How You Can Use Whizbuzz Books For Your Book Promotion

Whizbuzz Books has been helping authors promote books since 2010

Regular readers of Just Publishing Advice will know that I also own Whizuzz Books. The two sites have operating side by side for many years now.

The two websites are separate because each one serves a unique purpose. One is for free publishing, writing, blogging, SEO and marketing advice. The other is for online book promotion.

For authors who might be considering online book promotion, this article will give an outline view about how to use Whizbuzz Books to extend your book marketing reach.

What Does Whizbuzz Books Do?

Books and ebooks are now very much purchased online. Because of this fact, Whizbuzz specialises in on-site, social media and SEO based book promotion.

Social media promotion is essential in today’s market. The Whizbuzz follower count is always growing, and currently has more than 630,000 real users on its various social network accounts.

On-site, it uses cross-promotion via More Great Reads, Popular Books and genre groupings to increase exposure for listed books, as well as providing an enjoyable user experience. Importantly, the site is highly optimised for smartphones and tablets.

SEO is unseen by site visitors, but it is a vital element in attracting Google search and organic traffic. For this reason, SEO attributes are written to gain the best possible search engine indexing and then added individually to every book page.

Social media promotion is often assumed to be the primary form of book promotion nowadays. Yes, it is a priority, but posts have quite short-term visibility. During the one year of online promotion, Whizbuzz posts every book on a regular and recurring basis to maximise exposure.

On the other hand, a web page is for the long-term. All book pages on Whizbuzz remain on the site indefinitely and continue to attract traffic, even years after posting.

Whizbuzz Books offers set and forget book marketing. So yes, if you want it to do all the work for you, it will.

But there are a few on-site tools that authors can use to take their book promotion a step further and make the most of their year of promotion.

Let’s look at some of the Whizbuzz features in more detail and how they can be used to improve your book exposure.

Tracking the Buzz

Whizbuzz is active on more networks than any other book promotion service. At present, it is active on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Tumblr and Pinterest and is constantly looking for new opportunities and networks to help authors.

But social media is so fast-paced that posts and shares are not easy to find. The search tools on Twitter and Facebook, in particular, are very basic, limited and difficult to use effectively.

This was an issue that became frustrating for some Whizbuzz authors. They knew their book had been posted, somewhere, but couldn’t find the post when they wanted to share, retweet or view activity.

We solved this problem with a little bit of smart technology. On the site, a dedicated page and a sub-page for retweets collect most social media posts by Whizbuzz, and they can be viewed in almost real time.

The BUZZ page uses a ‘load more’ function to scroll back in time, so it can be used to view days or weeks of consolidated posts on each social network. There is also a more Buzz page to view secondary Twitter account activity and retweets.

How To Use It!

The Buzz and More Buzz pages make it easy for authors to find their book posts on social media and to interact by replying, sharing, retweeting, commenting or liking.

Another excellent use for these pages is to connect with more people and potential book buyers. Each entry has user activity icons, so you can trace new users to follow or interact with.

This is often an overlooked part of book promotion. By liking, commenting, retweeting or even sharing other books, people will see this in their notifications and possibly connect with you. It is a quick and easy way to build your author platform and social media reach.

In fact, this applies to all promotion on social media. Interacting with shares, likes, retweets and comments will help grow your social media network. Whizbuzz gives authors a vast resource of over 600,000 users to do exactly that. Connect and build an author platform.

How to make your book popular

The ‘Popular Book’ widget on the site is a powerful tool because it appears on almost every page on the site.

For a book to be showcased in this section, it needs to be within its one year of promotion and to gain enough page views over a rolling 30 day period to rank high enough to be in the top twenty viewed books.

How To Use It!

Because book popularity is calculated on page views, you should encourage people to visit your book page. You can do this by sharing your page regularly on your own social media accounts. There are sharing buttons on your book page to make this very easy.

Adding a link to your blog sidebar or at the end of your posts is also an easy way to get more page views.

You can add a link to your Facebook page, Goodreads and other social media profiles as well.

Another way is to include a link in your email signature. How many emails do you send out every day?

You don’t need to spend a lot of time to increase your book’s visibility. All you need to do is give people easy ways to view your book on Whizbuzz.

Keep your Whizbuzz page up to date

A lot can change in a year. You might decide to change your book cover or write a revised book description.

How To Use It!

Whizbuzz allows authors to update the information on their book page.

There is no extra charge. It’s a free service. So if you change any of your book details, use the site contact form to ask for a revision, or an update to your cover, book blurb, genre listing, social media links or your book buy link.

Stay connected to your book promotion

Whizbuzz Books is very active on social media. Because of this, there is a lot of external user activity such as social shares, likes, retweets, comments and shares. That is a LOT of activity. How can you keep up with it all?

How To Use It!

There is no way you can follow every interaction on social media.

But you can keep your finger on the pulse for your book promotion by taking a few simple steps.

Follow all of the Whizbuzz social media accounts on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Tumblr and Pinterest. Yes, there are a lot of them.

Next, turn on your notifications.

Check your settings to make sure you are not muting or blocking users.

Don’t be a slave to all your notifications, but you can quickly scan through them once a day. If you notice a comment or share about your book, you can say thank you or like a comment. It’s yet another way to expand your reach by connecting with people.

Wrapping it up

One of the early objectives of Whizbuzz was to give new authors access to an extensive online community of writers, readers, book bloggers, book reviewers and publishers. It is very common for authors to publish a book well before they have built a sizable online author platform.

The concept of offering one year of book promotion was initially developed to help solve this problem.

It not only gives an author instant exposure but it also allows the time to build their own author platform and online reach.

The tips highlighted in this article are all given with the goal of achieving this.

Whizbuzz Books can do a lot to help authors promote their books in ‘set and forget’ mode.

But with a little time and effort, authors can also do a lot to help themselves and their books with the tools the site offers.

Good luck with your next book!