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Plug Your Book!
173
Pay-per-click advertising
Pay-per-click advertising has revolutionized online promotion, and
has been wonderfully effective for many Internet businesses. The prime
advantage of pay-per-click is its ability to deliver your ad to targeted
audiences. Unfortunately, like other forms of advertising, pay-per-click
is seldom a cost-effective technique for marketing books.
Although pay-per-click can bring targeted traffic to your site, it’s
unlikely you’ll convert enough of those visitors into buyers to make your
ad campaign worthwhile. Google, for example, will charge you 75 cents
or more per click for competitive keywords, and only a small fraction of
those clicks will result in sales. Even if you’re paying as little as 10 cents
per click, your advertising bill will likely exceed the revenue from sales,
in the experience of many publishers. With typical consumer books,
there’s just not enough profit margin to pay for the ads.
Google AdWords
With AdWords, advertisers write short three-line text ads, then bid
on keywords relevant to their ad. The ads appear alongside relevant
search results or on content pages. For example, to advertise a book
about tropical fish, you might bid on several different keywords and
phrases—aquarium, exotic fish, fishkeeping, and pet fish.
Depending on how popular those words and phrases are with other
advertisers, you might have to pay a minimum of 10 cents, 30 cents, or
several dollars for each click. The higher your bid, the higher your ad
shows up on the relevant page.
Although most general-interest books can’t be cost-effectively
marketed using AdWords, the program can be effective for specialty
publishers and sellers of certain high-margin products, such as:
Expensive books such as technical and professional manuals costing
more than $75, where a built-in advertising budget of more than $15 per
unit can be justified.
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