So you're hoping to build conversation and interest among your customers? There are two practical ways to do this online!

- What: Create a review or reader comment form on your own website! Setting up this simple form on your website can allow your customers to post thoughts on your books, services, or products.

- Why: When visitors come to your website and start getting to know the service or product you provide, one of the best pieces of information you can give them is what other happy customers thought.

- How: There are many ways to get this done.
- If you have access to create a page on your website or to paste a pre made HTML code, you can get a third party service provider such as Caspio Bridge (click here to go to Caspio Bridge website) to help you set up a "comment" form on your website. You can have these comments emailed to you automatically once submitted and you will be able to review them before posting to your site (click for more from Caspio Bridge).
- One great way is to pull reviews on your book from Amazon and paste them into a page on your site. Why not pull the 5-star comments and display them proudly from a review page on your site? To do this, you can simply copy the 5-star image and corresponding text by selecting it all with your mouse and pressing (Ctrl-C) then pasting into your site with (Ctrl-V). If you're working with strict HTML coding, you can right click the page you are on, click "View Source," copy the portion of HTML that appears with the 5-star review, then paste it into you HTML document.

- How Much: This could be free or cost hundreds of dollars depending on how many forms or how customized you would like your forms to look. Here is an example of the pricing from Caspio Bridge.They are also available to chat at 877-820-9100

- Help: Besides perusing the site and chatting with the folks at Caspio Bridge, you can get more free help from other service providers of the same sort. Here are a few we found:
(1) Site: http://www.freedback.com/ 1-800-583-6455, Pricing: Click Here
(2) Site: http://www.formsite.com/ Fax: 630-737-1891, Pricing: Click Here

- What: Using marketing-oriented email signatures (AKA Signature Block) which consists of one or more lines containing information on the author of a message and is sometimes accompanied by an image.

- Why: These are located at the bottom of your emails and often have the effect of "signing off" a message.This can be a great way to impress your logo upon readers or create more brand awareness for yourself, as well as remind readers how they can reach you in a memorable way.

- How: Create a small jpg/jpeg or gif image of what you want to show at the bottom of every email and post it to your server and link it to your email signature, or simply paste it into every email you send! Be sure to keep it relatively small. The biggest ones we've been comfortable seeing are no more than 300 pixels wide or 200 pixels tall. Here is a great screenshot example of a block used by one of our authors!

Okay, I admit it; I added the hotlink to bkconnection.com to Mike’s e-signature above, but I encourage all of you to include a link from your book icon in your e-signature to the BK website, where we will then forward it to Amazon, Barnes&Noble, Powells, or other popular e-commerce sites if your customer prefers. The reason to come to our site first is that we will offer digital goodies on your page that can only come from the publisher.

- How Much: Free if you can create your own image and past it into your email. Between $50-$250/hr for expert graphic designers and implementation firms. Depending on your level of need and your ability or the ability of your expert, the project could take anywhere between one to five hours.

- Help: Check out these great links:
(1) Coolsig - Find Great Email Signatures
(2) What does your email signature say about you?
(3) Signature Block: Wickipedia's definition of an email signature
(4) Email Signatures in Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express
(5) Email Signatures in Apple Entourage (click here for a great pdf tutorial from Digital Overload)

That's it for this half of the month. We'll see you again in two weeks. In the meantime, if you have any questions, please email them to David Marshall at dmarshall@bkpub.com