In case you don’t know, Kindle is a tablet device from Amazon, intended for e-reading. Kindle allows you to shop, download, browse, and read e-books, newspapers, magazines, blogs, and other digital content via its in-built Wi-Fi network.
According to Amazon there are over a million e-books available on the Kindle store each costing less than $9.99; 180,000 Kindle exclusive titles that you won’t find anywhere else; and 270,000 titles in the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library from where you can lend books for free for any number of days.
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Also, you don’t need to own an actual Kindle device to read all these. You can download Kindle applications for PC, tablet, and smartphone and the Kindle will work just fine.
Due to these features millions of people use the Kindle. Amazon is not revealing the actual figures but it has been reported that during the Christmas month of 2011, they sold one million Kindle devices per week!
Therefore we can safely assume that targeting Kindle readers imply targeting millions of people.
In this article I will show you how to use Kindle to drive traffic to your blog.
Write an e-book and back link to your blog
Kindle is mainly all about e-books. E-books have some benefits over “real” books in that they are cheaper to buy, occupy no storage space (a Kindle can store more than 1,000 books), can be carried easily anywhere, and can be bought and delivered within two minutes.
Perhaps these are the reasons why Kindle users mainly consume books and hence it is wise to write a book in order to reach them.
Since a Kindle edition is a digital edition, therefore you can hyperlink any words or phrases in it.
What many people do is they write an e-book and link to their blog through the last sections of the book. This strategy to draw blog traffic will work only with people who’ll buy your book and will go on to read it until the end.
But there is another strategy that will work better. Kindle allows you to display the first 10% of your e-book as sample chapters to the viewers. The trick is to insert a back link in the first few pages so that even the people who are browsing through your sample chapters can also click on it and visit your blog.
The screenshot above shows how Jeff Goins of Goinswriter.com is doing it for his e-book You Are a Writer. The back link appears after you scroll only a few pages.
Try KDP Select
Though this method is not directly related to blog promotion but e-book promotion, yet it is important enough to be mentioned here. It has done wonders for other bloggers.
Here’s Kindle Direct Publishing Select or KDP Select in a nutshell:
You grant Amazon the exclusive right to sell your e-book for 90 days, i.e. you can’t sell or give away your e-book for 90 days on any other platform including your blog, and in exchange they’ll allow any five days of your choice when you can make your e-book free.
Sounds stupid?
Well let me explain. I’ve already said there are millions of Kindle users out there and most of them keep an eye on the e-books which Amazon gives away for free. Making your e-book free in the Kindle library means putting your work with zero resistance before millions of potential readers.
If you manage to convert even a small percentage of these potential readers into actual readers, you will get a lot of visibility and the above mentioned back link will draw in many readers to your blog.
Use Send to Kindle button
We all know about embedding Facebook and Twitter buttons in our blog posts so that people may share our articles with their social media friends. A somewhat lesser known button is the Send to Kindle button. You can add this button to your website or blog and readers may click on it and send the respective articles to their Kindle device for later reading.
The Send to Kindle button sends your article along with all the affiliate links in it and a link to your blog post and also a link to your blog.
If the reader likes your article he may return to your blog to see what else you have to offer and may also share your content with his friends.
If you use WordPress here is a plug-in for you. If you use some other platform, you can design your own button by going here.
Enroll for Kindle Blog Subscription
Did you know that you can enroll your blog for the Kindle Blog Subscription program? This program allows bloggers to submit their blogs in Amazon’s blog directory and readers then can pay a monthly subscription fee and subscribe to your blog posts. You will get some commission from that and so it is one more method to earn money from your blog.
The blog posts are auto delivered to Kindle and are updated throughout the day.
How is it different from RSS? Well many RSS readers don’t allow complete blog posts to be delivered into the feed. They usually give a small part of the story and then ask you to click on the link and go on to the website to read the complete article.
But blogs on Kindle will contain the complete text and most images.
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I hope this article will help you in getting more traffic from Kindle. Have you ever tried the strategies mentioned above? What was your experience? Or are you going to try them? Tell me in the comments below.
