1. Know Your Audience

Your message begins and ends with your audience. In marketing-speak, it's called your target market -- that slice of the population who need and want what you have to offer. If you begin with their language, their images, their way of looking at the world, the way St. Paul crafted his messages to the different churches of his time, your audience will hear you as speaking directly and specifically to them.

2. Optimize Your Website for Search Engines

It's possible to make simple tweaks to your website and content so that the search engines can find and more easily index your text. There are a couple of billion searches a day just on Google. It's painless and transparent to put your content where your searchers have a chance of finding you.

3. Use Content Marketing

Content marketing is the practice of providing valuable, useful information to your audience that helps them to know, like and trust you. The content proves your knowledge of the subject, displays your approach to the subject, and builds a relationship of trust and gratitude with readers. This is a technique that is especially valuable for nonfiction authors or fiction authors whose work has a strong nonfiction basis.

4. Cultivate Book Bloggers

Self-published ebook author Amanda Hocking sent review copies of her YA fantasy ebooks to book bloggers specializing in her genre. They loved the books and recommended them on their websites. This is less of an investment for ebook authors than for print authors, but look for popular blogs that review books in your genre and invite the blogger to read and possibly review yours.

Blog readers are more engaged with the writers they follow than most readers are with major media reviewers. What that means for you, the author, is that targeted blog reviews can reach your audience, and their reviews carry the weight of word-of-mouth recommendations.

5. Create a Mailing List

There are free and inexpensive tools to help you to create and maintain a mailing list so that you're not accused of being a spammer. Using these tools, you can notify people who have signed up for your list when you release a new book or when you're going to make personal appearances.

6. Write Guest Posts

Bloggers often invite other writers to submit an article to their site. It's a situation where everybody gains. The guest bloggers get to present their message to a different audience (and get valuable links back to their site to raise their search engine "score"). The audience is introduced to new voices they may be interested in hearing. And the blog owner0. gets a break from creating content.

You don't have to wait for an invitation. You can find a blog that you resonate with, that speaks to your audience, and offer a guest post -- or offer to trade guest posts with the blog owner. If it's a good fit, the blog owner will probably be glad you offered, even if that blog had never hosted a guest post before. The worst anyone can say is "No, thank you." In that case, move on to another on your list.

7. Take a Blog Book Tour

The blog book tour is a series of guest posts over a period of a week or two. Instead of going on the road for a few months, arrange a blog book tour. You can set it up so that you appear on the blogs day after day, for the period you've chosen. Being seen "everywhere" is a great way to launch or relaunch a book and helps penetrate people's filters against what they haven't heard of before.

8. Invest in Social Media

And by "investing," I mean more time than money. Depending on who your audience is, you may find Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+ to be a good way to connect with your audience and hold a two-way conversation. It's an opportunity for people to get to know you and to ask follow-up questions about your work.

9. Create Information Products

An information product can be in any format -- audio, video, ebook, short report, informational flyer. It can support your book by being a smaller investment for your prospective reader, either free or very low-cost. Like content marketing in general, it helps you establish your authority as someone who knows about your topic and also creates a relationship of trust and gratitude with your audience. You can also give readers permission to share it with friends and colleagues, who use links you've provided in the product to come back and get more information from your site.

Proclaiming Your Message with the Tools at Hand

If your message is important enough to write, it's important enough to work to find the audience who needs to hear it. You have a better opportunity now than at any time in history to meet your audience and give them the information and inspiration they need and want.

Not all of these techniques work equally well for every book. For example, fiction and nonfiction have slightly different marketing tracks. Not only that, you may have already put some of these into effect. If there are any here that look like good possibilities for you, I recommend that you select one and implement it thoroughly, rather than overwhelming yourself by taking on too much.

Image: Conductor, and charismatic lone speaker by woodleywonderworks, on Flickr