Once you have written and published your book, your work has only just begun. Consistent and never-ending promotion is the key to driving sales, visibility, and relevance in your market space.
Here are just a few ideas to get you started in promoting your book while still building your list:
Create a list-building/best seller campaign:
We have done this for many of my Entrepreneur Authors with great success. One new author had over 150 new list subscribers in less than 3 days. Another grew his list by more than 200% on one week. This is one of my all-time favorite list-building/book promotion strategies, but I’ll be honest here – it’s not for the faint of heart. There are a lot of moving parts to this one.
Essentially you’ll want to round up some fellow entrepreneurs to help out by promoting your book to their lists. I go into this in a lot of detail in my new program, but if you would like to get an idea of what it would look like you can check out the campaign I did (it totally rocked!) last summer to launch my book: “eBook Publishing POWER: SECRETS the Gurus Don’t Teach You”. This campaign grew my own list by approximately 275% AND ranked my book on Amazon’s best seller list in the Business category, which is highly competitive with 1000′s of new books added every day.
Have business cards created that look like your book:
One side should be the cover of your book, in full size (not just a small image of the book). The other side should include what the book is about, where they can buy the book (Amazon, B&N, etc.), and maybe some of the chapter titles or a few short reviews.
The one thing you want to be sure to include no matter what: A link to something free (bonus chapter, template, audio, video, etc) where they must register with their name & email address to receive the free gift. This is a beautiful way to promote your book and build your list because, even if they don’t buy your book, chances are really good they will check out the free gift anyway). You can get them printed up easily and inexpensively at VistaPrint.com. Give these cards away everywhere to everyone!
Publish a Press Release:
Yes, you can publish your own press release and it’s not that expensive to do so either. I’ve found PR Web to be the most cost effective solution for press releases, ranging from $99 to $499 per press release. Honestly, I would stick with the lower end of the scale. For $99 to $249 you can put out a press release that puts you out into over 20,000 new outlets. The really cool thing is that once one of these news outlets picks up your story, you can now put that information on your website stating “As seen in…..” or “As published in….”.
Now that’s some great publicity! They key to using this strategy is the same as writing blog posts or even writing your eBook – use appropriate KEY WORDS in your press release. And be sure to include a link to your website and to a free bonus gift at he bottom of the article. You will be surprised at the number of news outlets that pick up your press release, especially if it’s a slow news day!