An important part of promotion online is to participate in the various online discussions. A person builds credibility online by being a good source of information. And credibility is the cornerstone of any sales relationship. You can’t expect people to buy something from you if they can’t trust you.

By participation, I mean contributing worthwhile information to the discussion, not blabbing about the greatness of your book. The information you share needs to help the reader in some way. Otherwise, it isn’t worth posting. Fortunately, there are many ways to find discussion opportunities. Here is how I went about it with Angie’s new book.

First stop - Technorati, a searching engine for searching blog posts. You can manually search for specific terms, or do what I did - set up an RSS feed for a specific search term (in this case “VBAC”). Now, every morning when my feed reading software starts up, it runs the search on Technorati automatically and displays the results for me. I sort through them and forward on ones of interest to Angela.

Next stop, I set up a Google Alert for the term “VBAC”. With this service, Google notifies you by email whenever new instances of your term appear on the web, in the news, on the Usenet, or on blogs Google monitors.

I go into more detail on finding general discussions of a topic here.

Next time I’ll go into how I’m using Feedburner to get the most bang out of the RSS feed for Angela’s blog.