Ways to link to your Book’s Sale Page
Today we are going to talk about ways to link to your book’s sale page
As many of you know, I post to quite a few blogs each day. Getting what I call “buy links” seems to be a concern. The ability of the author to supply a link to a place where readers can purchase their book is of great importance.
Frequently I have authors sending me: 00FCJBBGG. This is one of my book’s ASIN. If I enter this set of letters and numbers into my browser window, I will get an error message. This is not a link to a buy page. It is an identifying feature of my book, but not helpful for readers trying to purchase a copy of your book.
Next most commonly, I’ll get: http://www.amazon.com/Go-Global-Build...
Amazon has got to have the longest, ugliest urls possible. Do you really want that showing on someone’s post about your book? It’s nasty.
A long url like this can be shortened using a number of services.
Bit.ly will allow the creation of an account and will shorted the above link to look like: http://amzn.to/182MFc0. Much nicer. It will also keep track of how many times this link is clicked on.
Ow.ly is the link shortener that Twitter uses and will shorten the link to look like: http://ow.ly/rajvt
My favorite is Smarturl as it will produce not only interesting looking links, but also provide stats about how many time, and where from the link is clicked on.
My book, Go Global: Building an International Platform that Sells, has a Smarturl that looks like: http://smarturl.it/AuthorPlatformAmazon. I also know that this link has been clicked on 3 times so far today from my book blog. Handy to know.
All urls need to be embedded to create clickable links
Research shows that people who read an electronic source of material (a blog, or ebook, etc) have the attention span of a gnat. We need to pander to this. All links should be embedded to create a clickable link. Don’t make people copy and paste a link into a new browser window. Just have them click on it.
To do that, highlight your text….
click on the link button on your menu bar……
Insert the nasty long url and click on the insert button…..
and your link looks like this: Buy this book at Amazon
Any questions? Don’t hesitate to ask!
Author information
Barb DrozdowichOwner at Bakerview ConsultingSocial Media and Wordpress Consultant Barb Drozdowich has taught at Colleges, trained technical personnel in the banking industry and, most recently, used her expertise to help hundreds of authors develop the social media platform needed to succeed in today’s fast evolving publishing world. She owns Bakerview Consulting and manages the popular blog, Sugarbeat’s Books. Her first book is now available on Amazon - The Author's Guide to Working with Book BloggersTwitterFacebookGoogle+LinkedIn
