Today’s Ask Dr. Diane: I just wrote a book that is available through Amazon. I’m just not sure about the best way to market it? Any suggestions?
That is a good question. The tips I’m about to give can also be used to market things other than a book.
You could market it through several ways. I would create a link to it on your site like I have
links on my main website to
Amazon. If you don’t want to do that, you could offer it directly from you as a PDF through your site and charge them using
PayPal.
You might want to make a
video (3-4 minutes at most) and put it on
Youtube. At the end of the video make mention of a free offer or newsletter and where to go for more information. If they go to that site, it should be a capture page to get people signed up to receive free newsletters (through a site like
aweber.com) to get them interested in you and your book.
You definitely need to be on
Facebook and create fan pages like the ones I have for each of my books there. See:
I would be on
Twitter as well. You can tie all of your Facebook, Twitter,
WordPress, etc. accounts into one area on sites like
Hootsuite . . . but I like to use Posterous a lot. It is like a blog but it has a great share information toolbar that you can get that and it also allows you to share your updates on multiple sites like Hootsuite does.
If you want to learn about social networking and “how to do it” . . .for a reasonable price you can go to Letsgetsocial and sign up to get their videos. I watched them and they are really very informative. They are designed to teach people how to be media managers but people who don’t want to do the job of media management can learn how to do their own media management from them.
I gave a
presentation yesterday to a local group here where others were presenting to career-seekers … they all agreed that Youtube is one of the biggest things you can do to get noticed.
I watched a video a while back on
Pitchengine.com about videos and they had some good information. They are more costly though. You might watch their video for information. If you are going to spend that kind of money, you need to have a major product to promote. Books probably won’t have the return to support that.
Talks are another great way to promote your book . . . so are
radio interviews. You can go to radioguestlist.com or other sites like that to find people looking to interview you.
Blogging is one of the best ways to get your name out there. I like to use WordPress because it is free and uncomplicated.
You can also release press releases on
prweb or other such sites. I am on
wooeb who also has press releases that are not as expensive. You can send out free releases on
pitchengine.
You might check out some books . . . .I liked a book called
Career Renegade . . . had some good ideas. (on a different side topic . . .I liked the book
The Happiness Advantage written by ex Harvard professor – very entertaining)