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The goal of this site is to help poets market their poetry beyond contests and literary magazines. You work hard creating your poetry and I believe you should be rewarded for it. Thus all of the poets who win an award in my poetry contests will receive free marketing tips for marketing their poetry.
The internet provides a wonderful opportunity for poets to market their poetry to a worldwide audience. This is incredibly important because poetry is a niche market. It's nearly impossible to profit in niche markets ordinarily because by definition these markets are very small. The cost of opening a bricks-and-mortar store and advertising would be greater than any profits you could expect to make since any one city would only have a small percentage of people interested in this niche.
But the internet lowers these barriers to entry. Anyone can launch their own web presence with very little investment. But more importantly, since the web is a worldwide venue, you gain access to everyone in the world who's interested in your niche. Thus your overall customer pool is much larger than it would be if you set up shop in an average city.
Thus the first step any serious poet needs to take in marketing their poetry is to create a website. I do not recommend using the free web hosting providers. You'll want to have a website with your own domain name. You have two options for designing a website: buy web design software and create it yourself or subscribe to a hosting plan that includes an online site-design wizard.
To design your own website I suggest using a program called NetObjects Fusion. This is the program I use and is by far the simplest web design software I've ever used (and I've used several other programs!). Once you design your site you'll need to purchase a domain name and find a hosting provider to host your website. I suggest DomainsWithUs for domain registration and HostingWithUs for website hosting.
If you want an even simpler way to build a website then sign up with a company that provides an online wizard for designing your site. I would recommend using SiteBuildIt.
After building your website, you'll need some products featuring your poetry which you can sell on this site. I suggest CafePress as the best option for this. I use them myself and highly recommend their services.
Now that you have products and a website, you'll need to begin marketing your site. You can either do it yourself or use a service. For those who chose SiteBuildIt as their web hosting company, you will be glad to hear that they offer a comprehensive marketing plan for your site at no additional cost. Just follow their advice and you'll be on your way to profits.
For those interested in learning more about the ins-and-outs of internet marketing, I would suggest purchasing one of the following two books:
Make Your Site Sell
Insider's Secrets to Marketing on the Internet
Now that you have a website the next step is to generate traffic. The easiest and most cost effective way to generate traffic is to get free traffic from the search engines. This is much easier said than done. Search engines have very specific rules for getting good placement. These rules are constantly changing but the general rule of thumb is that your website needs to have quality content optimized for the search engines. If it does then most likely lots of other sites will link to you which is the second requirement: your site should have lots of external sites linking to you.
Luckily there are programs to help you do this. I would recommend Web Position Gold. In order to stay up on all the changes in the search engine rules I would also suggest subscribing to Planet Ocean's Search Engine News.
To get lots of RELEVANT sites linking to you, I would suggest a tool called Link Assistant. Of course you could search the web and manually email each of the thousands of sites you find or you can let Link Assistant do the hard work for you.
Now that your site is optimized for search engines and has lots of incoming links you need to know how people are using your site. This requires measuring your site statistics. One of the best programs I've found for watching visitors surfing your website in real-time is VisitorVille.
Now that you've gotten all the free traffic from search engines, it's time to think about buying traffic through advertising. By far, the best method of purchasing traffic is through a pay-per-click like Google's Adwords.
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