Pal is fast, cost effective, and easy for the seller, it does involve a few extra screens for the buyer when used as described above. Another option is a merchant account that allows customers to purchase by typing a credit card directly into your website.

Merchant Account Setup and Fee Structure

Merchant accounts generally involve a set up or application fee, a monthly fee, and charge a percentage of each sale. The application process usually takes a few days for approval so start the process early if you choose this route.

Using an Existing Merchant Account

If you already have a merchant account, you can use this to process your online payments. Quick Shopping Cart offers 5 different methods of payment processing your existing merchant account.

Start building your new website today with Easy Website Builder

Three Days to Building a Winning Book Promotion Campaign

A - Drive Traffic
Learn how to move to the top of the search engine rankings by identifying popular searched keywords and crafting SEO optimized headlines and text.

B - Brand yourself
Readers identify with your message when they have a chance to get to know and trust you. Learn ways to enhance your credibility and establish yourself as an industry expert.

C - Attract loyal customers with high quality content
Sell more books by offering enough free information to get people interested, but not so much that you sacrifice sales

D - Interesting, fresh content
Keep readers coming back to your site consistently new and updated content. Learn how to generate lots of great new content without spending countless hours of work with RSS feeds, and articles archives.    

E - Sell your books
Use the product module to add your book to your site in 2 clicks and sell your books right from your site.  If you're selling through Amazon, learn how to set up an affiliate link to your book to generate a greater sales percentage.  

F - Build a mailing list
Keeping a customer is far easier than gaining a new one.  Learn the secrets of building a targeted mailing list to stay in touch with people who already have expressed interest in your book or idea. Find resources for creating and managing a newsletter campaign and learn how to insert forms into Easy Website Builder.

G- Earn Affiliate Profits
Earn additional revenue by offering thousands of high quality products targeted to your site's visitors from a variety of sources.

H - Earn cash for clicks
Use Google AdSense or Yahoo Publisher to add an additional stream of revenue. Find resources, information, and tutorials to maximize your profits and learn how to add the code into your Easy Website Builder Software.