Marketing books results in - publishing yet another book.
Got back to work getting my checklist/spreadsheet executed. With the revisions I added.
Now that the site was mobile-friendly for real, I then turned to the next most obvious distraction - no opt-in for the site. Even though I say to get this done as a first action.
I cast around and found several PLR articles which had to do with writing children's books, as well as a lecture from C. S. Lewis on the same subject (public domain as the 1952 copyright wasn't renewed.) Added an Intro to it, a Summary, and an addendum on how to get it published.
In this book, I also changed something. While I had been only giving a single link to Midwest Journal Press for these books - specific to that book - in this case I set up a Bibliography which linked to all the books in this series.
This is supposed to be hard-linked, so that showed up another problem: I hadn't created minimal landing pages for each of these books. Mainly because I found and added another Art book, and also four Writing books.
None of these books are themselves actually ready, as I would have created landing pages for each of them.
About this new book
It's a little book, about 66 pages. I've gone through all the articles and they make sense and have decent grammar (important to do with PLR - as well as looking for stupid things like keyword padding that makes them read poorly.)This book is on the other side of where I've been for so long - simply getting a book written. (And yes, this has a link to my "Just Publish!" book so they can learn all about self-publishing.)
It's simple, a quick read, and will be priced low as well. The cover (by John Morgan) is very enticing. As it's mostly PLR, I don't put my own name on the cover and will publish it under the "Thrive Learning Institute Library" imprint.
The description isn't bad, but could be better.
The idea here is to have an ebook which people can buy if they don't want to wait for the lessons to come to them. I'll take the individual chapters/articles and create the lessons from those. These articles will be published as individual PDFs on Slideshare and embedded in the lesson page. Creating pages on Blogger still gives you access to the sidebar material, but can be set up to mostly be ignored by the search engines as they lack a lot of the features of SEO. (One simple trick to hide pages from search engines is to give them the exact same meta-description and use no keywords at all in the title.)
These lessons will come one per week and eventually will give them access to a free membership - when I get back to building that membership site.
Right now, I'm focusing on simply getting this series published and using them as a case study for doing the marketing completely. (Although I'll probably skip testing the affiliate sites on this round, since this is not a major or key book series.)
Catching up is hard to do
Mostly a point of focus. I'd already seen that I was missing both a few of the landing pages and also the opt-in script and ethical bribe. The spreadsheet brought these home.By setting things out in a spreadsheet, you don't get the opportunity to skimp steps.
And by having a spreadsheet, you can line up any series that had been previously published and fill in the missing steps. (I've got a series on Copywriting and another on Max Freedom Long's Huna, plus several self-help series, and one on sustainable agriculture. All need actual marketing. Looking forward to getting these really done.)
What's still missing from the spreadsheet
Not that I'm going to work on it now, but there is a book launch sequence which is missing. Any book can be re-launched. What we are doing here might be best called "the invisible launch." It's simply published with no send off at all.Any book can be re-launched. Some authors spend a great deal of time (and money) at this. If you follow Jeff Walker, you'll see this can be ramped up into a very intense, month-long release. And the real work behind Walker's release is to build your list - even from nothing.
Where this really takes off is to have Joint Venture affiliates to push your released product. That is really why I'm not particularly testing the affiliate site section of this spreadsheet. Because it's going to move into quite another set of tests - where I really need that membership site ready to handle the flood.
This is basically an "internal launch" in Walker's terms. I'll announce this to my little list, and then get the social signals working for it through Synnd. Each book will get a video trailer, which will also be distributed through Synnd. Otherwise, a lot of the work will go through IFTTT. (And I have to go back and verify these as being in place.)
The trick with landing pages is to set them up with an address, and then turn them back to draft while you get them ready for publishing. When you then publish them for real, IFTTT should pick them up and send them along to the other sites. Or that's the idea, anyway. The other option is to set up custom links for them and never take them live until you have everything in place (all video and PDF embeds active, etc.)
This means we are still playing with the bubble-wrap, this is so new.
I still haven't found anyone else who is attempting this precise use of SEO and social signals as part of their marketing. So you're seeing a very pioneer work - even though all the steps of these have been tested thoroughly, none of this has been built into a single, comprehensive sequence of steps that I know of.
This spreadsheet of actions could actually be used to promote any digital product online. Some Internet Marketing guru's I've read of would give their hind teeth for this spreadsheet, as it's a course on it's own.
When this (and the additional testing of launches and affiliates) is run through completely and tweaked, I'll go and make it a course on its own - and launch it as a full system.
Meanwhile, I have a few dozen books to publish and a dozen dozen which haven't been marketed at all. So don't hold your breath...
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