I don’t like when industry buzzwords and terminology are dropped into conversations with people who don’t work in that field.

You know how it goes . . . social workers never tell anyone anything. They share with them.

Educators don’t work with groups. They’ve got cohorts.

And there are no phrases with words in the military and financial services field — those folks love their acronyms. They’ve got a POV or ARM for everything.

Authors are guilty of using buzzwords, too

Authors do it, too.

How many times have you mentioned to someone who doesn’t write that you’ll add a POD option for your next book or that you’re wondering if you should ditch ARCs this time?

Marketers are no different. They might even be worse!

I get frustrated when I see them using the latest buzzword (or any buzzword) with authors without pausing to explain or define industry expressions.

No matter who does it, it’s a way of setting up boundaries that separate those in the know from those in the dark. I prefer inclusion over exclusion.

Learn these book marketing buzzwords

With that in mind, here are a dozen common book marketing buzzwords you’re likely to come across as you learn how to market your books. The list is not exhaustive, but it’s a good start.

1. Call to action — CTA

A call to action, often abbreviated to CTA, tells your reader what you want them to do next.

Authors who are savvy social media users include CTAs in many of their posts. They might say, “If you liked this, please subscribe to my newsletter,” or “What do you think of my new character’s name? Does it work for you? Tell me in a comment.”

All authors should include a “please review this book” CTA at the end of their books.

We need to be told what to do, so please tell us in a CTA.

2. Funnel

This concept describes the journey a reader takes from the first interaction with your book(s) to purchase. It typically moves from awareness to opinion to purchase, as shown in this illustration. (Note that it looks like a funnel.)

Not everybody who becomes aware of your book will go on to purchase it. Those who do move through the complete cycle shown in the illustration and come out the bottom of the funnel as your readers after they purchase your book.

For more on this, read “Curious about book funnels? Here’s (almost) everything you need to know.”

3. Landing page

This is a simple web page with a single purpose.

For authors, that could be encouraging readers to subscribe to your newsletter or buy your book (but not both).

Because a landing page is so focused on just one goal, it is visually simple and has no menu or toolbar with other options to distract visitors.

My landing page offering the “Build Book Buzz Guest Blogging Cheat Sheet” is an example of one that’s designed to get newsletter subscribers.

The landing page for the Build Book Buzz Reader Book Review Forms is a product sales page. Note that there’s no menu or toolbar.

4. Lead magnet

Also referred to as a “reader magnet,” “lead generator,” “opt-in bribe,” or “freebie,” this is an irresistible gift you offer your target audience in exchange for their contact information.

While marketers might encourage you to collect full mailing addresses, don’t.

First, you don’t need that much information — all you need is a name and email address.

Second, people won’t provide it. If you force them to fill in their address to get your lead magnet, they’ll close the window and you’ll lose your chance to start building a relationship with someone in your target audience.

My “Guest Blogging Cheat Sheet” mentioned above is a lead magnet,  as is my “Book Marketing Plan Template” and “9 Places to Look for Readers Who Write Reviews.”

Get nonfiction lead magnet ideas in this article and fiction lead magnet ideas in this one.

5. Opt in

Opt in is a verb that describes what people do when they add themselves to your email list (often because they want your lead magnet). They opt in.

Best practice for email marketing is a 100 percent opt-in list. Don’t add people to your email list without their permission. They need to decide whether they want to hear from you or not.

Note the example on the right; you’ll also find it on the right sidebar of this page.

For more on this subject, read “3 important email marketing truths you need to know as an author” and “Book review: Newsletter Ninja: How to Become an Author Mailing List Expert.”

6. Optimize/Optimization

When you “optimize” something, you make the most of it.

For authors, optimize refers to maximizing the power and impact of your Amazon sales page, Amazon author page, and the text on your website for SEO reasons (see below).

It’s often used in conjunction with search terms people will use to find you and your books.

7. Pixels

Pixels also refers to images but in this case, it’s an advertising term referring to a piece of code that is used to track behavior on a website. It’s often used when talking about the effectiveness of Facebook ads that drive traffic to a website.

8. Re-targeting

Have you ever noticed how a product you looked at on an e-commerce site shows up as an ad on other sites you visit?

That’s re-targeting. It’s designed to encourage you to buy that product. Think of it as a digital reminder.

Here’s an example of re-targeting and really, it’s kind of creepy. After my daughter’s dog had surgery, I asked her via text how she got the pup to take pills. She sent me a picture of this product . . . which showed up on a page I was reading on my phone’s browser this morning.

9. Plugin

This is software that you add — plug in — to your browser or website that gives it more functionality. You’ll use a plugin to add an email optin form to your website.

Notice the social network icon toolbars at the top and left side of this article that allow you to share it quickly and easily. We added those toolbars here with a plugin.

10. SEO

SEO — search engine optimization — is what you do to your website (see optimize/optimization above) so that it gets found by search engines.

The better your site’s SEO — meaning, the more content you create that fits what your target audience is looking for — the higher your site pages will show up in search engine results.

11. Split testing

Also referred to as A/B testing, this function allows you to test website features such as headlines, text, or images or email subject lines and content, among other things.

12. Upselling

Upsells are designed to sell more to someone making a purchase. The most recognizable example is “Would you like fries with that?”

When you upsell, you’re either suggesting that the customer buy a better version (with more features or functionality, for example) or encouraging them to add a complementary product to the purchase.

Authors can upsell by offering a discounted price on a companion workbook, providing a volume discount, or selling additional merchandise or services from within the book.

There are many, many more book marketing buzzwords, of course.

Is there a book marketing buzzword you don’t understand? Maybe we can help you. Share it in a comment. 

(Editor’s note: This article was first published in September 2017. It has been updated and expanded.)

Why authors need a voice search strategy

By Miral Sattar

Have you ever asked Siri on your iPhone to tell you the time or set an alarm? Do you own a smart speaker, one of those voice-controlled search devices that include Amazon’s Echo and Google Home?

If not, you probably know someone who does.

What they all have in common is that they perform voice search through a voice assistant  on a smart speaker that you speak to.

Here’s what all of that means.

What is voice search? 

Voice search is speech technology that allows users to search by saying the terms rather than by typing them into a search engine.

Voice search is growing in popularity and by next year, 50 percent of all searches will be done through voice.

What is a voice assistant?

A voice assistant is a digital assistant that uses voice recognition, natural language processing, and speech synthesis to help users through phones and voice recognition applications.

Common voice assistants are Siri, Cortana, and Alexa. Built into smartphones and smart speakers (see below), they help with tasks that often include:

• Listening to audiobooks
• Requesting information (that’s where voice search comes in)
• Performing mathematical calculations (like my kids love doing)
• Playing music

What is a smart speaker?

A smart speaker is a device that processes voice search commands and responds to voice commands. Examples include most smartphone brands plus Echo, Echo Dot, and Google Home.

Why you need to optimize for voice search

Optimizing for voice search is critical to book marketing because a smart speaker and a voice assistant such as Siri are gateways to purchasing in the home.

What happens currently with your book if someone performs a voice search for it?

Nothing?

Does it return your website? Recommend your book?

Getting smart about how to use voice search to your advantage as an author reminds me of what happened with audiobooks. A few years ago, they weren’t the norm, but now, you can listen to almost any book you want in audio format.

You want to leverage the power of voice search in the same way that authors are taking advantage of audiobook popularity, too.

Just like with regular search engine optimization (SEO), there are things you need to do to get your book optimized for voice search SEO.

What you can do right now to prepare for voice search

In fact, there are a couple things you can do right now to make sure you’re prepared for the voice search revolution.

1. Update your meta description.

Having a meta description for your home page is especially important for voice search and voice assistants. The meta description is what voice assistants like Siri, Alexa, and Google use to describe your website.

The meta description is hidden text on every page of your website that tells search engines what’s on the page. It’s a snippet of up to about 150 characters.

Search engines display the meta description in search results mostly when the searched-for phrase, such as the author’s name, is in the description. You can make sure yours is as good as possible using an SEO plugin like Yoast SEO.

To see how this works, do a test. If you have an iPhone, ask Siri about your favorite author and see what comes up.

Example: “Siri, who is (favorite author name)?” 

If you have an Amazon Echo or Dot device, speak the following prompts.

“Alexa, who is (favorite author name)?” 

The search results that get displayed on your phone screen or read aloud are often the meta description on the author’s website.

2. Make sure your book is available in audiobook format:

Because smart speakers can play audiobooks, they give preference to books that are available in audiobook format when delivering search results.

That means that if there are two books with the same title and only one of them is available as an audiobook, that’s the one that will be at the top of search results.

To see how this works, if you have an Amazon Echo or Dot device say the following prompts:

“Alexa, read (book title).”

It will demonstrate why you want to make sure your audiobook is available on Amazon and Google Play. That way, the smart speakers can purchase, read, and recommend your audiobook to potential readers.

Authors and publishers stand to lose millions this year because they are not optimizing for voice search. Be prepared for the voice search revolution. It’s already here.

Learn how to leverage voice search for your book

Save 50 percent on my new course, “How to Leverage Voice Search to Sell Books,” with coupon code LAUNCH by May 30 at the Build Book Buzz affiliate link for the course. I will also give you another one of my training programs, the SEO Masterclass ($299 value), for free – but only if you purchase by May 30 at this link: “How to Leverage Voice Search to Sell Books.”

7 foolproof SEO tips for authors

By Miral Sattar

Let’s be honest. You understand the power of Google, but have no clue how it works, right?

This lack of understanding can be a problem for authors, though.

You rely on Google, the largest search engine in the world, to help readers discover your books, so you really should know at least the basics about how to get found.

What you do to your website and Amazon sales pages to make sure they’re discovered through Google searches is called search engine optimization – SEO. And there’s lots you can do to make sure that readers find you and your books when they’re searching online for your topic, name, or even parts of your book title.

Here are seven ways you can use the power of SEO to make it easier for readers to find and discover your books immediately.

1. Optimize your Amazon pages.

There’s no question that Amazon is one of the most well-indexed sites online. The search box there is a search engine, after all. Actually, if you search for your book or your name, it’s likely that your Amazon page will show up much higher than your website does.

Here are a few things you can do to optimize your Amazon pages:

• Make sure you have an Author Central account with your bio and picture. This will help you rank higher on Amazon searches.
• Connect your social media accounts to your Amazon Author Central page.
• Make sure your book has the relevant keywords you would use to find a book like yours.

2. Start blogging on your website and do it in a meaningful way.

It’s important to have a blog because it’s the key way that people learn about books.

It’s a good idea to blog to add value and not just to blog for the sake of blogging. David Gaughran and Joanna Penn are great examples of authors who blog effectively.

Blogging helps make sure that when people type your name into the Google search box, your website shows up on the first page of search results. They will then get to your site, where you  have all the information about you and your books that they need (and want).

3. Optimize your blog for Google.

You want to make sure that your blog is optimized for Google so that when it gets “crawled” or visited by all the major search engines, they will find the right content.

Plugins that include Yoast  will help you set up tags, title, keywords, and metadata.

Another way to optimize your blog is with sitemaps. This is a structured listing of all the pages on your blog or website. It tells Google and other search engines about your site’s structure.

A sitemap also lets Google know when a new post is published so it can index it and add it to search results.

4. Understand and use outbound and inbound linking.

Linking (links from one site to another) is another critical element of SEO.

You want other sites to link to your content, and you want to link to theirs, too. Let the sites you link to know you’ve linked to them so they can link back to you, too.

When someone links back to your blog posts, it’s basically a vote for your content as far as Google is concerned. Those links to your site are weighted by Google according to their reputations. For example, if TIME.com links or Buzzfeed.com links to your site, you get the equivalent of bonus points from Google.

5. Guest blog.

Guest blogging is a great way to establish yourself as an expert. It provides an opportunity to link back to your book or site in your bio that runs with your guest post (like the bio at the beginning of this article).

When author Hymn Herself wrote a blog post about 5 Things Movies Don’t Tell You About Mental Institutions for Cracked.com, the link to her book in the article bio helped her sell 1,000 copies in a few days.

She wrote about that experience for us on Bibliocrunch.

6. Write good headlines, keywords, and metadata.

Having a good title tag that tells what the blog is about will help make your content easy to search. When I worked at TIME, I was in charge of all the SEO and one of my responsibilities included training journalists in SEO.

Here are a few tips:

• Titles: Writers love using titles that don’t say anything about the content. For example, “Amazon Stops Selling Hoverboards Over Safety” is much better than ” You Don’t Want to Buy This Dangerous Gadget.”
• Keywords: Have five to seven keywords that describe your content. Examples would be: Amazon, hoverboards, hoverboard safety, Swagway, consumer safety
• Meta description: This is a short paragraph that describes your blog post content. This will show up in Google results. The meta description for that article about hoverbards might be, “Several models pulled by online retailer Amazon over fire hazard fears. Leading hoverboard maker Swagway confirmed the online retailer is requesting companies manufacturing the popular devices to prove they are safe to use.”

7. Make sure your site is mobile-friendly.

Because a lot of users now read on smartphones and other mobile devices, Google changed its algorithm in April 2015 to penalize any sites that are not optimized for mobile devices.

Use the free Google tool to test if your site is mobile-friendly: Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test Tool

These tips will definitely help you rank higher and make your books easier to find. If you’d like more help implementing these and other important steps that will help your book get found and purchased, register for my new training program, “Masterclass: SEO That Translates to Book Sales.” (This is an affiliate link.)

This course for authors will teach you how to get more traffic, fans, readers, and buyers for your books. And, Build Book Buzz readers get a 50 percent discount on registrations through tomorrow, June 7, 2018, so make sure you check out “Masterclass: SEO That Translates to Book Sales” now! (This is an affiliate link.)

I spoke about e-book publicity at BlogPaws, the conference for pet bloggers, earlier this month. While there, I sat in on a workshop on search engine optimization – SEO – led by Matt Beswick. He shared a few tips and tools for better author SEO that I found helpful and thought you might, too. Here they are.

1. Ubersuggest.org

This keyword suggestion tool helps you generate blog post or article topics that are based on keywords people are searching for.  Use the instructions on the left side of the screen to generate keywords, select the ones that appeal to you, and add them to your “basket.” When they’re in the basket, you can copy and paste them into Google’s Adwords search tool to see how many people are searching for each of them.

Beswick suggests starting with a couple of words to see what the software brings up for you. You’ll see in his example on the left that typing “what dogs”  into the search box generates a handy list of keywords that can be the start of blog posts or phrases to work into a site’s content.

2. WordPress SEO by Yoast

If you have a WordPress site, check out this plugin that will help you increase your search engine ranking but also increase the click through on organic search results. It does this in part by showing whether your title is too long or too short and if your meta description makes sense in the context of a search result. (My webmaster highly recommends it, too.)

3. Majestic SEO

Use Majestic to find all links pointing to your site, then check for “orphaned links” — those that take you nowhere and generate an error message. Redirect the orphaned links to valid and relevant pages. (This is important because orphaned links hurt your search engine ranking.) Learn more at this blog post, “Finding & Fixing Orphaned Links Using Majestic, Excel & Screaming Frog.”

4. Piktochart

Beswick (and so many others) recommends creating awesome, cool content that others want to share. Infographics are popular and shareable (check out Jane Friedman’s infographic on the five current book publishing options that I’ve seen shared on a few other sites). Piktochart will help you create those cool infographics so many of us love. I’m thinking about my first infographic and will see if Piktochart is the tool I need for it.

Thanks, Matt, for these helpful author SEO tools!

Let’s show a little love to Matt Beswick, who gave an excellent presentation (check it out on SlideShare). Thanks, Matt! Please follow him on Twitter (@MattBeswick) and send him a thank you note there.

What’s your favorite author website SEO tool? Please share it in a comment!