5 Online Tips for Authors

I believe you should never reinvent the wheel.

Here are 4 tips about easy ways to do things are required of you nearly every day. This will certainly aid you immediately in your online marketing.

1. Create a document with all your book titles, a short blurb for each, and the corresponding buy links for every channel where it's sold.

This document will save you so much time. You can access the document any time you need to fill out a website form or paste it into a blog post or wherever you may need it.

Create the document in an easy to access text document (Notepad) or Flashnote file, which is always plain text so you can just copy the link and paste it whenever you need it.

If you make this document in Word, save it as a text file so it doesn't create extraneous HTML code that can really mess up a blog post if you paste it into a blog without "cleaning it up."

2. Always paste from a text file rather than a Word file.

When filling out web forms, pasting content from a Word file can end up looking weird and/or have random odd characters appear.

3. Always proofread any online form you fill out—especially if you pasted text in.

Some web forms just won't accept pasted text cleanly. You may end up with random characters or symbols.

4. If you want to try to shorten a link so that you can track the number of clicks, use any of the popular link shortening services like Goo.gl, TinyURL, Bitly, Smart URL.

If you really want to see who's clicking your buy link, track the clicks. All the link shortening services work basically the same, but each has some pros and cons. Use the one that's easiest for you.

5. For books on Amazon, use Booklinker which creates one link that works in every Kindle book shop.

Booklinker is easy to use. Just create an account and create links for your book. It's so easy.You can personalize the link and also make the beginning part of it say: "get book" or "my book."

Remember, Booklinker is part of the Amazon world so it works only to create links for Amazon stores.

Of course, you can upgrade Booklinker to GeniusLink, but then it goes from free to paid. Once you upgrade, you can't go back to the free level.

By the way, Booklinker won't create a link from a URL that contains referral code so be sure you clean up the URL before using Booklinker.

(See my post Create a Clean Amazon URL Link.)

Booklinker does not currently support the shortened "amzn.to" format.

Takeaway Truth

There's always an easy way to shortcut the process. When you find a shortcut, share it with others.