Including hyperlinks in your marketing materials is a great way to send people to your Amazon page, or your website, or your Facebook page, or anywhere you want them to go. But the actual links can be long and quite unsightly, so I suggest using the text function to make them look clean, pretty and professional.
Hyperlinks look better with text!
Let’s use the e-mail signature as an example. Including a clever blurb about your books and a hyperlink or two in your e-mail signature is a fantastic marketing strategy that I’ve been recommending for as long as I’ve been writing this blog. However, I often receive e-mails from authors that include crazy long links. To protect the guilty, I’m making up the following author name and blurb and using hyperlinks to my own content.
EXAMPLE OF AN ATTRACTIVE E-MAIL SIGNATURE:
Name, author of ABC and XYZ, thrillers that make you scared to sleep
Check out my books on Amazon
Like me on Facebook
EXAMPLE OF A MESSY E-MAIL SIGNATURE:
Name, author of ABC and XYZ, thrillers that make you scared to sleep
Check out my books on Amazon!
http://www.amazon.com/Cassidy-Lane-Maria-Murnane-ebook/dp/B00FAH87I…
http://www.amazon.com/Perfect-Paper-Adventures-Waverly-Bryson-ebook…
Here’s my Facebook author page!
https://www.facebook.com/mariamurnane
To make a clean hyperlink in a Word document, type in the text you want to use, then highlight the text and right click. Choose the “hyperlink” option in the drop-down menu. Under the “address” function, paste in the actual hyperlink.
The hyperlink option varies by e-mail program, but it shouldn’t be too hard to figure out in the “signature” option.
Much of book marketing is making a positive first impression. Clean and pretty looks professional. Messy and unwieldy? Not so much. Which of the above e-mail signatures would impress you? Play around with your own until you come up with something good. I know you can do it!
-Maria
This blog post originally appeared on CreateSpace.com. Reprinted with permission. © 2015 CreateSpace, a DBA of On-Demand Publishing, LLC. All rights reserved.
