But I’m feeling fine. So I decided to get back on the horse and continue with the promotional campaign for Angela’s book.

In the last installment, I said this time I’d get into the inner workings of Feedburner, a great service for maximizing the RSS feed of a blog. But the subject is a bit complicated, so I thought I’d instead tackle something a little more straightforward for this installment – listing a blog with all the blog-specific directories and search engines.

One of the reasons I recommend blogs to authors is because there are many directories and search engines specifically for blogs. And, by definition, you can’t list standard web sites in them. So the fact of just having a blog, rather than a standard web site, increases the number of venues for exposure.

Registering with the blog directories and search engines really isn’t that much different than registering a standard web site. You need these pieces of information:

+ your email address (use one that you don’t mind giving out to the public)

+ your blog URL

+ 20-word description of the blog (not necessary for every site you submit to, but asked for by some)

+ Keyword phrases describing the blog

Remember, this is for the blog, not the book. So the above information should be relevant to the blog.

In Angela’s case, the relevant info is:

+ richard@booklocker.com

+ http://vbac.angelahoy.com/

+ A diary of one expecting family’s struggle over the local medical community’s refusal to perform VBACs (Vaginal Birth After Cesarean).

+ vbac, vaginal birth after cesarean, cesarean section, c-section

Some blog directories and search engines ask for more extensive personal information, like your name, age, gender, or physical location. The reason they ask for that is to be able to present the search results in more interesting ways (all the blogs in Bangor, Maine, for example). My personal feeling is if you aren’t comfortable giving it out, don’t. If they require information you don’t want to give out, skip the site and go to the next one.

Also, some of these sites require you create a free account with them, and provide a link to them from your blog.

Here is the master list I keep for BookLocker authors. I built this list over time from various sources:

http://www.blogpulse.com/submit.html
http://globeofblogs.com/register.php
http://www.getblogs.com/lma/guidelines.html
http://www.blogrankings.com/addblog.php
http://www.bloghub.com/cgi-bin/add.cgi
http://www.bloggernity.com/cgi-bin/add.cgi
http://swoogle.umbc.edu/index.php?option=com_swoogle_service&service=submit
http://www.blurtit.com/
http://www.sarthak.net/blogz/add.php
http://www.blogoriffic.com/add_blog.php
http://www.feedbomb.com/
http://www.blog-search.com/blog-submission.html
http://www.wilsdomain.com/add-url.html
http://www.yourwebloghere.com/add_url.php
http://www.all-blogs.net/submit.php
http://www.blogtopsites.com/register
http://www.thevital.net/
http://www.blogion.com/?p=submit
http://www.photarium.com/add-site.php
http://www.blogarama.com/add-a-site/
http://www.blogbib.com/submit.php
http://www.blogcatalog.com/blogs/submit_blog.html
http://www.bulletize.com/submit.php
http://www.daypop.com/info/submit.htm
http://www.lsblogs.com/howtosubmit.php

I try to keep this list current, but bad links still pop up. If you run across a bad link, let me know.

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.

In order to write material that’s effective, as well as helpful to others, you need to understand the phrases people are entering into the search engines. There is an easy and cheap way to figure this out. Use the tools available from the search engines themselves.

http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal?defaultView=2

As I explained awhile back in this article, search engines offer these tools to advertisers to help them determine what keywords to buy.

In our case, I entered the terms “VBAC” and “cesarean”. I whittled the resulting list down to these phrases, which are subjects to which I thought we could contribute information:

“VBAC statistics”
“Cesarean section risk versus VBAC risk”
“Finding VBAC friendly hospitals”
“10 steps to VBAC success”

I got Angela to work writing articles on those topics. The first one she wrote,  “10 Steps to VBAC Success”, is here.

In addition, I pulled these phrases for use in Amazon’s Search Suggestion program:

“vaginal birth after caesarean”
“vbac delivery”
“vbac birth”
“vbac risk”
“vbac”

The Amazon’s Search Suggestion program allows you to give Amazon search phrases for particular books. The link to the form you submit to Amazon with your suggestions is in the section of the book page, about halfway down, titled “Help others find this item”. You need an Amazon account to suggest terms.

In then next post, I’ll talk about finding, and participating in, online discussions.

Lesson 3 – The Online Press Kit

Sounds fancy, but all an online press kit consists of is a web page with links to all the information a third-party would need to announce the book. You can find the one for this book here. Once we get other sites and publications interested in doing interviews or running excerpts, we’ll send them here for promotional material.

Lesson 4 – Amazon

When you list a book on Amazon, it’s usually accompanied by a minimal description. You can go back in later and enhance that description by submitting a request here:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/content-form/?ie=UTF8&product=books

You’ll need to know the following details about the publisher, if it isn’t you:

Publisher
Contact person
Contact e-mail
Mailing address
City
State
Country
ZIP/postal code
Phone
ISBN (no hyphens in between the numbers)

Once you get in, you can add the following extra information:

Description (up to 300 words or 2,400 characters)
Publisher’s comments (up to 1,000 words or 8,000 characters)
Author comments (up to 250 words or 2,000 characters)
Author(s) bio(s) (up to 500 words or 4,000 characters)
Table of contents (Up to 1,000 words or 8,000 characters)
Inside-flap copy (up to 1,000 words or 8,000 characters)
Backcover copy (up to 1,000 words or 8,000 characters)
Reviews
Excerpt/first chapter (not to exceed one chapter)

Once you submit the above info, an email goes to the publisher confirming that you are authorized to update the book information. When your publisher responds, the information goes live on the book page.

Lesson 5 – Squidoo

There is a new site/service called Squidoo. It’s build on the same concept as About.com – experts maintaining pages on specific topics. But unlike About.com where they pick the experts, with Squidoo you can claim any topic as your own and become the Squidoo expert for that topic. In Squidoo lingo it is known as “creating a lens” (lens – magnifying a subject – get it?).

I went ahead and built a Squidoo Lens on the subject of VBACs using the VBAC book marketing material. Plus, Squidoo has some nice tools for pulling info on a subject from Google News and the blogsphere.

This is more of an experiment to see what happens, rather than a proven marketing strategy.

In the next installment, I’ll talk about adding keywords to Amazon to help the book come up better in the searches, and how to find out the hot topics to write articles about for Angela’s VBAC blog.

The book not only covers our experiences, but those of several other women seeking what is know in medical parlance as a VBAC (Vaginal Birth After Cesarean).

Among my many duties, I’m charged with developing and executing the promotional plan for this book.

I’ve written extensively about how to promote online, and often offer free advice privately to BookLocker authors. But I thought it would be useful if I walked through all the steps I go through when promoting, using a real world example. So over the next several weeks, I’m going to explain how I’m tackling the project of promoting Angela’s new book.

Lesson 1 – What We’re Selling

The first thing you need to do is understand what you are selling and why it is unique. Otherwise, you have no foundation from which to explain it to other people.

So in the case of our book, the issue is repeat cesarean sections (or c-sections). It is common practice in many hospitals to automatically give a woman a c-section if she’s had one before. While there are sound medical reasons why a woman might need a c-section, cutting a woman open just because that was the way her previous delivery was done is not a legitimate one. In fact, it can be significantly more dangerous for mother and baby – due to the risks of surgery – to have a c-section versus a vaginal birth, assuming the pregnancy has no complications (the situation with most pregnancies).

Angela’s book discusses all this from the perspective of 22 different mothers, almost all of whom met resistance from their respective doctors when raising the question as to the need for a repeat c-section. It is these real life stories that make the book unique.

Now that we have a good handle on what we are selling, it is time to pull together the material we’ll need to sell the book to the public.

Lesson 2 – Marketing Material

Here is the list of stuff I have in my notes to create and/or gather for Angela’s book:

+ Descriptive copy for the book page on BookLocker.com
+ Chapter excerpt (in PDF)
+ Cover graphic
+ Bio of Angela
+ Picture of Angela
+ Angela’s chapter in the book (in text format)
+ 25 copies of the book for reviewers
+ Extra editorial info to add to the Amazon and Barnes and Noble book pages
+ Blog

A side note here on the blog. I’ve already laid out my rational for a blog versus a web site here, in case you are curious as to why I went that route. We were fortunate that we created a blog a year ago to chronicle our own experiences with this issue – making it easy to convert over as a site for the book. (The blog is here: http://vbac.angelahoy.com/). Where we made a mistake is in not keeping the blog going after Mason was born last June. It would be a much more powerful promotional tool had we kept posting as Angela wrote the book.

In the next installment I’ll discuss how to use this material.