What websites do you like to use to self promote?

[Baker Street Books]

I am currently only promoting myself by being listed on myspace at www.myspace.com/bakerstreetbooks

I like to use it to promote my latest finds and connect with specific people on myspace who are book lovers.

My son has been telling me about facebook, another social networking site. He thinks its a little more popular with younger ones right now. Like the teen to twenty something crowd. When time permits I'll probably use that one too.

A little other self promotion I like to use is a banner ad signature at the end of my email that links directly to my inventory on Biblio.com. This way when I send out a "Book Has Been Shipped" email they will get a link to the rest of my inventory. Not sure if its helped yet but you never know.

Did I mention that all these tactics above are absolutely FREE!?!

Currently I do not have a website of my own as I am still a small volume seller and paying for a site would not be cost effective right now. I am listed on the major websites but am only promoting links to Biblio because their pay structure provides the least amount of fees per sale.

Happy Selling,
Kyle

[Bruce Hollingdrake]

I think one of the best ways to market yourself or your blog is exactly what your doing, participating in groups/forums that have to do with books. Places like this forum, other book forums, My space seems good/ I'm just getting started there (and added you as a friend tonight), writing posts seems like a good idea as well. It gives you a certain credibility. Jill from Fiction Addiction is a good representation of that idea. She has contributed posts at The Bookshop Blog as well as Bookthink and I'm sure is building a following.

And try hard to be consistent. If you post somewhere then disappear for a month it may be hard to build anything.

[rainydaypaperback]

I'm also an artist on the side, so get some traffic to my business site from people tracking me down about artwork. 

My oldest gallery is on VCL which has stuff all the back to 2000! It is confined to furry art however.
http://us.vclart.net/vcl/Artists/Fenris-Lorsrai/

Conveniently, it also has some of the paintings I've done of the shop window, including this run showing the process of painting the window.  (note the huge website address in final image.  We no longer have it painted on window like that)
http://us.vclart.net/vcl/Artists/Fenris-Lorsrai/Sketches/glasspainting/index01-by-date.html

For more thorough archives, I point people at the Deviantart site.  it only goes back to 2004, but includes a lot of sketches and normal artwork:
http://fenrislorsrai.deviantart.com/

However, I get the most activity through my recent gallery on FurAffinity which I got this year, which is focused on furry art. VCL doesn't allow comments, but does allow you to link your VCL art to the same art on FA, so I get it doubled up traffic from VCL browsers leaving comments on FA:
http://www.furaffinity.net/user/fenrislorsrai/

And I finally switched how I was selling originals, so they're now up in a storefront on Etsy (which allows me to embed it in my website so it functions like a normal storefront)
http://www.etsy.com/shop.php?user_id=5416792

Which generates some trackbacks to my main hub page on the actual store site as that's where I keep the commission info!
http://www.rainydaypaperback.com/artindex.html

And I just started adding images to Flickr this week here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/21881149@N06/
haven't gotten any bites so far on Flick, but I've only joined two groups thusfar.


(I do have two more galleries, but I almost never use due to ongoing technical issues with the hosts and INTERNET DRAMA! OH NOES! They're too much effort to keep on top of.  If I get anything from 'em, great!  But I've largely let them go fallow cause they drive me nuts.  I also have a Myspace page, which I almost never update because I hate being attacked by random blinking ads)

Some of those may be useful to other arty types.

[Bruce Hollingdrake]

Thanks a lot for sharing all of those links.

I recently started up on Twitter. I can't say I fully understand it but we'll see where it goes.

Bruce

[prying1]

I've only got two websites currently going and am selling on Alibris and AbeBooks.

My poor blog that I've neglected because of the time it's taken me to move the library I bought and set up my sales outlets. "http://prying1.blogspot.com/2007/07/where-is-prying1-he-has-new-life-not-to.html"

I hope to post on my blog - http://prying1.blogspot.com/ - more often and get the numbers back up before too long. It'll be one of my New Years resolutions.

My main booksite is http://www.prying1books.com/ that I hope to grow a bit at a time. Of course I'd love to just list books and have them sell by the time the sun comes up the next day but I don't think it quite works that way.

I've been posting comments more often at different blogs with pithy words of wisdom that I'm sure will attract people to my blog and from there to my booksite. I have seen a few hits transfered.

[XenithBS]

I find I get some business directed to my websitre from MySpace

www.myspace.com/xenithbooksellers

I have my own webspace holder

www.xenithbooksellers.com

which I use to link to my Alibris and Amazon store.

Paul @ Xenith

[Bruce Hollingdrake]

Holy cow Paul!
How does one go about getting 2000 friends?!
I just started up a few weeks ago. Not sure how much time I can put into it.
Working on Facebook/Bookshop Blog/Forum/World Book Market/running my Bookstore-Internet-Cafe/taking care of 9 month old son/Book hunting+listing/boy, I'm getting tired just typing all that. Actually I recently made a decision to take about 2 hours a day from my sleep in order to do a little more. Luckily our boy sleeps close to 12 hours! If you want to see him just do a search for Bruce Hollingdrake on Facebook(and add me as a friend if you have an account).

Just wondering how active you need to be to make it worthwhile and what kind of response do you get/ does it lead to sales.
Perhaps you could write a paragraph or two on your MySpace experience for the Blog?? I'd love to know a little more about your experiences there

[Baker Street Books]

How does one go about getting 2000 friends?!

Do a google search for a "Myspace Mass Adder". There are several free and not so free programs out there that you can use to "bulk add" friends.

It can be used to seek out specific criteria such as book people or authors.

Its a very useful tool but if you use it too much it can be seen as a way of spamming

Kyle

[msager]

One of the things I do to promote my website, northamericanrarities.net, is to search out sites for genre fiction and non-fiction.  I then ask them to link to my store, telling them it could be a source for their members.  For example, I have a Sci Fi aficionado site linking to me.  I have a military history site linking to me, and I have a craft guild linking to me.  Each site checked my site to make sure I had a decent sized inventory, and each corresponded  to me.  It took some work to track down sites, and I was turned down by several as 'too commercial'.  But, hey, the ones that go to my site are buyers of books.

Another thing I do to promote the site is to enclose a newsletter with every order.  I plug my site over the big boys by telling buyers that the search engine on my site picks up new listings almost immediately, the sales on the booksite have priority over other sites, and I give discounts which change monthly (might be reduced or free shipping, a discount on a category, or a special author being featured).

Marilyn
http://northamericanrarities.net 

[paperlady]

I've listed items through a few multi-dealer venues for years and have just recently started my own shopping cart to sell my used books. My inventory is low at this point because I've spent the first month trying to get the cart set up with decent SEO, get the shipping calculator working, and all of that stuff.

What I'm doing to self-promote is to join forums like this, add my shop to directories that pertain to selling on line, exchanging links with book related sites, and submitting my items to Google Base as I add them to my shop.

I do feel that Google Base is important because it will give you a presence with the 'big boy' sites like Amazon, Abe, and other. If you are carrying a title that they have too at least people will see your listing.

I'm getting indexed by Google and a few on Yahoo now. MSN has yet to index anything but I have submitted my url. I've also submitted to dmoz.

My thoughts are that if I get a few of these items in place in the beginning and then steadily add my inventory, I should see good results in traffic along the way.