No matter how beautifully you write, if no one can find your story, you’ll never get read. Unless you’re a very prolific blogger with a huge following, advertising is probably the way you need to go. But there are a lot of advertising services for ebooks, and new services are coming on-line everyday…how do you choose?

I’ve spent over 8 years now in online-marketing. In honor of that, I want to share 8 tips for writers, artists, and entrepreneurs for evaluating solid ONLINE advertising opportunities:

1. First, know the stats on the best. Bookbub is awesome, it is the Holy Grail of book promotion. No. Really. They clearly break down how many email subscribers they have for each genre. Email is still probably the most effective medium for advertising. People who opt in to have their inboxes cluttered are HIGHLY motivated. For instance, for Mystery Bookbub has about 900K subscribers, for fantasy only about 270k. They price according to reach. This tells you EXACTLY how many of their subscribers will potentially be interested in your story.

Here are Bookbub’s social media stats as of this post: Facebook 944K followers. Twitter 63K followers. Pinterest: approx. 900 followers. When a potential advertising partner promises you social media promotion, compare their numbers to these!

2. Emails that are shorter with only one to three promotions are a better deal. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t go with services that list a lot of offerings, it’s just you should count on it being cheaper than a “feature”.

3. Emails should only come once a day. Subscribe to a service…if they annoy you with multiple emails during the day, they are annoying other people. If they’re cheap or free, they may still be a good deal, but if they’re expensive, pass.

4. Emails are targeted based on the genre of interest. Self-explanatory really! 

5. Big buy buttons on the website and emails. Buttons perform better than simple hyperlinks or worse…the URL spelled out. (Yuck! Ugly, and difficult to respond to).

6. Social media posts are attractive, and/or witty and well written. A post with a picture and a choice excerpt is going to perform better than a dry rehash of the first sentence of the description (Yes, I’ve seen that).

7. Banners…I haven’t tried them for ebooks. I actually make banners and emails for a living, and banners, while good for name recognition, are not the best deliverers of conversions. 

8. Does the link in the advertisement go directly to the place of sale? Every time a customer clicks you risk losing their interest and/or time. If a banner, email, or Facebook link takes a customer to an intermediary page, you’re going to lose a lot more of them. 

BONUS (ESPECIALLY FOR MY ENTREPRENEUR FRIENDS)
Google and LinkedIn: the cost for Google & LinkedIn is too high for inexpensive products. However, they are great for “high-end” items. And LinkedIn in particular is great for B to B products, especially niche items.

Well, there are my 8 and a 1/2 cents. Anyone else out there got tips, or something that worked for them?