How to Market Your Book Online - My Last Recipe

This is the (final) recipe for marketing a book online. 

And because of the breakthroughs below, you may not hear from me for awhile.

But don't worry, I'll give you links at the end so you can follow this book promotion as it shows up.

I don't call these breakthroughs lightly. Of course, I've been "breaking through" for the last few years, the first being where I simply starting creating enough passive income to work at this full time. The others have been known about for awhile, and the last one fell into place with LinkedIn becoming a publishing platform.

Now it's time to put them all to the test.

We're going to review these rapidly, so feel free to print off the transcript for this podcast. It's simple to spool these off, but the work in getting them done takes a bit more time and effort. (Like days and weeks.)

The key points with all this are just a few:

• Make it pay for itself as an investment as it goes, not just a money drain from your day job income. Eventually, this will replace your day job.
• Build your audience and find out from them what they most want from you. That's the books you'll write and publish.
• Focus on making this a success (Napoleon Hill's Burning Desire) - find and follow your bliss to make this happen fastest.

Note: Don't skimp on these steps below. These are in pretty much final order, but you can mix them around except for the first three. Any failure I've seen in authors can be traced to these even more than anything else.

The First Three Ingredients

0. Get an email list. MailChimp, Simplycast, AWeber, Infusionsoft, anything. Yes, those are autoresponder services, not sending out emails personally.

00. Get a domain name. Can be anything. If you don't already have your own name, grab it - that will be fine, especially for original works. Otherwise, set up something that sounds like a respectable publishing house. (Or follow Google and Yahoo's lead -- pronounceable gobbledegook seems OK these days.) Resources: NameCheap, GoDaddy

000. Get an actual website. You can start on Blogger with the domain name on top of it if you want. Best bet here is to get something like HostGator and pay for some minimal hosting, then put your domain up as a CNAME subdomain, so you could use all sorts of other features of that hosting.

To repeat myself - all successful authors have these up and running. Period. If you're not doing these, you have a hobby.

Note: I'm not covering writing your book here. See my "Just Publish!" for the steps of these. You'll need a well-edited book (even if you do it yourself) and a fascinating cover (if you aren't graphic-trained, hire this out - don't DIY to cut corners. 10 or 50 bucks is a good investment. Get some copywriting books so you know how to write a good, engaging description. (See my Masters of Marketing Series - Collier, Schwab, Schwartz, or their collection.)

One last point: the best model for this is a free membership, so you get people's address and build your list. You don't want freebie-seekers, you want people who will invest in your and your books - so they can improve their lives and continue on their own journey. Memberships are a study of their own, I've covered earlier on this blog. Free is via Gumroad, or self-hosted with a Wordpress plug-in, paid with Rainmaker, top-end is Infusionsoft.

How to Mix Your Promotion Set-ups Batter

A. Set up your landing page with title, cover, description.
You need this to link inside your digital copies, as well as laying this out in your hardcopy version so people can type it in. Your books are emissaries which bring you more audience. Put this link in your book, both front and back, so it's the first and last thing they see.

B. Publish your book. Lulu is recommended, as almost every type of publishing can be done there.

1. Ebook - upload your document and have Lulu port this out to everywhere except Amazon.
   - Amazon - take Lulu's completed epub file and upload it. We do Amazon separately in order to be able to tweak their metadata.
   - Google - Lulu doesn't go there.
   - There are more which I've mentioned, but these are the key distributors. You can later come back to port to more to further leverage your sales.
2. Trade paperback - use your original file and they'll generate a print-ready PDF for you. (Or port this from LibreOffice if you're using it.) Ordering your proof is another expense, but minor. This helps you spot obvious goofs before you send out to Ingram. 
3. PDF - for Lulu and also Scribd.

C. Update your landing page with all these links - hard-coded.

1. Copy your links and use the distributor's little icons so that if they click on it, they'll go to that distributor. This is an SEO trick. Using a script won't do it, the links have to be hardcoded. Google this if you don't know how - or get a simple HTML book on it.
2. Embed a script like Ganxy so that you can sell your book locally. Sellfy and Gumroad are also good. (Later, you can upgrade to something like Rainmaker, which has this all built in.) Ganxy is good, as you can get email opt-in's. Ganxy also allows you to create bundles for extra value - we'll cover more of this later.

D. Set up or verify your IFTTT recipes. If This Then That - a way to syndicate your content so that it sends updates to every social network you want to. It will also auto-post for you to Wordpress.com, Tumblr, and some others - which doesn't hurt for backlinks and traffic. This is a short study if you haven't done this before, but will run indefinitely - and you can tweak it later.
Note: when you set up Buffer through IFTTT, it can take your updates and content to even more social outposts, even on it's free plan.

How to Bake Your Promotion Execution Layer Cake

A. (Paid) Synnd. This I haven't talked about much, but you can read up on it at that link. Essentially, this promots any link via bookmarking and social media campaigns through a distributed world-wide network:

1. Your book's Landing Page
2. Your Amazon buy link. Because they are the most leveraged for sales.
   
3. (Optional) Other distributor buy links - not essential. 

B. Post your cover art to Flickr and Instagram (IFTTT will take it from there) with links back to your book's landing page. (No, don't short cut it by sending to Amazon - you want their email address so you can help them better.)

C. Promote your book on OpenLibrary, Library Thing, and Goodreads - these all link back to the book's landing page. Make sure you update/create your author page on these. Update your Amazon author page while you're at it (and consider updating all the national Amazon author pages as well, especially after your book becomes an international bestseller. This can give you more traffic back to your site, but at least tells the search engines more about you.)

D. Split every chapter in your book out as content:

1. Create long-form articles on your site-blog, then convert these to run on LinkedIn. Google likes about 2K words, LinkedIn about 1K. Your earlier study on copywriting comes into play here, as it's essentially the same format - you fascinate the reader, draw them in, and get them to act (go to your site and sign up.) See Gericke Potgieter's book on this. Your LinkedIn article call to action (CTA) will tell them to visit the blog for the full article and more information. Your blog post obviously links to the book's landing page and tells them to go there - and sign up for the free membership. 
2. Podcast your chapters. Review my earlier posts on this. Very simple, and it will bring regular traffic to your site via iTunes and Stitcher. Embed the player on your blog toward the top.
3. Create a video using the 8 images from the LinkedIn post and your audio. Post this directly to YouTube and embed in your site (or use Synnd to do this for you, and run campaigns to promote it there as well.) Embed the video on your blog post at the top to keep visitors from bouncing.
4. Create a PDF in presentation format from these images - post this to Slideshare. Embed your video inside the presentation. Your CTA in that presentation tells viewers to visit your site for more information - that link to the specific page that presentation is about (that chapter of the book.)
5. Email your list once weekly with your progress and give them links to the new content. Ask for feedback and any corrections they note - give away gifts for people who find errors. Of course, you then update the ebook versions on all distributors. (Trade paperback updates should wait until the error-reporting slows down. Then come out with version 2.0 and add some additional content...)

More publishing to enable more discovery

A. Bundles - Somewhere in the middle of this, you get a lot of extra content floating around that people will be interested in. Particularly if you give it away with your book.

1. Post all these peripheral digital materials up on Ganxy and create new landing pages for each set of this book's bundles. Create several different kinds of bundles - with the book and various videos, audio files, PDFs, cover art, and anything else you may have from creating the book. Give away samples, and sell both a high-priced bundle and a higher-priced bundle on each landing page. 
2. Post bundles on BitTorrent Bundles and sell these as well as giving them away for emails. Use their model to guide your own bundle creations.
3. Update your book's landing page with these links.

B. Audiobook - you may have noticed that you've just created an audio book of your content. It's in all those podcasts. There's a trick to monetizing these.

1. Audible has sewn up the major distributors for audiobooks - or so they think. They have arbitrary standards, and set your price for you. Dumb and dumber. Your workaround is to set up an account on CDBaby and create a "Spoken Word Album" for your book, using the same title and cover art as your Amazon version. This will then start showing up on Amazon alongside your ebook and trade paperback. As well, your CD gets sold internationally in music stores, as well as digital downloads via CDBaby.
2. Of course, you then update your book's landing page with this hard-link so you can sell them directly as well.

C. Consider Affiliate sales.
With Bundles, you can enter the wonderful world of affiliate marketing. There are several sites for this which have no upfront costs. By now you've had quite a bit of experience in writing engaging copy, so tailoring one for affiliate marketers shouldn't be very hard. Rainmaker also has a built-in Affiliate program you can start if you want. The trick is in how much time this will take to run - but you should weigh how much this is leaving money on the table. I haven't gone there yet, but still consider it worth checking out.

D. Consider a proper book launch.
You have just done a launch, but without a list. By the end of this, you should have build a considerable list and can now study up on how launches are done and so jump-start your next book (or version 2.0) on Amazon to leverage all the resources you have. Look around the web and find Jeff Walker's stuff. He does a release every year and tells his whole system (bare bones) in the sales videos. (I imagine he'll probably announce this to his email list if you want to sign up and wait...)

How to Apply This to Existing Backbench - Cupcakes From Cake Mix

You may already have numerous books sitting out there and perhaps you've never had a list before, or even a website or blog. The approach could be full on, but probably that would only be effective for a new book (especially not for PLR or public domain books.)

Let's take an example: I've got about 25 PD classic fiction bestsellers I published as a test about everywhere but Amazon. Their common denominator was their continuing success.

What they are missing is some decent, current marketing to tell these newer generations what they are missing. The bright idea here is to do a sort of Cliff Notes version of these - plot, characters, background, locale, interesting stories about how the book was written, what the author was doing at the time, how well the book sold and why... All those sorts of things. These would run about 2,000 to 5,000 words or so - just lay it all out and don't worry about length (just so long as you keep it interesting.) Then you compile these longish articles into a book on it's own, like: "25 Bestselling Classics of All Time - Series I: The Romances" Now you have a new book and can run this through as above.

First, you take your list and website above and do a mailing to see if anyone is interested in this area. If it's all crickets (and is a passion for you) then you go ahead and do it anyway. This is different from people mailing you back and saying you're full of it. (Not that one or two trolls or cranks would dissuade you.) You're just telling everyone what you're going to start doing. Gives them a heads-up.

The point here is that these books sell OK, even without marketing. So why not help them out?

You just work over one book at a time.

First up, make sure you update (or even create, if it's missing) that book's landing page. Get all the distributor links on there. Put a Ganxy script on it. Make it look nice.

Update the text of your book to include that link in both front and back.

Next, you create an Amazon version of that particular book which they would accept on Kindle. Put in some content in the back of each of these - like your overlong essay and mark it "annotated" - and submit it with that quote above as it's subtitle.  Now it's part of a series. And series have a better chance of selling.

Oh - and check to see if you can make the cover even better while you're at it.

Go ahead and publish your new trade paperback version with the same title and cover.

Synnd that landing page. IFTTT is already set up as above, so it will automatically tweet and post status updates everywhere on your behalf.

OK, take that essay - that's your long-form content - and post it on your blog. Now you make a LinkedIn article about this, with the 8 images that Gericke recommends in his book. This links back to your blog post.

Next, podcast that essay. Take the images and create a video. Embed them both. Create a PDF presentation and post it to Slideshare - embed it on the blog post as well.

Now create a bundle with all that, just for this book. Post it on Ganxy and BitTorrent Bundles.

Finally, update your Landing Page with all these direct links.

Take the next book in that series and run it through as above. If you're doing the Romances, then your next book is a Romance.

Once you've run all the books in that series through, then create a book out of those long-form essays and post it on Kindle. Create a hardcopy version of it with the same title and cover. Create a "spoken word album" with the same title and cover.  Create a bundle with your audio files for all the books and the ebooks and post it on Ganxy and BitTorrent.

You probably have about 4-5 series in those bestsellers (I worked this up once.)

This gets all these regular sellers a bit of a boost.

While you're doing all this, you're sending out emails to your list.

With all this promotion you've just set up some ways to make more sales from getting new paperbacks and Kindles onto Amazon. Also, you've got 4-5 new titles on Amazon and everywhere else from your essays.

Now you've created all sorts of new emissaries to send people to your membership and your list.

That's how you do your backbench.

What about working in batches for PD publishing? 

Same sequence applies, actually. But you'll need to work all of the books in that batch individually.

1. Make sure they each have their own landing page. 
2. Then do a long-form review in order to get the "annotated" Kindle version approved.
3. Then make sure you have a matching hardcopy version to go up there on Amazon. 
4. Work up binders of subsets within that batch. Include the audio of the reviews.
5. Compile and publish ebook and paperback of that subset's reviews - make sure it gets a landing page, too.
6. That will then give you another bundle to publish. 
7. Once you have that new ebook and bundle published, then go back to update all the individual reviews and the individual book pages to also link to this new book's landing page.

If you think back to where we started with this podcast, I was in the middle of the marketing for a book series on Writing and Illustrating Children's books. This was 12 classic PD books and 2 PLR reports. Within these were sub-series on drawing, (oil) painting, and writing. A few of the drawing books would apply to oil painting as well. Although I'd probably look around for some PD/PLR water-color painting books, as these would lend themselves better to illustrations.

And several of these could become free and paid online courses.

Another reason I quit that one was as it brought up another four sets of books - each having about 25 titles each - which would help someone study classics in order to improve their abilities to write and illustrate children's books. That's about 125-150 more books to publish from scratch.

As I got closer to this, I saw that this journey was going to take me directly away from a lot of what I was doing currently - and I'd not be coming back.

The decision was made to put that all on hold (yet again) so I could wrap other stuff up.

A Q-and-A Discussion With Fellow Bakers

Why this approach?  

• Mainly as Content Marketing and Search Engine Marketing are two peas in a single pod. Google wants more content and will give you link love for putting your variations on several platforms. With some care, you rank better for certain keywords if you craft your meta-data carefully. 
• You'll also have a better chance of getting clicks when you offer varied content - sometimes a video or rich media in position 2 will get more clicks than a text link in position 1 (which traditionally pulls down 40-50% of all clicks for that keyword.)

Why not use advertising?

• Because I hate ads in general and believe in the Golden Rule as a Natural law you shouldn't try to skimp on. Modern advertising is built on interrupting your attention and mostly talks down to the audience.
• Content marketing is different, and is more and more welcome (even in it's "native advertising" mode.)
• The only ads I'd do would be Stumbleupon, which actually bring traffic to your webpage. (These are also cheaper than all the other types of ads, BTW.)

Why all this social media by syndication? 

• By testing (which I haven't compiled and written up yet) each platform and social media has its own audience. Their tastes are wildly different. As well, most of these social media now have their own search engines, to find and serve up content. 
• As you build your content backbench by consistently publishing, these different social platforms will actually bring you more and more traffic, even on days you don't post.
• You'll note that the only platform I suggest personally involving yourself with is LinkedIn - because with their publishing feature, they've moved into content, which is any author's chief talent. Everything else is by IFTTT, so you don't burn your time trying to collect followers when you need to be concentrating on leads and conversions. I'll take a well-heeled CEO looking at my landing page any time over some random lookie-loo in search of freebies.

Does all this work pay off better?

• Of course. Look - most authors are settling for an ebook on just Amazon.  My tests show you can make more on other distributors until/if that ebook starts to take off (this is figuring with no list and no other promotion.) Even when that book takes off, you'll still get several hundred per month from the other distributors combined. (Meanwhile, when someone searches for the book by name, you get multiple listings on Google for each distributor.)
• Doing podcasts actually creates your audio book - which can be posted to Audible to get pulled up by Amazon for your book's title. Using that same set of audio files for a CD Baby "spoken word album" should also show up on Amazon and also will get distributed to multiple music stores internationally.
• Videos bring their own traffic. But this can give you a DVD to sell on Amazon via CDBaby or directly via Kunaki.
• Meanwhile, all this extra content allows you to offer bundles, which can be sold on BitTorrent (a yet different audience) and also directly.
• The Short Answer is yes. The other response is: you'll never know what money you've been leaving on the table until you try this out. 

Why do so little on backbench?

• Mainly because my view of this is about PD and/or PLR books, which most  distributors Amazon and Kobo discriminate badly about. The key point is to create little sub-series, each with their own new book. Again, you waste no efforts but instead leverage everything. New text, combined, becomes a new ebook on Amazon and print book via Lulu. Classic fiction mostly already has audio for it, and this usually in the public domain. Of course, a good non-fiction book which has never been transferred to audio is yet another leverage-able approach. Nothing is cast in stone.
• If you have a lot of original works, then take them in order of best sales and do the whole podcast/audiobook route. This also then can give you a video for each chapter, which will of course get people to view the rest in the series.
• And you can bundle multiple earlier versions of your own books, much like I've outlined for PD/PLR. Some PLR comes with audio, so this can put you way ahead of the curve. Podcast these, create video's from them (and in some cases, extract the audio from the video in reverse.)
• The point is to leverage everything, and point to your landing page with all variations of content.

Why bother selling direct when you get so many sales on Amazon?

• Actually, most authors don't sell well on Amazon - it's known as the ebook graveyard, especially for Indies. Out of over 200 books I've published only about 70 do more than one sale per month, only a dozen do more than 5 a month, and only 2 sell more than a couple hundred per month. Sure, these are mostly PD and no PLR is allowed on Amazon, so it cuts down what I can really sell there. 
• The point with having an audience is in those bundles. Amazon can't really do this, other than trying to sell the various versions of each title together (which the author has to agree to sell at a lower price.) 
• With a membership, I can give them offers which Amazon can't (such as buying all the ebook versions [mobi, epub, PDF] all at once, and also getting videos and audio files, plus "cutting room floor" excerpts - as well as special casewrap hardback editions, and so on.
• Your own audience can be leveraged to increase your income hugely. If you don't try it - again, you'll never know what money you're leaving on the table.
• Most importantly, you can build your audience by giving them exactly what they really want.
  

The Key Ingredient is Audience

Most authors (and big publishing houses) never figured this out - and it has only really come to view with the last decade of Content Marketing, replacing conventional advertising and ecommerce wisdom.

The importances and sequence appears to be this:

Audience - Value - Income - Bliss 

1. You invite an audience to join you on your journey.
   
2. This is done by generating interesting and valuable/useful content. Of course, you have an opt-in form to get their emails, which is the most efficient way to deliver content to your audience.
   
3. While you give some very valuable data away for free, you also offer versions of this in some sort of paid content - which they can exchange with you.
   
4. As they click on and buy your content containers, you then get an idea of what they are really wanting. You then refine these and offer more of that and related materials.
   
5. Along the line, you'll find your own and your audience's bliss.
   
6. And as long as you balance all these above, you can continue this journey indefinitely. This passive income flow continues to support your lifestyle and will leverage as you go, to provide for all your dreams.
   

A Warning: This Cookbook is Closing...

Of course, the next thing is to tell you - as usual - that I'm dogfooding this and so probably won't be podcasting here for awhile. Maybe not again, actually.

Just too much work to do on this new book - the manifesto for this new site. It's got some 15 chapters or so - which then means a lot of time getting all this promotion done for this book. You can see above that this title becomes a container for all the various formats that are possible - all as a test of this careful planning.

And if I do have another breakthrough, I'll let you know. 

The invitation to join me on Live Sensical still exists.

That way, you can see this as it works up. But no, I won't be doing a post-mortem on this particular marketing as far as I know.

Because I have a back bench of books to handle after this one manifesto is set.

And I haven't mentioned creating courses for books, both free and paid.

I also haven't mentioned the idea of paying to have an audiobook created, and then immediately posting each chapter as a podcast, which will then auto-post each week (or bi-weekly) for a year and promote the title in all formats - as well as the membership. Just organizing this for several books will take a few weeks on its own.

So you can see I have a lot of work coming up.

Then please forgive me if I don't talk about book publishing and marketing for awhile - as I'll be far too busy publishing and marketing books.

Again, I'm heading into writing, illustrating, and publishing children's books after this - so I'm pretty sure that we're done here.

Do join me at livesensical.com to see how it all turns out.

PS. I do owe you a title on book marketing. This last test sequence will basically wrap it up.

PPS. There's also a whole study of the personal development side to making a bestseller. This is ongoing and will eventually show up on the livesensical.com podcast - or will be a reason to dust this podcast off and revive it for a bit. Maybe. Just maybe.

Related articles

• Getting Your Book Discovered, Finding More Sales, Having More Fun
• How to Build Your Own Membership like a Bum Marketer
• How to Sell Your Books Online, Old or New.
• Updates to Online Publishing - Easier Than You Think...
• How to Edit a Book Into Shape and Stay Sane
• How to publish 4 ebook versions simultaneously on Lulu, iTunes, B&N, and Kobo

How I Fouled up Self-Publishing My New Book Series - Case Study 10

(...and what you can do to avoid this mistake)

(Yes, I know - Fouled up isn't the same as Fowl, which isn't a cute chickie...)

Video edition:

OK, I got busy getting some hard-cover books done up - mainly because Lulu had a 25% discount which ended last night. (And that mostly paid for shipping...)

I had these books which I thought were ready, but actually were only half-way there. Out of the 13 books in that series (yes it grew from the first 6), I was able to get 8 of them coming to me as proofs. (I have one more actually ready, but was too close to the midnight deadline to order, and the others are either too short to print, or have a lot of work yet to make them ready.)

The problem was, I screwed up with the self-serving links in them.

I told you years ago - or was it just last year sometime - that you need to start tracking your links from these books.

It's true that Google is able to read these books, and so can follow links. If you put a link-shortener in there, you get no SEO. So my foul-up isn't that bad.

OK, let's backtrack a bit - this is getting us both confused.

The error you shouldn't make

I had these books ready, or so I thought.

Instead of putting a single link back to the site, I thought to add a "Bibliography" to each book which would give links to all the books in that series. (This is instead of a single link front and back.)

What I did then was to quickly set up landing page addresses for each book (set up the page on the site, copy the link, then turn the post back to draft.)

The step I omitted (which isn't a big deal, since the print versions don't have links anyway) is to convert all these books into bit.ly-shortened links.

The two reasons for using bit.ly are, first - they are the only shortener left standing which actually tracks your links and can give some analytics on it. The second reason is that they have become a form of social media in themselves.

The whole point of this is to have trackable links from your ebooks to show you whether they are coming from your books or somewhere else. I don't know that Google Analytics can't track these, but the point is that you want to be able to - and bit.ly is the only way I know of right now to do so.

Why the trade paperback isn't a bad start

It's true that they don't have links, but why paying for the expense of getting these books printed instead of the easy route of ebooks?

Well, for a start - Amazon can't/won't reject them. Second, you are only paying a few bucks for each book and will have a nice copy for your effort, with the satisfying touch and feel - being able to dog-ear and use a real bookmark, etc.

True, I've said to get them out into the ebook distributors first and then only spend the time and money on proven sellers.

And that is still very valid advice. When you are broadshooting with a few dozen books available to publish, that would be the way to go. Particularly with PLR to show you which book markets are hottest - of course you've already done your market research to pick out PLR ebooks based on what you've found. Publishing ebooks just tends to verify and narrow your field (providing your covers and descriptions are enticing and fascinating.)

And maybe this was a mistake. I kinda think not - since I can sit down and rattle off a 5-10 minute book trailer with a hardcopy in my hand, doing a half-dozen or more books in a single sitting. This then gets the book trailer out of the way.

It also takes time to get those books to me, while I then build out the landing pages for each one (yes, you can imagine having to build 13 landing pages will take some time.) With snail-mail (cheapest) figure about 10 days to 2 weeks before they arrive. I should be able to get all those pages back up and running.

The other error I'm correcting 

It has to do with IFTTT (If This Then That - ifttt.com). This we've covered - it's a way to get your message out to all sorts of social media. I have to post the original video, cover, blog post, audio, and PDF to basically five sites. Then IFTTT sends these out to:

Tumblr
Wordpress
Blogger
Facebook Page
Instagram
500px
Twitter
LinkedIn
bitly
delicious
diigo
digg
Box
and Facebook

And some get multiple posts. That saves me a lot of work promoting these - the problem is: I don't have these set up via IFTTT, either. Or all verified, anyway.

So I pulled down (reverted to draft) all the landing pages I had put up. So when I put these live, they'll be covered. (You can see my CYA post here.)

All that work is headed in a certain direction - which is how to market these books, any books, effectively. And as I said before, what starts right tends to go right, but you can always start over...

What about this Membership stuff?

Funny you should ask. That's probably the fourth error I have to fix.

When I started looking ahead to all the work I had to do, I considered that I wouldn't want to do anything twice - and that why should I invest my Synnd coins on a Blogger blog, when I can spend them promoting the same post on my membership site which I can then syndicate over to that Blogger site (which IFTTT then syndicates to Wordpress and Tumblr, etc. for me.)

About the time I get all done, I'll need to change it again. Not funny.

So my next real step is to figure if I can CNAME deep inside my membership, or simply redirect my Blogger blog over to a category inside my wordpress-based Rainmaker platform.

The original Blogger site will still get set up as planned, it's just that the main promotion is going to be spent on my Rainmaker-hosted site, with the freebie site carried as a version of the first. Is it worth it? Well, you never throw away a blog which has been around for awhile. And this standalone blog will be devoted entirely and only to assembling and promoting the know-how of creating children's books. (I've got plans after this as well - when I start cranking out children's books by the gross, literally...)

Lots of work ahead, one step back for every two forward, and so on.

But you're worth it, aren't you?

You are why I'm doing this after all - so you don't have to go through this pain on your own.

- - - -

Be sure you're subscribed by email or news-reader to this site so you don't miss anything coming up...

Presentation version:

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• Getting Started on a Right Foot - with Online Book Selling
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• The Book Income Sales Web You Build
• How Rubber Meets the Real World - Case Study 08

How Rubber Meets the Real World - Case Study 08

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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Getting Started on a Right Foot - with Online Book Selling: Case Study 07

(Photo:  Augustus Binu)

Your site is the right first step to take in getting your book selling online.

There I was, running through all these to-do spreadsheet list actions - and I realized I'd skipped over a huge piece of this puzzle.

Yes, I really just want to get to work on these books - but part of that was telling you just how to get started right. Because I so often just haven't - and see so many authors out there who also just didn't.

That might explain why so many authors work so hard and then have almost nothing to show for it. Well, they have their day job...

You first have to know who your selling to...

And that's no easy first step. A lot of writers start with this incredible story in their head, that's just screaming to get out - won't let them sleep, etc. (Been there, done that.)

But in the back of their mind, they are really writing for someone. They've studied the genre, studied the artists they like, know the general layout of how that type of story goes - the know what people want to read and will buy.

Those that don't - well amateurs and suckers are born every minute. Millions and Billions.

Amateurs become Pro's through lots of practice and study and practice. Amanda Hocking wrote over 10 books before she hit her stride and became a million-seller on Amazon. Louis La'Mour studied all the classics and wrote tons of short stories (some even got accepted and published) before he hit his stride - with a unique style built from what the successful writers used: Shakespeare, Beowulf's author, and the dime novels from Street & Smith which sold and sold and sold. So: his books sold - and his books were in demand the world over.

It's more than craft, though. Online sales depend on a website which provides exactly what people are looking for. A website doesn't just list the books you wrote, it mirrors the people who are reading them. Their site contributes to their author-journey, giving them the tools and weapons to defeat any opponents and resolve the struggles they will face.

How you find who and what your'e looking for.

It's not really all that hard to get from where you are to where you want to be. You've just been missing someone who's left a trail after wandering the maze before you.

You need to meet your avatar. Some call her Emily. She's the single persona that represents your typical buyer.  You write exclusively for her - once you find where she lives and what she wants.

In marketing-speak, some of this is known as demographics. Outside of some very good (and quite expensive) services out there, where does a beginning/struggling author supposed to find what they are looking for?

One free tool - Alexa.

While their paid version gives you way more data, just searching up the top sites you're avatar is familiar with on their free data will give you tons of insight.

What I'd suggest is getting your copy of Market Samurai (a one-time payment, life-time updates) and find the sites which come up for the keyword phrases you want to use. Check those in Alexa and really get your data straight - find out in-depth what your avatar is looking for - before you set your site up.

Spreadsheet addition - prepare your site to rock your world

(Yeah, I know - yet more to-do list? Oh, come on...)

Let's keep this simple: 

Market Research     Keyword phrases, Alexa, demographics, Avatar
DomainHosting     Analytics Analytics
    Google Analytics, Webmaster Tools, Feedburner, G+ page, Facebook Page, Analytics.twitter.com
Mobile Template
    Sharing widgets, social profile, affiliate links, G+ badge, Facebook Page badge
Opt-in
    content hosted, script, tested
Legal Pages
   disclaimer, disclosure, terms of use, privacy  

You see that this doesn't fit on the regular spreadsheet. Because it's really more  a checklist. Then you fill up your site with landing pages and so on. But you first have to get it all set up. That's why the checklist.

We've covered Market Research. Look these up, don't skimp.

Domain name is selected as a result of your keyword research - as the Search Engines give you credit in your domain name.  We're talking here about having a domain for your series.  But there's a trick to use - particularly where the domain you want is already taken - subdomains.

That's http://subdomain.domain.com - see?

I long ago got the domain midwestjournalpress.com as a publishing imprint. This then gets extended by simply setting up a site at the subdomain. (Like http://picturebook.midwestjournalpress.com - our test case.) Of course, I take this a bit further by setting these new sites up on Blogger, with CNAMEs. You can see that the original domain is then infinitely extensible - so you can put any sort of keyword in front of your current domain and have the best of both worlds.

Analytics

A bit tricky here - you want to know what's going on with your site. Who's visiting, what they are using to get there, that they like best, the countries they come from - all that and more. Wherever you host your domain, if you have a site there, you can find out all this from your host.

However, if you are just passing your subdomain over to Google, then you could be missing some analytics. Not to worry - Google has even better analytics, due to combining their Adwords tools and Webmaster Tools in one interface. With Google, and getting your site running for awhile, you'll find all sorts of data about your avatar - way more "granular" than you can get from Alexa or your own domain host. For all the limits of Blogger as a platform, this more than makes up for it. (Of course, you can get these analytics for all your sites on any platform. So it's a tool you should be using whether you run ads or whatever you do. Also your Analytics can plug into almost anything that has a web address...

Other points: burn your feed with Feedburner to get some additional analytics (it's another Google product.)

Having a Google+ page for your series makes a lot of sense (as G+ is part of the Google universe.)

Facebook has some analytics, as well as Twitter. Might as well access them if you're doing promotion down that line.

A note here: access these weekly, or at least monthly, to see how your traffic and links are going. Then you can adjust your marketing - change course, or expand what you're doing right.

Mobile Template

As I went over elsewhere - the world is going mobile, so having a website/blog which does mobile right is essential.

Some other points you want to include are:

• Sharing widgets
• Any affiliate products you push
• G+ badge (from your Google+ page)
• Facebook badge (from your Facebook page)

All these back up your social signals (and can earn you more income.) But that's not all...

Opt-in

This is what I've been most guilty of - not building my list. And it's pegged my income.

So do what I haven't - get your opt-in (and ethical bribe) ready from day one - even before you post a single landing page. Really. Just do it.

Get your email provider to give you the script and plug it in - make sure it's prominent and shows up on your mobile version.

Test, tweak, test - until it's great. Just what your avatar has always wanted.

And yes, this is great to introduce them to your membership (both free and paid.)

Legal Pages

Google wants these:

• disclaimer 
• disclosure  
• terms of use  
• privacy

There are a lot of scripts online which can give you versions of these, which you just post as pages and then link through the template so they show up on every view. 

Summary

Well, that about does it. Remember to use this as a checklist - get it done, but have fun with it. Let your muse guide you: there's still a lot of leeway and creative work to do in these.

Remember, though, that your real work still lies ahead. Your site just gives you a great start in getting your books to sell.

Note: why do I keep talking about a blog instead of a static site? Simple: Search engines like regular new content. Having a blog format gives you a leg up in this area. Even if you neglect it, it will still rank better than most other sites. Tumblr and Wordpress even as backups (through IFTTT) will help you rank better - as they will also be ranking along with your main blog.

- - - - 

I hope next post to get back to work with my books. Bring you up to speed and show you where I left off before I started this whole "organize" scene. A bit shocking, even for me...

Don't miss out - make sure you're subscribed by email or newsletter.

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Save Time, Save Money, Get Loved - Case Study 06

(Graphic: Coloroverboard.com)

How to Save Time and Money - and Find Love.

Well - link-love, anyway.

We're talking social media here. Many of these are interlinked with various programs that will send your status updates, and even post blogs for you.

The technical name for this is syndication. Newspapers and radio programs still do this, as do TV networks. Movies are distributed in a similar fashion.

But the Internet does this best. A good piece of content-media can get shared by millions.

Your job, should you accept this, is to get your message out to the world.

Today, we're going to talk about two programs you should know about that can help you promote your book.

These take care of detail work - mundaine, grinding, and most authors won't go there. I didn't talk about them on the spreadsheet proper (much) but can now tell you since you've been through all those steps.

Caveat: Again, all these do is to "prime the pump." If you send out salesy, garbage content, don't expect anyone to respond. You'll just tick them off and get yourself blocked. This is not without risk. Improperly done, you can become a social pariah and lose friends - or have only shallow associations. If you value the people you know on social media, then tread lightly - and follow these instructions carefully.

The time saver - IFTTT

No, I didn't stumble.

Stands for If This Then That.

This is one of the few still standing, and is fairly new. The story to syndication services is one of success, attrition, buy-outs, and close outs. Companies like HootSuite simply bought up competition, who in turn had bought out competition (those pictures of tiny fish eaten by bigger fish eaten by larger fish come to mind...)

And while Hoot Suite is still pretty good, it's limited (unless you want to pay them.)

IFTTT does this quite simply - when something happens on one site, it sends a message to other sites. It can even run your internet-connected house if you want. (Example: when you get a sale on GumRoad, it can dim your lights momentarily.) 

IFTTT runs on "recipes" which interconnect "triggers" and "actions" so that when something happens over here (ex: person buys on gumroad) it sends a signal for something to happen over there (ex: lights are momentarily dimmed.) If you post an image, it can copy that image to several other places. Same for blog posts.

Our use of this is to simply make sure that our social posts and status updates go everywhere we want to show up.

A necessary sidebar: Check out Knowem.com - what this does is to ensure your brand is taken care of.  Your brand name can be registered on all the biggest social media sites out there - so no one can market that except you.  On the front page of Knowem is all the top ones. The others are nice, but mostly also-rans as far as traffic - so they wouldn't get your book much exposure for discovery.

If you cross-compare IFTTT and Knowem, you'll see the key social media you need to exist on and to cross link.

Warning - there be dragons and perilous cliffs...

Here's where the hazardous part comes in.

Social sites are meant to be social. Means they hate fakes and salesy media-content. Meanwhile, there is all sorts of tales about how having huge followings will give you sales and so on - all unprovable, since those results can't be duplicated. And as well, most of the "followers" are fake - up to 70% for some politicians. (The recent story you may have heard that several thousand "active" twitter followers of Obama turned out to be the work of just a hundred or so hackers who would "re-tweet" through that network.)

Most social media sites are filled with lurkers who sign up and then do nothing.

But the few who are active and do value the interaction really resent being fed obvious garbage - and might not just un-follow you, but instead start a real negative campaign against you. (Like getting people to vote you down or give you bad ratings on Amazon.)

The key is to always, always give great value away - far more than any simple promotion like "I just released another book - check it out." The ratio is something like 20-1 or so. That's the simple rules of social posting.

OK? Now let's get to work.

Where you should be

Look up IFTTT and you'll see 187 sites represented. Really. That's a lot.

When we compare this to Knowem, it narrows down to a handful. You'll need to sign up with accounts on each of these - and fill out your profile on each of them, so you look like a real person, not just a 'bot.

Let me cut to the chase:

Status Updates:
From (trigger sites below) to Twitter, Facebook, Facebook page, Linkedin, bit.ly, delicious, digg, diigo

Video
From YouTube to Tumblr, Wordpress, Blogger, Status Updates
From DailyMotion to Tumblr, Wordpress, Blogger, Status Updates

Cover Art
From Flickr to Instagram, 500px, Status Updates

Landing Pages and blog posts
From Blogger to Wordpress, Tumbr, Status Updates

Audio
From Soundcloud to Status Updates

Presentation
From GDrive to Box, Status Updates

Do your own study of these to see if you can improve on them. The key point is that you get word out that whatever you just posted is available. You post to five sites and 12 get alerted. About seven will get notified when you send any sort of varied media out.

On these original sites (the five mentioned above) that content is linked to your landing page. Your landing page is hardlinked to all your distributors, as well as having a place to buy from you directly - and maybe even access to buying your BitTorrent bundle.

One side benefit is that the distributors will be getting a lot of traffic about your book, as will your landing page.

There are a lot of recombinations around. The trick is to avoid echoes. Use just one syndication service and double check to ensure you aren't sending duplicates out there. (That's a red flag to the search engines that you're spamming.)

Now for the heavy hitter...

Synnd - the quiet giant

This is a different approach to the same problem. It was created with the idea of giving a jumpstart to SEO for bloggers. Actually, it's roots probably go back to the old Digg cadres - where a handful of people were actually determining what got "dugg" and what got "buried". They all dugg each other's stuff, so that when one liked it, they all liked it - and when one buried it, they all buried it.

Kinda like a Good Old Boy's Network. In Synnd's case, it wasn't collusion as much as it was cooperation. The original scene was that you earned credits by bookmarking someone else's material and could spend that credit to get other people bookmarking your stuff. You could only spend what you got paid, and the work was apportioned automatically, with all the members computers simply doing what they were asked with a tiny program that ran on it in the background. You asked (and paid), the network delivered.

In this case, they worked with the search engines said they wanted to hear about - social signals.

There's a lot of theory to why search engines follow social media. The main one points back to how they stay in business - organizing data that people want and giving it to them when they ask for it.

Terms like "authority" and "trust" really just mean that people want some things more than others and will re-visit (and stay a long time when they visit) the sites they think are good. Tweets with links and keyword phrases tell a lot about a site and whether it's trusted to be an authority.

The idea of getting a bunch of people together who will tweet, like, bookmark, and generally share each others sites is pretty sensible. This is why groups are good things, and people keep joining them and starting new ones. Mutual back-scratching and such.

Synnd's not cheap, and you don't see the results right away. After all, there are a usually a few other sites on the top of the heap you have to push aside - and many have been there for awhile, so they're tested. But the search engines are always looking for "the next big thing" to show up - so give a new site a leg up to see if it stays popular.

Can you use cheaper tools? Sure, like Hootsuite and Onlywire. But they are really no better than IFTTT for getting the word out on platforms you have already staked out. Synnd coordinates thousands of other people and their unique computer addresses to do this work for you. In my mind, this is a very cheap investment which pays huge.

Where I've used Synnd, it helps those sites get and stay up there - provided I put good content there for people to find and appreciate. Where I've seen it fail always goes back to not doing enough and not using it they way they said to.

Synnd runs on campaigns, which is a set of "votes" by the network. There are bookmarking, social news, and other campaigns to use. You'll want to run more than one type of campaign on a site if you can. Even if you only have salesy content, you can at least get that page or link bookmarked.

Again, Synnd isn't there to make your site rank, it's there to give you all the right signals to the search engines by priming the pump. You have to have good content which is valuable in order to earn the right to stay on that heap top once you get there.

There's a lot of data they have for free on how it works and how to use it.

Video Synnd-ication

One great asset Synnd has is the ability to syndicate your videos - and then run bookmarking and social news campaigns (social signals again) on these videos.

Videos are some of the greatest tools to promote your book with. YouTube is the third-most used search engine out there right now. There are many, many video sites because that is what people want to see - probably because videos are stories and we all think in stories.

The video sites you'll need to sign up for, and have paid accounts with (so Synnd can do it's magic) are:

• Flickr
• YouTube
• Photobucket
• DailyMotion
• Phanfare

(These are the sites which don't cost you an arm and a leg to get started. There are others, but these five will take videos you submit.)

You simply upload your video to Synnd, along with the meta data, and they upload it for you, plus then make it "popular" by creating social signals.

Again, see their documentation.

If you want to do something right, sometimes it's DIY.

There are some sites which are key, but aren't on IFTTT or Synnd. You approach these much as you do porting your book. Set up bookmarks in a folder on your browser and then "open each bookmark as tab".

Here's the list (which doesn't include IFTTT - which runs in the background.)

Blog post (LP)
    Blogger
Video   
    Synnd
Covers   
    Flickr
    G+ (public)
    Pinterest
Presentations   
    Slideshare
    Scribd
    Doc-Stoc
    Issuu
    Gdrive (public)
Audio   
    archive.org
    Soundcloud

Once you do these, then IFTTT will copy the content around for you. Synnd will take your video - and you'll be able to set your campaigns from that tab.

This list integrates with your to-do spreadsheet, which isn't set in stone. Adjust it as you see fit.

You can note that on the spreadsheet, I set IFTTT Setup right after the Book Landing page column. All the IFTTT setups really only need to be done once.  But you have a day's work signing up for these various sites and linking up the recipes. Just pile in and get it done.

Note: presentations are PDF's just like promotional book excerpts. They both get updated to the same key doc-sharing sites as separate content.

Your mileage may vary - a lot.

The point of this is all "Multiple eyeballs" and "Caring Sharing". You're creating multiple versions and porting them everywhere you can. And getting these syndicated so that you don't have to spend a month per book just getting the data out about each one. You've got a whole series to promote.

Life can interrupt so that you don't get all your media produced until later.

With a spreadsheet, you can always just say, "Oh right, now where were we?" - and then you can carry on, calmly.

No two books sell the same. No two promotional campaigns will get the same result.

The point of this spreadsheet and these actions are to give you a fighting chance to get your book discovered and sell well online.

Volume (deep backbench) is what will pay more than spending time on social signals. Lots of books selling somewhat decently might be better than putting all your eggs into a single book in order to "make it a bestseller".

Again, this marketing is all built on what works in other areas. It's built on why some books sell when they do, the reasons why some authors have broken through. Sure, it's a ton of work. But you'll find that if you set this up on a spreadsheet basis, you can work on this a bit each day and get it  done, while you are also writing your next book - or editing your next series into one.

While some people like ads, I don't. It's too close to gambling for my taste. If I am spending for ad-blockers, then why would I want to spend money on ads that people like me are ignoring?

I'd rather spend my time and money on great media-content that people are already looking for. Move my targets in front of people who are shooting their arrows there.

These tools make some of your target-moving somewhat automatic. The volume of the work to be done just makes certain that we can hide these secrets right out in the open. No one with a "get rich quick" mentality will try it - it involves too much work. Once you do set this up for yourself and move through it, then the pieces will all fall into place the next time you do it.

Another side benefit is that the more books you get up there and market in this fashion - the more your name and brand are being built up with the search engines. Your later waves you create will help float your earlier boats that much higher.

It's all based on how much you want to succeed, and how much you want to work at it. That comes right back to having and following a bliss - your "Burning Desire" as Napoleon Hill has it.

Everything that goes around, comes around.

- - - -

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