The Top Ten Ways to Market Your Book - Lessons Learned - 2016 - 2017

The Zbooks.co Successful Authors Podcast

Lessons Learned in 2015 and 2016 plus the Top Ten Ways to Market Your Book

Well my friends, I couldn't get an interviewee on time -this- time, so here I go alone! 

Hope you like it and remember it's available on iTunes HERE.

                                             

Show notes:

Top Ten Ways to Market Your Book

1. Word of mouth - or better said "Influencer Outreach"

I ask you this:

What's easier, tweeting something 10,000 times, or getting an influencer to send one message to his/her 10,000 followers?

Steps

1- Start a spreadsheet.

2- Make columns: Influencer Name, Influencer Website, Influencer Email, His/Her top 5 posts.

You are building your DREAM TEAM here of the top influencers in your niche. The people you would most LOVE to have promote YOU!

3- JOIN HIS / HER MAILING LIST!

4 - DO one of their tutorials.

5- Report the results to him/her.

Basically you must develop a relationship (at least a cyber or online relationship) with this person and help them. If you do one of their tutorials and show some good results, they will LOVE to show you off on their website and then promote your book too!

Advantages

You get promoted to an influencer’s list of 10k+ !

Disadvantages

None - aboslutely none.

2. Publish a free book or cheatsheet on amazon which is linked to your “full” book.

This is the most awesome technique — and my favorite method. As long as your free book is on amazon, it is "sitting" there collecting leads!

Steps

Go here: I will be teaching this in a live 7 Day Challenge - sign up here! !

Sometimes called the “perma free” model, you publish a book or preliminary material for free and it acts as the tip of your book funnel. Funneling readers to your other — paid books.

Advantages:

• You can test your titles and keywords on the actual platform(!) before you pubish the full book.
• You BUILD your list before launch — for FREE!
• As long as your free book is on Amazon you are getting free traffic to your blog or book landing page!

Disadvantages:

• None! What are the disadvantages of publishing a book? If it bombs just unpublish it!

3. Your own website/book landing page/author page - A MUST!

Get the SEO right and you will have a constant stream of views - for FREE.

Get the offer right, and you will have a constant income!

This is actually the preferred method if you are publishing a high value information product. E.g. Pat Flynn sold his book on his blog which helped people pass the LEEDS exam. He made 8,000 in the first month!

And our very own Zbook’er Jean-Yves Ponce does the very same, and sells his book as a pdf on his website.

Steps

See this post and podcast

http://www.zbooks.co/2015/11/the-most-awesome-seo-blueprint-ever_9.html

Advantages:

• You don’t need to promote yourself. Your audience is Google and Bing and all the other search engines.
• You can charge a MUCH HIGHER price than if you put your book on Amazon. Pat Flynn charges $24 for his .pdf!

Disadvantages:

• It is very tricky. SEO is a pseudo-science and has a HUGE learning curve.
• You are totally at the mercy of Goog’s whims. They change their search algorithm constantly. If you think you can game them — you are definitively wrong.

4. Facebook ads - still the KING of paid advertisement

This is my new favorite method, and as you know by now, the subject of my signature course Facebook Ads for Authors Crash Course.

You can see the posts on the blog, and soon the guest post on Kindlepreneur.com .

Long story short:

I use these to build up my list for launch, about 3 months in advance —  and they work like magic!  

Once you get the targeting right, it’s like turning on a faucet!

Steps

Get your FREE training here!

http://bookmaster.co/fafacc-a/

Advantages:

• You build your list FAST!
• Your list stays “warm” and you have high open rates.
• You can reach a lot of people around the world at the flip of a switch.

Disadvantages:

• It costs money, -BUT- this is almost not a disadvantage; because when you are A-B testing your ads, you get subscribers even from the less successful ads = awesome!

5. Email drops

Everyone is going to tell you BookBub here, but BookBub costs over $300 AND - does not accept any book without 75 reviews.

My platform of choice: BuckBooks. As you saw in my last mail, it works!

My recommendation:

Do a Buck Books promo, and when you finally get 75 reviews on your book, THEN apply at BookBub.

Nothing can beat BookBub’s list — they have over a MILLION subscribers!

Steps

7. Blog Tours

This is my next conquest, and I will be trying this for Be Freud and report back to you.

For now, here is an awesome article with the best resources:

http://www.thebookdesigner.com/2014/02/greg-strandberg/

8. Forums "Arbitrage"

This could be any forum, everyone thinks of Facebook, but I have found FB to be the LEAST effective.

The most effective is a forum for your niche, like The World's Largest Poetry Site or the Kboards (go there first!)

Reddit is supposed to be very good too but...

Pinterest is gaining on them all and leaving them in the dust, check out Nick Loper's latest podcast with a very successful blogger who is really acing it with FREE pinterest methods.

9. Tools

KdRoi is very good here, it submits to over 30 sites!

Wesly Atkins the mastermind behind KdSpy and KdRoi is constantly updating the tool and adding sites. As it is, when I use the tool for my funky non-fiction books I get at least 10 or more sales.

That’s not ground-breaking, but it’s not chopped liver either.

10. Hybrid technique

ALL of the above or a combination thereof!

If you want results NOW as in really right now — TODAY:

I recommend doing #2, #4, and #5.

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What Every Author MUST Do

By Eric Z follow him Here
Yesterday I received this message from a frustrated young author:

“Hi Eric. I need your advice on what should i do. I have published my ebook on 1st june. Since then , i am having very hard time in ranking my book. After marketing it everywhere and spending $$$ , only two 5 star reviews so far and it is still ranked at 272000 which is very bad...

...I am giving up this useless kindle writing business. Nothing is working for me. After spending many $$$, i got nothing . I am in negative budget now and i dont think i will be able to cover up my investments. This is my short story -

1. I outsourced writing an ebook. The ebook which my writer wrote is not bad actually. Anyone who read the book really liked it. Its a non-fiction self help book.

2. advertised at more than 70 facebook groups.

3. i saw all these 70+ FB groups is flooded with ebook ads and no one give a shit reading to any ebook.

4. i also submitted my free ebook promotions to 80+ sites, not even a single free download as well.

5. some website asked me $ 300 to ad my book to their website and other website. WTF ! $300?? are they serious?

6. Bart Bagget's suggestions are useless - i tried his suggestions nothing worked.

Anyways thanks for your advices. I wish you all the best in this over-saturated web of kindle publishing.”

— frustrated young author

This happens to us all in the beginning, and it is a perfect example of what happens when we do not VALIDATE our product or book. Since taking the AppSumo business course of Noah Kagan, this has been my biggest takeaway. As I have said in many posts before:

“We must go from a PUSH system to a PULL system. The low hanging fruit in Amazon is gone!”

— Eric Z

So how do we do that?

ONE:

Do NOT write a book until you know people will buy it.

Ok, so ... how do you do that?!

Easy:

1. You make a website or blog for each book,
2. You make the cover FIRST,
3. You write some enticing stuff and previews of your chapters,
4. Then most important of all you CAPTURE EMAILS,
5. and the best way to do that is with the free tools from SumoMe.com

I show you how to do this in less than 5 minutes:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U23yi8nq8uo

Note to self: I must revise that video, I do NOT recommend using the Mailchimp pop-up anymore. Not only does it turn off most visitors, it simply pales in comparsion to the functionality of the SumoMe tools.

I cannot thank SumoMe enough, starting my email list and collecting emails has been the turning point, not only in my authoring career but also in my online business.

Now I have a way to directly interact with my customers, now I can easily monetize my website.

“The Money is in the List” — anonymous internet gods

But more importantly, now I can validate my books!

One of the most downright simple way is to make as many websites or blogs as you can, install the SumoMe tools and then just watch to see which book blog collects the most emails if any... = make THAT book!

This way you know people will buy your book when it’s done!

Another AWE-SUM technique?

When your free blog is up and running and you have only a few mails, maybe 10 or 20, you can already invite your list to become BETA-READERS.  This is one of the most important interactions you can do.

Repeat:

THIS IS ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT INTERACTIONS YOU CAN DO.

Not only do you make your readers feel special, but you are engaging more deeply with them AND you are improving your book, AND for free dammit!

Isn’t that a gift?

Did I mention that SumoMe is also free?

You can see SumoMe’s List Builder and Scroll Box tool at work on this page. (Note: Normally you should offer a specific bonus to each post. I have not for this one. In this case the bonus is — go to sumome.com and install it on your blog/website.)

I am the laziest person I know, and Steve Jobs said that if he was hiring someone, he would hire the lazy guy, because he would find the most effective way to get a job done — that’s me.  Not only do I find the most effective way, but if you are one of my long time readers you know I will find a FREE way too.

This is what we call “Giving Gary”. When we give things away in good will, to build customer trust and rapport. The opposite is “Leaching Larry”. These are the guys who charge you to look at their blog. Can you believe that? Their business usually dies in less than a year too — imho deservedly.

Noah and the team at SumoMe are “Giving Gary’s”, If you want to make money with your books, do what is outlined above. And by the way, I’m not the only one who says that, everyone from Tim Ferriss, Charlie Hoehn and Jim Kukral say so:

How to Make Your Ebook a Run-Away Success: An Interview with Jim Kukral

“Step 1: The very day when you have the idea of the book in your head, sit down, give the book a title, and write down who the book is for.

Step 2: The next step is to create a book cover. You can get that done  on Fiverr.com for only $5.

Step 3: Place the image of your bookcover on your blog, on Facebook, or wherever you tend to hang out. You can say, ‘Hey, I’m writing this book,’ and build anticipation. It’s like the way big movies do it. You can see the trailer long before the film is ready for viewing.

Step 4: Create a short video or blog post about your book idea with an email signup form. Six months down the track when you’ve actually written the eBook, you’ll already have a group of customers waiting for it.” — Jim Kukral

SumoMe’s Listbuilder and Scrollbox, the two MUST HAVEs on your authoring website:

Listbuilder Pop-up

Scrollbox:

And while you’re at it, install heatmaps too, it’s awesome — and free:

Do it now, Fail Forward,

Eric

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