Free Ideas

Links, links, links

The key to advertising your book for free is placing your link everywhere.  Once you have the web address of your book, put it in your profile.  For every profile you have, chat rooms, message boards, blogs - just about everywhere you have a login - you probably have a place to put a link.  Add your book's webpage there.  Include the web address as part of your signature in your email and on message boards.

Wherever you go online that offers an appropriate place to add a link to your book, do so.  If you aren't a member of a message board, join one and get active.  You can post as a new member and the links will help, but people will be much more likely to click on your link if they know something about you.  Some of the bigger and more active message boards on the net are:

http://www.faithforum.org/

http://bibleforums.org/forum/

http://www.christianforums.com/

http://www.mannacabana.com/cabanaboards/ubbthreads.php

If you want to join together with other Christian writers there are lots of sites for that as well.  You'll probably even learn a thing or two from other authors.  Here are some of the top ranked ones:

http://www.christianwriters.com/

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/writershelpers/

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/TheWritersView/

The great thing about links is that not only does it give your book exposure, each time another site links back to this one, it increases our search engine rating meaning that people are more likely to find your book through a search engine as well.

If you are looking for other places to try, some of the ads on the left will likely be able to offer good resources as well.  Check them out!

Traffic Exchanges

Traffic exchanges are great to an extent.  A lot of them require you to have a website to put banner ads on though.  On the plus side, if you wish to go this route and add a banner pointing to your book, most traffic exchanges offer a number of free credits to join.  There are a lot of Christian exchanges as well as secular ones.

Other types of traffic exchanges will give you credit for viewing other people's web pages.  Basically, you view someone's web page for "x" seconds and then someone will view your page.  A lot of these sites are manual, meaning you have to click a button after time has expired but some are "auto" meaning the next page will display automatically after "x" seconds.  Avoid auto exchanges as they are basically a waste of bandwidth.  When an auto exchange is running, a person can be away from the computer or even let it run overnight to accumulate credits.  Your page will be displayed but no one will be in front of the computer to actually see it in most cases.

If you want to check out a Christian traffic exchange there are many but a highly ranked one is http://www.christiantrafficexchange.com/  They have a wide number of options.