Your best tips on how to progress next

Carol,

***Heads Up = Long Post***

You can go to technorati.com/blogs/directory/ and select a category or a sub category that's closely related to your niche (self help) or to your micro niche (self esteem). Technorati will display a list of the top blogs in your chosen category or sub category. Then:

Choose a blog in the list that isn't operated by a corporation or a big business. Then:

Go to Compete.Com to get US traffic estimates of that blog. I assume you're mainly targeting the US buyer market? Anyway:

If it has decent traffic stats, go to the blog. Study the most relevant, most recent and most popular (in this order) posts in that blog. See if your article can serve as an excellent follow-up post to those most relevant, most recent and most popular posts. Otherwise, go back to Technorati's blog directory until you get what you want. Then:

Take note of the contact details of the blog's owner and/or webmaster, i.e. Facebook, email address, contact form URL, Twitter, Skype and so on. Next:

Offer your article as a guest post. Somewhere in your article (usually in the last section), include a paragraph about your relevant expertise and your book. Have one to two links pointing to your site, preferably pages of your site which offer useful content that can nicely supplement the info shared by your article. And, since you're already at this point:

You can also ask if the blog owner'd be interested in getting a review copy of your book, and if he or she likes it, let the blog owner know that you're offering an XX% commission for each of his or her buyer referrals. If the blog owner doesn't know anything about affiliate marketing, suggest a few things that can allow the blog owner to funnel his or her blog traffic to your site via an affiliate link, to generate more buyers for you and more commissions for the blog owner, i.e. The blog owner can publish a review post in his or her blog or in a newsletter for the blog's subscribers, with an affiliate link.

We've been doing this for our clients since 2005, and it has been giving them excellent direct traffic, SERP improvement resulting to good search traffic and lead generation and product/CPC/CPA sales results. Check out the US traffic stats of this site and this other one in Compete.Com. We started to implement guest posting campaigns for that first site in early 2010, and for that second site in late 2010, among other offsite marketing campaigns, and guest posting that's done like how I described above has greatly improved the direct traffic, page SERPs (resulting to search traffic) and CPC sales margins of those two sites.

Carol,

Looked at your sig. Why not plan an outline for an interview, i.e. How self esteem and self confidence helped specific people with disabilities recognize opportunities amidst their adversities? I'm willing to go on that interview. Then:

You can write some content along with that video interview and post it on your site. Sign me up as an affiliate for your book, though give me the function of reducing my commission, i.e. If you're offering 40% commissions for each sale generated by your affiliates, then grant me the function of setting my affiliate commissions to just 20% and giving the remaining 20% as a discount, via a discount code.

This is so I can offer the percentage I deducted as a discount for my network. Next:

Include my affiliate link in that video interview page of yours. And:

I'll use my own network and resources to generate traffic for that video interview page of yours, same things you'd do, I'm sure, so I can get more commissions and you can get more sales. What I also suggest is:

For that video interview to have sub titles in your native language and its written content to also be translated in your native language, so you can include this version of the written content in that page (alongside the English version). Why?

You can contact private, non-profit, non-government groups and even government offices there, particularly those that look after the welfare of people with disabilities. Private institutions have CSR programs, and this can be an excellent entry point, in my experience. Tell them you're offering that video interview and written content as content that they can syndicate on their sites and for their members, RSS readers and mailing list subscribers, for international disability day.

Anyway, these concepts can be cleaned up a bit. Let me know what you think

Carol,

Glad to help. Once that interview page goes live, I'm planning to contact some of my friends who work in companies that provide services for analyzing the accessibility of public and private websites and for implementing relevant changes to improve the accessibility features of those sites. They'd most likely be interested in writing posts about that interview page (with a link to it) in their company sites and blogs, even in their personal blogs.