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Book Platform and Promotion Tip – Create a Business Blog

What other questions do you have about your blog? Please comment below and share what is and is not working for you.

One question came to me in my book group at Linkedin this week.

Q. How can my new or revise my old blog to sell more books and attract new qualified clients (not lookie loos)?

Your site must work in tandem with your online promotion. It must build your book platform. What good does it do to tweet if your best audience doesn’t get a link to your opt-in free things to be part of your gold–your database. You must coordinate all of this.

Judy reminds you of these important steps to make your site sell more books and attract more clients:

Step 1. Know your targeted audience before you write your site or your blog. This is what I coach all clients on as the first step to book writing and promotion success for anything, including their books. Write a letter to your #1 best audience; name it specifically, not generally. For example,

Dear Small Businesses, Many of you want to write a book to brand and promote your business. When you educate your audience, you are really educating and promoting in a positive way to attract them to your site and your book.

Published on February 23, 2010 at 9:28 AM by Judy Cullins


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Book Marketing Tip – Share Your Blog with Social Networking Sites

Wouldn’t it be great to sell books before yours is done? As part of your author’s promotion platform – all done before you finish your book?

  • Share parts of your book and gather comments and questions about it. This works for fiction as well as non-fiction. When you engage your blog visitors, you’ll get a following, and they’ll be more likely to buy your book with a special pre-publication offer, or after you publish it. Before blogs, one bookcoaching client emailed a sales message to her newsletter subscribers and got an immediate 100 book sales.

  • Parlay even more pre-publication book visibility by creating tweets of each blog post with a benefit statement and its link, then sharing these at Linkedin in the news article sections of all the groups you belong to. When you belong to many LI groups who are your book’s audience, and you post regularly, you will see like me in just a month your targeted visitors from Linkedin and Facebook increase by 25% (from Google Analytics). With only pre-promotion to your book’s best audience, and not to big numbers of followers who don’t really want your information, you’ll get much lower bounce rates at your site too. That means these people really want information about your book’s topic. Then, sales conversions increase at least double.

Published on February 21, 2010 at 10:36 AM by Judy Cullins


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Book Branding Pre-Marketing Checklist to Stand Out from the Crowd

During my early days as a book coach, I discovered not only a creative way to present my Passion at any Age chapters, but also a way to brand myself as the Passion Coach. Since then, I changed to be a full service book coach to help authors write the best book they can and make it profitable. Branding is part of the pre-marketing you must do to win at this game. I ask you did you Brand your non-fiction book inside and out?

___1. Did you give it a branded title?  If a lot of other titles are your competition in your non-fiction or self-help category, you want yours to stand out from the crowd. A title helps do just that.

___2. Did you make each chapter title branded to support your book title? This is what big time, well-known authors do, and you can too. Again, it sets you off as the expert or go to person in your field.

Published on February 16, 2010 at 9:01 AM by Judy Cullins


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Social Media – Collecting Numbers and It’s Not Working?

For any of your social networking you need a promotion strategy to get your messages to the right people–your target audience. You don’t need to collect followers, friends, or contacts. With social networking it’s best to form a quality audience who wants information from you than collect big numbers who really don’t care and that you will have no interaction with.

For Twitter, Facebook, and Linkedin, I have changed course. Now I concentrate on attracting my audience on Facebook and Linking to my fan page and my book group to keep receiving great free content from me with links to my site, so they would opt-in. Intermittently, I offer one of my 11 books or MP3 audios for sale.

On FB, I emailed my friends and book group with the benefits to change places, and really almost all of them joined me. I got just one complaint from Facebook, but he wasn’t in my audience anyway.

On LinkedIn, I’ve changed my marketing approach. Before I connect with new requests, I offer them more interaction with me at my “Book Writing, self-publishing, and marketing book for Business People group” there.  Why business? Because they are my best audience rather than just authors. In it, we discuss all kinds of business writing and who doesn’t need help in that? I also joined 35 other business groups who I felt would benefit by my articles and discussions.  Now, I can send them direct email messages of upcoming useful content or seminars besides the discussion topics and new news articles.

Published on February 15, 2010 at 9:23 AM by Judy Cullins


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Does Your Website Bring you Clients and Sales?

Many coaches come to me for their book projects, but I also coach on websites that sell you. So many unnecessary mistakes. I know, I’m on my 5th revision, optimizing and updating and would love to share with this audience some powerful tasks we did to boost clients and sales. To set up a site that offers books and services, you need to agree it’s for attracting and keeping clients–in other words, a site that sells. No shame in that.

More things that guarantee lifelong income for you at your site:

1. Make one site for one audience. Don’t hodgepodge with your business and your personal growth book at the same site, unless you are a personal/life coach. Create your site around a theme.

2. Change your keywords. We have changed our key words to long tail, low competition. These are the ones people Google to get information. We know that’s part of the success. Because many of my site’s pages are on page one of Google. For example, the key words “book coaching” “publish your book online,” are updates of ones that didn’t do us much good because they were too popular. These key words and your content show you as the”go to” person they should come to when ready for your service.

Published on February 8, 2010 at 9:56 AM by Judy Cullins


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Use Twitter for Business and Books in Six Starting Steps

Do you know what Twitter is? It’s a micro-blogging site that allows you to interact in short messages of 140 characters with your primary audience and experts in your field in. If you wonder the value and Return on Investment, know your purpose for using Twitter first. Your Purpose? To develop business relationships and get your target audience to your site to either opt-in for free information or buy your services and products.

Is Twitter Worth it?

After 2 years on Twitter, I’ve found you can get a rather big Return on Investment of your time with it. My Web site opt-in conversions went up 25% a month, my ezine sign ups went up 25%, my teleseminars got filled to the brim. And my sales from sending promotion to these who are now on my data base increased significantly.

Will you Make Mistakes Along the Way?

You bet. There’s a learning curve and it takes time to develop a following. Just be patient with the process and prepare yourself before you leap.

Published on February 7, 2010 at 10:03 AM by Judy Cullins


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What is Self-Publishing?

Opinions vary about self-publishing. I self-published 11 of my own print and eBooks that are business books about book writing, self-publishing, and book marketing. Self-publishing is not a vanity press option, where you can get a company to get your family cookbook or anything into print. And Print on Demand is a digital printing offering, not publishing or marketing. While many choose it because they don’t know the downfalls of it and they get disappointed. I have offered discussions on Print on Demand at my book group at Linkedin.com.

Think YOU when you think self-publishing. YOU are responsible for all the things that you must do to get your book into the hands of your readers. YOU get an ISBN number for each book, which makes you a publisher unless you plan to only sell your book at your Web site. YOU can set up a publishing name/business as Dan Poynter advises since some book printers won’t work with individuals. But, you don’t have to.

Published on February 6, 2010 at 10:07 AM by Judy Cullins


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Did you Know that your Book Brands your Business?

Branding is a marketing concept that’s been around for decades.

Think of Donald Trump whose name is his brand. When you buy his books, you’ll know that HE is the brand. Like Donald Trump, your business may be smaller, but can get a big boost when your write a book that educates your audience on your service, and its benefits that will attract them to your business Web site and also sell books.

A book is the number one way to brand your business and get big credibility as well as visibility.

Published on February 5, 2010 at 10:39 AM by Judy Cullins


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Use Twitter to Fill Your Teleseminars and Build Your ROI

We did this marketing plan BEFORE tweets were connected to my FB Fan Club and my Linkedin Profile.

Over three months, I did a series of free teleseminars on eBook writing and marketing, online marketing with twitter, and one on article marketing. I gave myself a month to market on twitter primarily in addition to my email list opt-ins who come to my site for all the free content I share there.

Follow my Steps of What I Do and Fill your Teleseminars to the brim:

  1. Establish rapport with my target audience -business people who want content writing and marketing help.
  2. Give book writing and marketing tips with no URLS to show my expertise without agenda.

Published on February 3, 2010 at 12:55 PM by Judy Cullins


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