Any tips for promoting POD books?

In my experience with promoting POD books, I have used the same methods as with ebooks with some success - i.e. do your niche research (niche, demographics, willing buyers), keyword research, competition research, build a sales page or a small niche site around your book/books, and add backlinks. This works well with non-fiction - fiction is much, much harder to promote.

Obviously, when looking at keywords, people aren't going to search for your specific book title (until you get famous, of course ), so you'll have to do with more generic searches, but the same applies to the way you would market clickbank products, for example. Remember to look for buying keywords. Sometimes it also helps to look for keywords that people are searching for and add "book" or "books", or "guide" after it and check the no. of searches.

You can, of course, also build a list from your sales page or niche site. Another thing about your niche site is, if your books are selling from Amazon (which they should), then you can add links to your books with your affiliate code in it and make a bit of commission on the side.

I've had some success with MySpace, but I haven't tried Facebook yet. I'm sure you can get a lot of success this way, especially with Facebook groups. This just seems like too much constant work to me. The thing is to not add friends in a shotgun fashion but to select them carefully based on the required demographics and their interests.

With some POD programs you can set your own discounts if they buy directly through the POD program, such as CreateSpace or Lulu, and promote these via your list, Facebook, or MySpace.

You can also create a separate blog (just use the free blogger), or use your own niche site, and often post any fresh news about your books on there and link back to your niche site, and update it via twitter as well.

I know that someone here on the forum uses PPC to drive traffic to a landing page promoting the books, but I haven't tried that yet.

I hope this helps.

Thank you very much for your post. This has been extremely helpful for me. I can now see more of a path.

Time to get to work then!

Facebook groups in particular sounds like it could be a profitable vehicle to try.

Are there any good guides around on how they work and how to best use facebook?