HOW TO PROMOTE YOUR BOOK

IN 10 SIMPLE STEPSTHE SELF-PUBLISHER’S MARKETING PLAN

By Matt Cumming, BookDesignHQ.com

Here at BookDesignHQ we take the pain out of

publishing and give control back to you, the author.

Our unique Bestselling Book Design Method enables us to take authors from manu-script to book sales effortlessly, establishing them as experts in their field, helping

them spread their message and build their brand.

The creator of the B.S.B.D. Method and the real “secret sauce” in the BookDesign-HQ service (as well as the author of the following 10 steps for promoting your book) is our chief — Matt Cumming — who leads us to achieve this with exceptional book

design and his extensive branding and self-publishing knowledge.

“Matt designs the kind of books you’d see on Oprah.”

Dale Beaumont, author of 16 Best-Selling books

1Have A Unique Message

Have a unique message that’s bigger than just your book (something that differenti-ates you and your book from other similar authors and books) and KEEP sharing it with people in as many ways as possible. (To find out HOW to create a unique, pow-erful message, take a look at “POLARIZE“).

2Keep Writing & Sharing Content!

Blog, micro-blog, photo-blog, press-release-blog, article-blog and then… blog some more! Even if you have to pull bits from your book to do it, make sure you write a few hundred words every week, AND make sure they’re using the keywords (see next point) your SEO guy gives you!!

Then you’ll improve your Google rank and generate more interest… you’ll also have something to talk about in social media circles which will bring people back to your website (which is where you want them obviously!!).

3 Use SEO Techniques

Get someone to help you with SEO, there’s a lot of free organic traffic that could be coming to your website if you know how to do it properly. This area is something I encourage my clients to do because it’s such a wasted opportunity if you miss out on all that glorious free search traffic!!

But be careful who you hire. Things have changed a LOT in the last few years in SEO, and you need to ensure they’re up-to-date with their approach, otherwise it can actually make things worse, not better!

One really easy way to use SEO (at no cost!) is to use the Adwords Keyword Tool to find good phrases that people are using, and then simply use those as titles for your blog posts. Then simply share those posts as much as possible on other relat-ed blogs, in Facebook groups, forums relating to your niche and anywhere else that seems relevant to your audience!

4 Get Social!

Create a page on Facebook, buy a few thousand “likes” on Fiverr and then begin sharing links to those blog posts on that Facebook page (and anywhere else you can!) as you create them. The vast majority of those “likes” will be fake profiles BUT there will be SOME real people that will notice your blog and it will also look very impressive to anyone ELSE who might visit your page.

It would be my strong recommendation to take the most passionately emotional themes from you book and base your blog and Facebook page around that, because people love to be able to relate emotionally to something and to be part of a “cause” or a “club” that is meaningful.

It can also sometimes be NEWS-worthy (which is crucial to getting free exposure) if it’s a topic that is currently getting exposure in the press (this is called “piggy-back-ing” and it can work well because reporters are often looking for follow-up articles on hot topics).

5Build Your Personal Brand

The reason many books never get seen is that many AUTHORS like to “hide” behind their words and books. Your book will be FAR more memorable if people know (and hopefully like) who you are. So you could consider doing something PUBLIC (think about all Richard Branson’s global stunts for free media publicity) — make it in line with your blog goals/topic and VIDEO it.

Your audience will love it, video is totally VIRAL, and the smaller newspapers will love sharing your event too if it’s significantly different or newsworthy (make sure you let them know about it BEFORE you do it so they can be there) — so it will in-stantly build a genuine audience for you (many of which will be “fans” who keep talking about you in social media).

Take a look at what already makes the news in the local papers to help you come up with ideas.

6Get Some Free PR Exposure

Subscribe to as many services as you can find like HARO, where they email you opportunities for exposure. You’ll get a feel for which ones are worth doing or not after a while, but initially just respond to as many as are appropriate to your book and your “cause” as you can.

7Join Existing Conversations

If you’re not already doing this, make sure you search every forum and discussion blog under the sun (Who’sTalkin is a good way to search for “social chatter” about a subject) and join the conversation — introducing people to both your point of view (being controversial is good because it gets attention and response) and then your book of course.

8Gain Trust With Your Website

You might want to consider getting a redesign on your site…. If you’ve got a website that is [a] old or [b] badly designed, then there’s definitely more “trust”, “believ-abilty” and “likeability” to be gained by a more professional looking website (PLRZ can help you with this).

9Think “Book Series” (Not Just “My Book”)

If you are at all interested in getting into bookshops (or you really want to show you’re an expert in your field), then this is pretty important… Consider writing an-other book (or five!) and mockup covers of the other potential books in the “series” to show people.

There are many, many new authors springing up all over the place and most are seen as “one-hit-wonders” by the industry, but if you have a “series” of books, then you are a much more valuable client to a bookstore and it makes you look far more impressive — even if you never actually get the other books finished.

Show these covers on your website too (as “upcoming books in the series”)… It’s cheeky, but it works!

10Build Your List

Make sure you have a subscription option on your blog so that people can give you their email address and automatically get your blog posts every week.

This is totally invaluable because every 3 or 4 weeks you can include a gentle re-minder at the end of your blog post to buy your book (maybe something like “P.S. Have you read my book yet? I’d love to know what you think about it. Go get yourself a copy at…”).

They won’t be offended that you’re trying to “sell” to them because you’ve been giving them lots of helpful free content (look up “reciprocity” and how that works wonders for sales).

11BONUS Track What Works (& What Doesn’t)

The other useful thing to do is get your web guy to install Google Analytics so you can see what sort of traffic you’re getting to your website and where they’re com-ing from — that way when you start promoting, you’ll know what’s working the best and then you can drop some of the lower-performance promotions and focus on the higher-performing ones.

This also helps you when/if you’re blogging to know which blog posts are most pop-ular — then it pays to write more on the same topic.

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