PSP 3:5 20 Marketing Tactics & Hacks

PSP 3:5 20 Marketing Tactics & Hacks Alright, we re back, and we re going to jump into the 20 marketing tactics and hacks to help you sell your self-published work. This is sort of a grab bag. There are a lot of great ideas here. It s sort of random. Some of them we ve talked about a little bit before. Some of them we haven t talked about enough though. I think there s going to be a lot of new topics in this collection of tactics and hacks that maybe you haven t heard about or thought about previously. The first tactic is in-book advertising. When you advertise a free bonus in your ebook, you create the opportunity to drive readers on your website and on to your email list. So advertising a free bonus is really a phenomenal tactic or strategy. Obviously, you can also advertise your catalog of prior books, and really make sure that in your front matter (the front of the book) and in the back matter (the back of the book) you ve got very specific calls to action for your work. The second strategy I call in-book tuning. Let s say you ve got a catalog of seven or eight or ten books that are out there, they re all doing their thing, being downloaded on Amazon. Now, when you come out with a new book, you ve got an opportunity if you ve got the time and energy to do it to simply go back and update the advertising in each of those books and you can do that very simply. Just create a Word document, where it s got new content for the advertisement, and advertise your new book. Now imagine if you ve got six or seven books out there, and all of them are tuned to focus on this new book that you re coming out with. It s a very powerful way to point all of your existing books towards your new book that s coming out. Of course, you could do this to a course. You could do it to a website, or a new product that you re coming out with. It doesn t have to be another Kindle book. It could be anything. You can tune them collectively to all point to the same thing. The third idea is that you can align your bonus content with the topic at hand very carefully and creatively. This is really critical. If you have a free bonus that you advertise in the front of your book, and it s about a completely different topic, the chances are the person s not going to be that interested. But you can look to see what they re interested in. Make sure that you understand what their felt needs are, and then create a bonus that really, really appeals to them. It s a fantastic opportunity to engage with them in a way that gets them focused on more content, more information, and really aligns well with their felt needs. 1

The fourth idea is that you can do the ten-one-zero bonus tactic. Look at it like this: when you put a book out on KDP or on CreateSpace as a paperback, the first chuck of it is going to be presented for people to browse or look at. So when you re on Amazon and you want to look at a book you can do this in terms of collecting ideas for writing, or just seeing the style of a book you look inside the book. You can see an excerpt of it. Generally that s about ten percent. It s usually the first ten percent, and if you include your bonus in that ten percent at the front of the book, you re very, very wise to do it, because people then can look without buying. If your bonus is really appealing, and you give a clear call to action, they can go get your bonus without ever buying the book. Some book marketers are using this very creatively, in terms of having a very compelling bonus that they know people are going to jump into without ever buying the book. So, then have one goal: to deliver the bonus in exchange for an email address. Talk about the bonus. Explain what it is. Obviously make it so it s very compelling to your prospective buyer, and then obviously send them to a website a landing page is ideal that captures their email address. This is a classic ethical bribe. It s a lead generation strategy that works very effectively. That s the goal: email address and name capture. The best bonus is a free bonus. Obviously, if you can give massive value for free as the bonus, people are going to be fantastically grateful. One book marketer that I know, he actually makes an audio version of the book and he does this all self-published, so there s no royalty sharing or anything like that. But his audio version of the book is what he gives away as the free bonus. So, if somebody is looking at the first ten percent of the book, and they see the bonus is the complete audio book of the book, then they click on that link. They go and get it. They ve got what they wanted, which is the book, for free. It s really just in exchange for an email address. If that makes sense for you, it s certainly a strategy you can try, right? The fifth idea is to create book bundles. People love a bargain. People love the idea of buy one, get one free, or buy two, get one free, and that kind of strategy. You can do that very simply, self-published on either the Kindle platform or through CreateSpace, by simply creating a bundle of books, and then offering them at a lower price. Basically, the way you do that is in Word. You cut and paste and create a master document that has both complete manuscripts in it. That s what you upload, and that s what you sell. The cover art needs to change, but beyond that, not much needs to change inside. 2

So the sixth idea is that you can do the books, not bucks hack. If you re a speaker, maybe you re familiar with this already, but if you re asked to speak regularly, one of the things that you can do is say, Hey, I ll waive my speaker s fee in exchange for you, event coordinator, buying whatever volume of books makes sense. Maybe it s 100 copies; maybe it s 7000 copies. I don t know. It depends on what you would normally get for a speaker commission. But you ask them to buy the books instead of giving you the speaker s fee. Now, some book marketers and internet marketers in particular have used this to phenomenal success, specifically Chris Brogan uses this strategy. He s become a New York Times Bestselling Author because of it. Jay Baer recently did this strategy for his new book Youtility and became a New York Times Bestselling Author because of it. If you can stack your sales of these books onto one given week so in other words, you take all of your speaking events, and say, Hey, I want you to agree to buy this number of books, but you don t want to buy them until March 2 nd, for example. If you say that to enough speaking event coordinators and you coordinate their buying, you can have so many sales happen in one week that you will hit the New York Times Bestsellers list. Internet marketers are doing this all the time now. It s a great hack, the books, not bucks hack. The seventh strategy is you can add extra Amazon listing content. This is sort of a no-brainer, but there s a lot of fantastic stuff you can include in the Amazon listing through Author Central that helps presell or sell your book. Including a Q&A with the author, for example so you write it up, and you simply add it to the book listing through the Author Central site. One of the most important understandings, as it relates to digital goods and online buying, is that time on the site is completely correlated to intent to buy and the decision to buy. So, in other words, the longer you can get someone to engage with your content, the likelihood of them buying skyrockets. One of the ways you can do that is have a lot of robust content like a Q&A with the author on your Amazon listing for your books. So the eighth strategy is to remember Kindle-less people, the sad, sad people who don t have a Kindle. I didn t have a Kindle for almost forever. Finally I got one, because I needed to start seeing what my books were looking like. There are tons of people who don t have a Kindle. You want to market to them the idea that they can read your Kindle book on any device: smartphone, tablet, or computer. The way you do that is you use the links to Amazon s reader tool. They have apps or software that you can put on any machine now. It doesn t matter the device style (smartphone, tablet, or computer) or operating system. 3

So as you re marketing your book, you always want to remember to give a shout-out, or instructions, or details about how people can use the Kindle reader tools to actually use your content. Don t forget the Kindle-less people. The ninth strategy is, you can add an author video. I haven t done this, and when I saw how Guy Kawasaki did it, I thought, Hey, I could do that! He basically created a video that was a fastdrawn video, you know, those kinds with the marker on the whiteboard, and he s reading the script. So it s his voice with a doodler drawing out a fast-drawn kind of drawing over the top of it. That s cool. That s engaging. It s a way to have your message shared. It s another way to engage people on your seller s page on Amazon. So the tenth strategy is what I call the anti-selling hack. Here s the basic idea: rather than email people when you want to sell ebooks, which would be the normal thing to do, email them when you re about to make your book free, and tell them it s going to be free. What happens when you do that? First of all, you build huge goodwill with your list. They re grateful. What also happens, though, is that their downloads skyrocket your book up the charts. So, they get the books for free, but the downloads that are generated, and the exposure that s generated because the book has been downloaded so many times, and it has become high, high, high in the rankings, actually makes up for them not paying you completely. The anti-selling hack: let your people know when your book is going to be free. Now, you could say, I hate this idea. I m going to do the exact opposite. I m going to make my book free and not tell my people about it, and that way people in Amazon will discover me, and I ll be getting new prospective buyers from Amazon. That s valid, but I like this strategy better, because it s kind of cooler and nicer to your list. The eleventh strategy is the multi-format credibility hack. Here s the idea. R agents are the ones who have said this; I ve heard this from authors who have said, My PR agent told me that if I publish my book in multiple formats, including in particular the audiobook format, it will become in the marketplace more legitimate, and will be considered more legitimate by prospective customers. Now, that might be somebody s opinion, but I think there s some validity there. I think having a paperback version and an audio version says something to prospective buyers about the quality of your book. So, we ve already talked about CreateSpace for paperbacks, and we ve already talked about ACX for audio books. You want to learn those platforms to help create credibility for your selfpublished work. 4

Alright, number twelve is what I call the Amazon SEO hack. Now, obviously, SEO is not only dead, but I think it s ridiculous in terms of broad internet marketing and internet search. However, Amazon is a search engine. So what you want to do is make sure that your title, your book description, the categories you list your book in, and the keywords you use in listing your book all support the search process. So when someone is looking for the topic of, you know, Atkins diet, they re seeing your results because you ve dialed in your description, your title, your categories, keywords, and all of that stuff works to support the search process. This is really speaking to the fact that you want to be super-specific and direct. You don t want to have abstract titles that don t speak specifically to the topic that you re trying to present. You want to have very clear titles and words that make sense for the search process. I call that the Amazon SEO hack. The thirteenth strategy that you can use is what I call the supersize title hack. Here s the thing about it. If you ve used Amazon to look for books, obviously you know this, but Amazon will present your book cover in like a postage-stamp-sized view. So that necessitates you having a very big and bold title and a very big and bold subtitle. If you can see the subtitle for your ebook cover at a thumbnail size, then you re on the right track. You want to just make sure that your title is nice and bold and big, and your subtitle is as well. That s really a stylistic issue that has kind of resulted from the presentation methodology of Amazon. You don t want to overlook that. You don t want to have abstract titles, and you don t want to have cover art that doesn t clearly portray your title. So what if you re not sure whether the title works or whether the cover art works? I like to use a strategy I call a polling survey tactic. This is basically where you go out you can go to your list of fans and followers; you can do this in an email, or you can do it through social media, and you can even do it through paid advertising, like on Facebook, where you run ads and you basically run multiple titles and multiple covers, and you ask people their opinion. If you re going to do it through email marketing or social media, you can create a simple poll, like on SurveyMonkey. Just have several options and ask people to vote. Or, if you re doing it through Facebook, then you would just create ads with different word choices and different cover art for your image and use the display ad network style strategy to find out what gets clicked on the most. That s one way you can actually fine-tune and really clarify what title and what cover art really will work for you. 5

The fifteenth hack is the clickable URL hack. The Kindle formatting process allows you to include clickable links in your document as you upload them, and they are clickable when people read them on a Kindle, if they re reading on a Kindle that has an internet browser, like a Kindle Fire for example, or a smartphone. So you want to build your Word document to include lots of hyperlinks to the appropriate stuff. You want to do this in a cool way. You don t want to do it in a spammy way, but if it makes sense and it flows with the writing, then certainly have links to websites, related ebooks, related products, and those types of resources. So the clickable URL hack is hugely important, because it means you can drive traffic out of the Kindle process and into your websites. The sixteenth strategy or tactic I call the science experiment hack. Basically it s the idea that, if you will keep a running log of the major changes you make to your ebook that could be a change to the price, or it could be a change of covers, or it could be moving it from one category in Amazon to a different category, or whatever. But you make those changes and you keep track of when you do them. Then you re also looking at your sales results through Author Central. You can see specific results or implications of changes. So, if you do this, and you hear some expert saying, Your cover needs to have bold titles and bold subtitles, and you try that, and it totally bombs in terms of sales results, then you know that, hey, that didn t work for you. You have a methodology by which you can test and refine what actually works for you, and for your audience, because tons and tons of people will give you suggestions or tips. At the end of the day, you have to figure out what really, really works for you. The seventeenth tactic is the book of book tactic. This is just a simple idea in terms of new content creation ideas. If you keep a simple journal you could do this on your smartphone if you wanted to. Just keep a list or diary of book ideas as they come to mind. Maybe as you re reading you ll come across a phrase or statement. Maybe as you re listening to a webinar or whatever you ll hear something that will pique your interest, and you ll say, Oh, that would be a perfect book topic! Well, if you ve got a little journal, just write it down. I have one of these, and I call it my book of books. When you thumb through it, you just see lists of book ideas that I could do. Then what will happen is, of course, when I need a new idea, I just kind of look back through that list of book ideas, and I say, Hey, does this one make sense for me right now? It gives you tons and tons and tons of content that you can potentially write about. You ll never run out of ideas if you keep a journal like this. 6

The eighteenth approach or tactic is the I m an author approach. You can use, as I ve mentioned before in the prior videos use your book writing to meet key leaders. You can ask them to write a blurb for your upcoming book. You can ask them to be interviewed for content, as a part of your book. You can ask them to give a review, you know, a formal statement. All of those ways are great ways to connect with key leaders or industry insiders. The nineteenth strategy is the excerpt teaser tactic. We ve talked all about how to use interviews with experts to help supplement your writing, and to give you content for your book. This strategy is actually using prior excerpts from your previous books in your new book in a thoughtful and meaningful way. Weave it in appropriately to your new book. But it not only gives you content for your new book and helps you cut down the necessary word count to make a meaningful chapter or book, but it also gives you a marketing tool so that people can have exposure to one of your prior books. Maybe they haven t read it. They ve seen it, obviously, but they didn t pick it up. You give them a nice excerpt. Maybe it s the very best section of the book, and it allows them to engage with that content and try it out. It gives them a little bit of a teaser for going back and buying that book. We re at the twentieth strategy. The twentieth strategy is the blogosphere hack. I could have a whole video about this strategy. Maybe we ll do it as a supplemental bonus, but if you ve got a new book coming out, think through what blog groups would make sense for engaging with that content. Maybe it s the mommy-and-coupon blogger group, and that s a whole huge industry, right? Maybe they d love a copy of the book, if it s a paperback, for one of their giveaways. Maybe they d like a copy as a PDF. Be gracious, of course, about their work and their writing. Be genuine. If you really are a fan or a follower, let them know that, and then let them know about your book coming out. Bloggers who have some volume of traffic get this kind of offer all the time. They might respond back and say, Hey, I only do this kind of promotion for a certain dollar amount, but you never know. If it s a topic that really clicks with them, they certainly could say, Yeah, send me four copies and I ll run a giveaway or a promotion. Those types of backlinks from their site and those types of endorsements, if they give one, are phenomenal tools in terms of the book launch strategy. So the blogosphere hack is a fantastic marketing tool. I hope you enjoyed this. I know it s a fun topic for a lot of us that are marketers. If you ve got additional ideas that I didn t touch on, feel free to share them with us, and we ll spread the word about them as well. 7

Thanks for hanging in there with me on this video, and I hope you ve appreciated the Marketing Mastery module. We re going to jump into module four when we come back, and it s going to be a great one. We re going to talk all about the business of book writing. See you in a few minutes, and we ll go from there. 8