How can I best advertise my book on pain relief?

I haven't personally used one, but try searching for affiliate job board widget. Monster has one at http://publisher.monster.com/Widgets/ for their affiliate publishers. See these links: http://publisher.monster.com/ http://publisher.monster.com/Widgets/Job-Board-Widget.aspx There are others. Either search for affiliate on major job boards, or do the search I suggested. You can also see these widgets that came up for a search on widgetbox for jobs: http://www.widgetbox.com/search?q=jobs The key thing to know is that you want an affiliate plugin or widget provided by a major job board that has many listings. It would make sense for LinkedIn to have an affiliate offering for their jobs listings; however, I haven't found information on it yet. If I don't find it fast enough I won't be able to edit this answer to include it. You can contact me for more details on these. If you find one you like or need additional information I can ask our Blogger Mastermind group if anyone has used any of these or can recommend others. We have 100+ serious bloggers who are likely to have more suggestions.

Hey, I'm a conversion optimization consultant so I can offer some help here. Whether a conversion rate is "good" or not is a relative measure. If you run a test and get it to 35% from 26%, that's good! If if go from 26% to 10%, then you know you could be doing better. Comparing your conversion rate to industry averages rarely tells you anything meaningful or actionable, so the best thing you can do is continue testing and compare to your old baseline. The confidence level is the likelihood that the detected result actually exists. For example, if you flip a coin 10 times it will likely land on one side more than the other. If you stopped testing after 10 flips, you might assume that one side has a higher probability than the other... But we both know that's wrong. The real result (50/50) would only begin to emerge after 20 flips, and even then you would not have 100% confidence. So you don't want to start flipping (ie, testing) too soon because you might draw the wrong conclusion ("the coin landed on tails 6 out of 10 times, therefore tails beats heads by 20%"). You also want to know when to stop and what is the smallest meaningful difference ("the coin landed on tails 49 out of 100 times, and the 2% difference is not significant, so we can confidently say the probability of landing on tails is the same as landing on heads.") The confidence level tells you when you've reached this point. Before you start any A/B test, you need to know how many "flips" (sample number, ie, visitors) are need to reach a result that is likely to be true, and what is the minimum significant change (is a 2% increase significant, or is that just random fluctuation?). Here is a handy calculator to calculate this before you start your test: http://www.evanmiller.org/ab-testing/sample-size.html If you (or anyone reading) would like some help in setting up and running A/B tests to increase conversions, get in touch!

Source: I founded www.buyads.com and www.isocket.com, which powers the direct ad sales for the web's best sites (like TechCrunch, AOL, Microsoft, etc) We hand invited the publishers that join our market because, as your question suggests, there is some threshold between who should and should not try direct sales. There are no hard rules, just guidelines. The superseding one is this: Do you have inventory (audience) an advertiser would take the time to specifically work with you for? If you open a "store" and starting selling this stuff, do people want to buy it? One measure is traffic, but that's not enough. In general we like to look for sites with 100,000 page views a month or more. But it can depend on the content and vertical. For example, we power a website that gets 25k hits a month but is the only site covering the voice over talent industry in Hollywood - so its super nichey and there is a market for those advertisers. Other examples of small but successful premium properties include some hyperlocal ones (www.queensmamas.com, www.brooklynheightsblog.com, www.brokelyn.com, etc), the largest blog for truckers, largest blog for prison wardens, etc. The conflicting examples are sites with large traffic but bad audiences/verticals. We reject a lot of "tech blog" also-rans that just copy and paste content from TechCrunch but get a lot of SEO traffic from it. Or even if it's a legit site, it can be in a bad brand-advertiser vertical like home finance / mortgages (which is mostly lead gen advertisers)

(Background: I founded the largest marketplace for direct ad sales. Powers sites like Microsoft, Aol, Gawker, etc) If you want to sell ads directly to advertisers... that's awesome, but recognize it takes more work than just dropping AdSense on your site. I'm glad you're thinking of it like "how can I attract advertisers (customers) to do business with me?" I personally don't think gimmicks work well in the long run. It's all about the fundamentals. You are essentially a business (the website) that sells a product (the ad space / ability to reach your audience) to customers (the advertisers). All the normal fundamentals apply - you have to attract potential customers, sell them on your product, close the business, get repeat business, etc. So while a gimmick may work to get someones attention, if their experience of doing business with you is terrible they won't buy or won't come back. We believe the best way to attract, close and keep advertisers is to make your "products" as easy to find and purchase as possible. In the direct ad space, it is way too complicated - often requiring lots of emails and manual effort. Plus they have to find you to begin with. Some actionable stuff for you to do: * Do some customer validation. If you want to sell a product (the ad space), how do you know there is a market? Have you talked to potential advertisers about this? Do you have any pre-committed deals? Do your similar competitors do direct sales successfully? * Have a .com/advertise page and promote it well. You have to let people know you're open for business. Make it easy for people to find it. * Have a system that makes it easy to place/execute/manage actual ad orders. This is what we do at www.isocket.com. There are other tools for various needs, website sizes, costs, etc.

I hate to be "that guy," but I'm gonna say, "it depends." What I mean by this is it is highly subjective to the market you are in and the target you're going after. However, with that being said, let me share a few of my favorite growth-hacky-type ideas that you might want to consider using to grow your customer base: #1 - Produce a TON of content. Make it valuable, and don't cut corners. Then, promote it to your existing tribes. If you don't already have a tribe, see the bullet #2. #2 - Build a tribe. Get started at a place like triberr.com where you can connect your social profiles and your blog and share with likeminded folks. It takes time to get going, but you'll thank me for it later. #3 - Test every aspect of your landing pages. Use something like Unbounce (my favorite) to strip down every element of your pages and split test constantly. Get used to the fact that your landing pages are NEVER complete. They can always be improved. #4 - Build an email list from your blog traffic by using "content upgrades" or "lead magnets." Search Google for the specifics, but basically, you create free content that is related to each post on your blog that the reader can download in return for subscribing to your newsletter. It works like a charm! Let me know if you want me to go into further detail on any of this stuff.