Last week, we looked at a few online advertising options for our ebooks. For the most part, I talked about large, established sites that receive a lot of visitors every day. If you think the rates are on the high side or the wait is on the long side (or you’ve already tried them and are looking for more ways to advertise), you may want to check out other options.
A lot of small book/ebook review blogs are starting to offer sponsorship packages. I’m not going to say yay or nay as to whether these are worth the money, but I’ll throw out some things you may want to consider before plonking your virtual coins down:
How much traffic does the site receive?
A brand new site that gets three visitors a day probably isn’t going to generate a lot of sales for you. You can get a general idea of traffic by looking the site up at Alexa. The lower the traffic rating, the more popular the site. You might type yours in or other ones in the industry for a comparison.
A lot of bloggers are great about giving you a big ad (maybe a full blog post), including interviews, excerpts from your ebook, others’ reviews of your ebook, etc. etc. etc., but if the eyeballs aren’t there, you have to ask yourself if any of that matters.
That said, a highly targeted blog with low traffic may give you much better results than a less well targeted blog with high traffic. For example, an ebook review site with fifty visitors a day may sell more books for you than a general e-reader forum with hundreds of visitors. People don’t generally go to forums to buy things, but if they’re looking for reviews, chances are they’re in a buying frame of mind.
Can you get your ebook mentioned without paying for an ad?
A lot of the review sites have submission guidelines posted and/or invite guest posts. If you can write a guest post and include a link back to your site and to your book at Amazon, you could save yourself a few dollars. Too, people tend to respond more positively to informative blog posts than ‘sponsored posts’ or advertisements.
Are there a lot of other advertisements on the site already?
I saw a brand new ebook review blog the other day that had so many Amazon and Adsense ads on it, my eyes crossed. And that’s coming from someone who makes a living running ads on her sites. I’m not against a blogger trying to make money, but a lot of clutter will detract from your ad.
The ‘can’t see the forest for the trees’ adage applies here.
Do you get a permanent link to your site out of the deal?
Even if all I’d checked the big fail box for everything else listed above, I’d probably pay for an advertisement that included a permanent link to my site (i.e. in the form of a blog post that remained on the site long after it’d been shifted off the front page).
The more links pointing to your site the more ways people can find you. Also, search engines assume sites with lots of links pointing to them are authorities in their niche. You’ll end up ranking more highly in the search engine results, so you’ll get more organic traffic from Google, Yahoo, etc. in the long run.
A banner ad that appears on a site for a month, then disappears forever is worth a lot less to me (add to that the studies suggesting people have been banner blind since the 90s and don’t click them nearly as often as text links, and I’ve little interest in banners, period).
Ultimately… it’s your decision
I wanted to offer some Devil’s Advocate advice here, but I know that ultimately a lot of writers are just happy to support folks who are reviewing books, especially the ones who go out of their way to help out indie authors. If you have the money to do that, then don’t let me stop you. However, if you are keeping ROI in mind and need to make sure each advertising dollar counts, then please consider these points before paying for sponsorship.
