As CEO, founder and tour coordinator for Pump Up Your Book Promotion, I get many questions that run the gamut from “What is a virtual book tour?” to “How many books will I sell during my tour?”

To explain virtual book tours, it’s simply an online tour where you will be stopping off at various blogs giving interviews, receiving reviews for your book, or guest posting during a set time.

Sounds easy, but it’s a lot of work that the author may not realize until he or she does one.

The beauty of virtual book tours is that your book will be appearing all over the Internet without ever leaving your home. Everyone by now has heard of them and quite a few of you have been on one.

But, for those who have not, I’m going to explain what virtual book tours can do for you and how you can make full use of one if you are going it alone.

I have been running Pump Up Your Book Promotion Virtual Book Tours for a scant three months and already we are booked solid with great names such as Jane Green, Caridad Pineiro and Sandi Kahn Shelton. But, right along with these bestselling authors are unknown authors trying to pave a way into the vast book buyer’s territory; namely, those readers out there who have never heard of them because they aren’t well-known authors and perhaps would have never known about them if it weren’t for online book tours.

And that’s the beauty of online tours. Anyone can do them.

Whether you set one up yourself or you hire someone to run your tour for you, you start out by targeting book blogs and bloggers who write the same genre. The reasoning for the latter is that if that particular blogger has friends who visit because of the genre, your book will be more appealing to them.

However, that’s not a die hard rule.

The key is exposure to all audiences. While John Smith might like to read a good horror book, he might enjoy a good art book. Even though the two genres are completely different, don’t pass up a chance to appear on a blog that doesn’t match your genre if the host invites you because you just never know who might stop by.

Which brings me to the point of this article. A virtual book tour is perpetual. Even though your tour may last a month and you may or may not sell books (although not selling any is highly unlikely), as long as the host keeps your interview in their archives, your stop will be linked up in the search engines forever.

The key to making your tour successful is to get on as many blogs as you possibly can. The more blogs you appear, the more links go into the search engines and this ups your rankings for your particular key search words.

So, not only is your tour perpetual, your rankings in the search engines go through the roof and that’s the sole purpose of a virtual book tour. While it’s fun to watch your tour in progress, what’s really going to matter is afterwards when your tour is long over.

The beauty of virtual book tours is that, if the bloggers have thought to use tags in your interviews, your tour stops should come up on the very first page of the search engines using your key search words. It’s a known fact that if your book does not come up on the first three pages of the search engines using any given search words that describe your book, you’ve just lost a customer.

Millions of people use the Internet each day. By incorporating SEO (search engine optimization), which our company is known for, your tour stands to outshine the rest.

Virtual book tours can be fun, but they can also be a crash course in finding out how blogs and the search engines work and how you can make it work for you to make your tour something to be proud of.

Dorothy Thompson is CEO/Founder of Pump Up Your Book Promotion, a full service public relations firm specializing in online book tours. You can visit her website at http://www.pumpupyourbookpromotion.com.