How Can Authors Benefit From Using YouTube to Get Traffic?

According to Alexa (http://www.alexa.com/), YouTube is the third most visited website in the world (at the time of writing), and you can quite easily harness this advertising power as long as you know what you are doing.

Aside from all of the common ways to get people to visit your website like search engine optimization, mailing lists, and affiliate programs there is a way for you to boost the traffic to your website – use YouTube.

YouTube is set up primarily as a place for people to interact with each other and share videos that they have created or that others have created which they think are cool, unique or hilarious.

It is not, at its base, a place for you to advertise for your website – but that does not mean that you cannot do so. There are a variety of ways in which you can advertise to try and bring traffic to your site without making it totally obvious, so let’s see what a few of those techniques are.

The best way to get people from YouTube to visit your website is to become a video releaser. All of the most popular people on YouTube have released their own videos, and you can too with the simple click of your mouse button.

To advertise as a releaser is easy.  Create a username that is the same name as your book, website or author name, and then make the intro and finale on your video contain the name and address of your website.

People will visit.

If you are not excited about releasing your own videos, you can always be a passionate viewer and commenter. Create a profile on YouTube that contains the name of your book and the website address and then start viewing all kinds of videos.

Comment on them, favorite them, add good ones to your blog – it’s that simple and you will have countless people visiting your own website via YouTube in no time.

Providing Value On Twitter

Photo by lyricsboy

You might be wondering, “what should I tweet about?”

Just as with your blog, website, and forum posts, your main goal should be to provide value. If you can manage to do that, you're golden!

Here are easy ways to provide value that don't take much effort at all:

• Retweet an interesting update from someone that you're following.

• Offer links to free and interesting stuff, like articles, pictures, and videos (not all your own stuff).

• Comment on current events / news.

• Post funny/profound/inspiring quotes.

• Tweet about interesting things that happened in your day or upcoming events that you're excited about. (actual things that your followers will be interested in, not the new episode of American Idol airing tonight.... unless your niche is American Idol of course!)

• Find something on Digg, Stumbleupon, etc. that really catches your attention. Write a blog post about it first, and then link to your blog post in your tweet. This way, instead of linking directly to the source, you're linking to your own blog. If it's something really neat it may go viral, causing a potential hurricane of traffic.

After you have been on Twitter for a while, look at your tweet history. Are you selling too hard? Not selling enough? Are you providing value with your tweets or just rambling on about random stuff every day? Would YOU follow yourself?

Analyze your tweets carefully and modify your strategy accordingly. Just as with a PPC campaign, monitor, track, and make changes as needed.

Need help with writing, editing, publishing, or book marketing? thepublishingguru(at)gmail.com

Twitter Tools for Authors - Twellow and Grader

Tweet Twellow

Twellow, at http://www.twellow.com, is another great way of finding people to interact with. People are categorized into different areas, and you can search for those with similar interests.  The main page shows you all the categories, which then have sub-categories. Click on a category and the list of people in that area are displayed.  You don't have to be registered with Twellow to be displayed, but at the time of writing this post, there were more than 30 million people showing on the site, so you will have plenty to choose from. By all means though, register yourself and set up a profile so others can find you.  When you click on a category, Twellow displays a list of people in that category and they are ordered by the number of followers they have. If you are already logged into Twitter via the web, you will be able to follow people directly from the screens where the profiles are displayed.

Grader

Grader is on Twitter as @grader and online at http://twitter.grader.com. As you get going on Twitter, you can get “ranked” by Grader with a score out of 100. It is based on a secret algorithm so people can't trick the system.  Apart from that aspect of Grader, you can have a look at who the top Tweeple are in a particular area or even by topic using the search function.  When you use the search function, it will list the Tweeple by their score in descending order. For example, if you search for “gardening” on Grader, you will get a list of all the top 100 people interested in gardening on Twitter. You can see their “bio” from their Twitter account and if you click on their Grader score, it will take you to their Twitter account from where you can follow them. Naturally, you must already be logged in to Twitter yourself to follow anyone.

Need help with writing, editing, publishing, or book marketing? thepublishingguru(at)gmail.com