Marketing A Book On The Internet

[Letting Go Pro]

Hello all. We are preparing for marketing my book on the internet in 2009. We plan to spend the entire year fully focused on this effort. We are planning to offer affiliate opportunities, I will be writing articles, doing press releases, and the like. BUT, I want to know if there is anything else that we could do to increase our market penetration on line. Our primary target market is female, secondary market is self help organizations and not for profits. Any suggestions? You can see the book before you respond on the website link in my signature below. Thanks in advance for your suggestions.

[MissieK]

Kathie Thomas has some great ideas

Contact some of the women's websites & send them a book to review, maybe even offer a copy as a prize for a competition. This way you can get right in front of women.

Melissa

[Warren Cottis]

Hi Darren

Before chasing new traffic you might want to review what you are doing with your existing traffic. The domain that you quoted doesn't take you to your home page but to an opt in page which is rather confronting .... going then to your home page it is not very personal considering your market. You might take your picture from "about the author" and put it on the home page .... just some quick observations... cheers

360 Digital Performance | Complete Digital and Marketing Agency

[marnieb]

I have to agree about the opt-in page.

Aside from that, you could review opportunities for viral marketing such as web applications like Twitter, particularly if you already have an established profile on there.

You'd be amazed at the power of 'retweets'.

[JohBD]

I found the opt-in page a bit confronting too as there is no information to make up your mind first.

As for getting the word out, why not try contacting female-orientated magazines, newspaper sections and websites with an extract of the book, or an article based on one of the chapters?

Johanna

[kathiemt]

Thanks for the mention Melissa.

I've been going down this road with my own books. In fact I have a thread in this section about an Amazon promotion and you should have a read of that as various things have been discussed there.

Things I have done are:

• Sourced suitable discussion forums and participated there - ahead of time
• Developed a website for the book and included it in signature blocks
• Talk about it
• Notify people in advance when it is going to be ready and take advance orders
• Contact magazines and other publications of your target audience to get reviews (I have a woman's magazine reviewing right now)
• Offer free copies for review and ask people to write reviews and send them to you, or submit them wherever you need them
• Contact bookstores to see if they are interested in stocking the book (I have a major chain store reviewing my book right now)
• Contact community radio stations and offer review copies in hope of an interview (I have two radio stations reviewing my latest book right now)
• Contact local newspapers for articles/press releases
• Write a blog about your topic and look for recent media articles that relate to your topic and link to them

There are other things but these should help - if you haven't thought of some before.

[LeelaCosgrove]

For starters, I don't think 'females' is a good enough target market.

Marketing a product to a 25 year old middle class woman who is single, lives in Sydney and works as a recruitment consultant is different to marketing to a 35 year old woman with two kids who lives in Melbourne and is a WAHM, running her own business is different to marketing to a 55 year old woman with four adult kids who lives in Brisbane and works part time in child care (hi mum!).

I am a female, but I'm not a mother, I don't read women's magazines or the local paper and I don't have anything to do with any websites that would identify as being particularly for women.

So, if you wanted me to buy your book, none of those things would be of any use.

Drill down and define your target market more clearly and THEN we can think about what will work.

I think what a lot of business people tend to do is look at target markets as demographics instead of people. "Female" is a demographic (albeit, a VERY large one!) - "Leela" is a person. She is a particular person with particular tastes - the great thing about this is that if you identify your "Leela" (whoever she is!) then you can figure out WHERE she is ... where she hangs out regularly, what she's interested in, how to appeal to her - once you have THAT figured out ... everything else becomes E.A.S.Y!

Well, sort of ...

[Elizabeth Richardson]

Originally Posted by JohBD

I found the opt-in page a bit confronting too as there is no information to make up your mind first.

Yikes, I agree...that opt in box is really off-putting. Most people offer an incentive such as a free report, an e-book, a book excerpt etc, and have you thought about including a PRIVACY NOTE - "Your email address is only used to communicate with our interested subscribers and will never be given away or sold…and of course you can un-subscribe at any time too".

You might like to consider using the steps taken by an already successfully published author. The names Joe Vitale and Tim Ferris spring to mind. Tim also offers a 'book sample' to read prior to purchase and has his best testimonials in full view on the landing page.

All the best,

[bchapman]

You should have a companion site with a matching domain name, some information about the authors and generally a sales pitch to help the target market identify themselves when they first look 'above the fold' on your site. Statements in clear text like 'The book for women who....<do whatever>' along with an attractive photo and perhaps some review quotes.

I would think seriously about publishing a blog to go with the book : you can just post bits and pieces of the topics - people won't mind if they purchase the book and find themselves going over things they've seen before. You could also think about a free e-book sample chapter or something like that.

Speaking of Tim Ferris ; the title of his book 'the 4 hour workweek' was chosen after doing adwords testing to see which of his ideas had the best impact. If you haven't yet settled on a title this alone will probably have a material effect on sales. I would suggest reading his book, particularly the section about ad testing - you could read the relevant chapter in a bookstore in about 5 minutes if you didn't want the book. He is a master of self promotion and there is much to be learnt from the way he made his first book an international best seller.

Basically he ran a series of ads using Google adwords and saw which prospective book title got the best click-through rate. In effect, the target market chose the title that made them respond best. Sure beats guesssing. You don't have to spend a lot of money on ads to get decent results doing testing.

My advice would be to spend as much money and time on your site as possible, because I can guarantee it will be the hardest working member of your sales team. It will keep plugging away, 24 hours a day, selling the book long after the womens magazines are in the rubbish and the radio interviews are a distant memory. Chances are the site will be the first port of call for someone who reads about it or hears it on the radio. Sell direct through the site and you'll get better margins as well.