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Book Review & Contest Insights from Real Reviews and Submissions

What separates great books from the rest? Below are articles with insights from real reviews and contest submissions—what works, what doesn’t, and how to improve your book. You’ll also find a wide range of articles covering writing, publishing, marketing, and more. Each article has a Comments section so you can read advice from other authors and leave your own.

Why Some Books Win Awards (And Most Don’t) — Insights From Real Contest Submissions New!

What separates award-winning books from the rest? After evaluating contest submissions across a wide range of genres, certain patterns become clear. Some books consistently rise to the top. Others, even with strong ideas and clear effort behind them, fall short. The difference is rarely dramatic—it...

What We’ve Learned From Reviewing Hundreds of Thousands of Books (And Why Most Don’t Stand Out) New!

After reviewing and evaluating books across thousands of submissions over the past two decades, certain patterns become impossible to ignore. Some books immediately stand out to reviewers. Others—even well-intentioned ones—fade into the middle or fall short. The difference is rarely luck. It comes down to...

Five Paid Websites That Can Promote Your Blog

The main thing a blogger wants is to generate traffic to his or her blog. There are two different methods to get traffic to your blog. One is through a free traffic source and the other is through paid advertising. Getting free traffic takes a lot of work to get SEO promotion, but paid advertising gets you just the right traffic quickly. Paid advertising will require you to invest money to get traffic from these sources. What you want is to find advertising options which are cheap and effective.

Facebook – can be a good channel for receiving paid traffic. On Facebook, visitors can click on your Facebook advertisement and then land on your Facebook page. You also have the option to send visitors straight to your blog post. This will get paid traffic moving to your blog. To gain traffic, you can advertise your blog's Facebook page. You can choose to put a Facebook Widget on your blog that will show you how many people have liked your Facebook page. When you post something on your Facebook page it will reach your followers, and in turn they will go to your blog to read your latest posts.

Twitter – has also started advertising and through this you can promote your tweets and your Twitter profile. Through it you can draw visitors to your blog and get a chance to increase your Twitter followers, who in turn will go to your blog - similar to what is happening on Facebook.

StumbleUpon – offers you PaidDiscovery to promote your website. On this platform you can promote various blog posts and your blog post will be shown to people who are interested in your blog niche. With StumbleUpon, if your blog post is getting good feedback then you will get a lot of free traffic so it's a winning situation any way you look at it. You can advertise by targeting location, age, interest or other things.

Pay Per View – one of the cheapest online advertising forms. PPV traffic comes from people who've installed Adware software or plug-ins. You can get a visitor at a low cost, but it's a disturbance-based advertisement. To be able to advertise on PPV you target related websites, blogs or keyword. Whenever a visitor opens the targeted website, a pop-up will open up with your website or blog.

Paid Blog Post – this can be a good option for you to be able to reach a large audience. To write a sponsored blog post, search for some of the top blogs related to your blog niche and find if they accept a sponsored or Paid Blog Post. If a blog begins getting thousands of visitors per day and you pay them to publish your blog post, then you have the opportunity to gain lots of visitors and it can increase your branding. If that blog post ranked well on search engine results, then you can get visitors for a long time.