Do you scratch your head and wonder what you can do to increase the visibility of your book? Do you wonder how you can get your name and site in the search engines on a regular basis? Well, virtual book tours can help in that area.

I recently did a Google search for "virtual book tours" and it came up with over 17,000,000 results. So, it's obvious that millions of people are using this means as a method of creating visibility. And, why not, it is a valid means of promotion - it not only creates visibility, it is also a useful tool to draw traffic back to your site. But, it's important to remember that it's only one strategy in a marketing plan.

Just how do you get involved in a virtual tour? Well, with most virtual book tours, you ask a blogger to host you. There are many bloggers who are looking for content for their blogs and hosting an author is great content. You may even be asked by a blogger to visit their site as a guest. There are also some organized tours in which you make the rounds (usually for a week of other specified amount of time) as a guest on several blogger sites in a circuit tour. These types of tours may be initiated by a publisher, promoter, or the authors themselves. While these circuit tours do produce a wider range of visibility, it is for a specific amount of time.

While these tours are a useful strategy to help bring you and your book into the limelight, they are limited. It can become a little burdensome to continually need to look for opportunities to be a guest on bloggers' sites. Depending on how large your network is, this can become quite challenging. In addition to this, I'm sure your goal is to sell your book for as long as you can - this means ONGOING promotion.

One group that takes it up a notch is VBT - Writers on the Move. Imagine having the ability to be a guest on other authors' sites on a regular basis - having guaranteed exposure every month, without the burden of finding bloggers who are willing to host you. In addition to this you won't have to find host sites that have good reputations and have a decent amount of traffic. This group is one of the only groups I know of that offers this type of exposure.

VBT - Writers on the Move is a group of 30 authors (so far). Included in the group are: author and President of 4RV Publishing, Vivian Zabel; award winning author and editor, Lea Schizas; and award winning author Carolyn Howard-Johnson, recipient of many writing and achievement awards. What's great about this group is that it covers a wide range of fiction and nonfiction writing genres, such as children's books, romance, suspense, and poetry. This allows the books to be visible to a much larger audience than if they were promoted within one genre.

Along with the ongoing virtual tours, VBT - Writers on the Move offers a number of other marketing tools to help promote its members and their work. It has a Link Exchange, Book Reviews (for those members who are interested), a Library strategy, a monthly Mystery Site Giveaway, a Viewpoint/Hot Topics monthly segment, and it has its own blogsite. But it doesn't stop there, the manager and members are constantly moving forward and looking for new tools and strategies to create visibility and increase sales.

One of the goals of VBT - Writers on the Move is to broaden its horizons by increasing membership. Since the name of the game is promotion through visibility, the more members the more visibility. This means more readers get a chance to learn about the members and their books - this encourages sales.

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