This week I added two lessons and a new tool the the Ultimate Author Platform and I’m really excited to tell you about them.

Tracking sales using Amazon affiliate links

Amazon affiliate links are a great way to track clicks and conversions for your book links. What makes them really useful is that you can generate multiple tags for the same product. When using multiple channels to promote your book on Amazon, you’ll want to generate new tracking tags for each of those channels; one for facebook, one for email, one for twitter, and as always, one for your website.

The new lesson in the Ultimate Author Platform is a quick screencast that shows how to create unique Amazon affiliate links for each of your marketing efforts. You can see the lesson here.

DVD Extras

One terrific list-building tool is to provide additional resources to your readers that serves to promote your work and your books. If you’re a nonfiction author, what interesting content do you have that got cut from the book? What ideas could you take from the book and simplify to make available to others? If you’re a fiction author, are there short stories that you can write that are available to your readers? You could write a series of short stories, providing a story a week, then at the end, package it all into a members-only resource, and put it on your site for subscribers. What content you want to use a question you have to answer. The question I answer is, “How?”.

Membergate

I’m happy to say that I’ve created a simple tool to help you create a “Subscriber-only” area. Using your mailchimp account, and this WordPress plugin, you can quickly and easily create a member-only area to your website by creating two pages; one forward facing page, where you provide the benefits of signing up, and another page that is protected from website visitors that are not subscribers.

Keep in mind, that you can use this in combination with an autoresponder series to welcome members to the list, and provide them with a series of updates.

You can download Membergate from the downloads page, and this lesson will walk you through how to use it.