How To Market Your Book Online: Part 1

Ok, about every 2-3 weeks now I meet someone who’s a smart savvy business person who is thinking about writing a book of their own, or already has written one, and is trying to figure out how to market it.

When we get to talking they often want to know how I’ve created the success around my online eBook and CD/DVD catalog of products. (I market my books and products for women at www.CatchHimAndKeepHim.com where I’ve spent over 3 years writing content and marketing to over a million women 2-3 times a week.)

I thought I’d answer some of the more common questions and give some guidance for publishing and marketing your book online. I’ll be updating this topic on publishing your book online and internet marketing in a few parts, starting with this as a first lesson here I think is the right place to start.

Step 1 In Marketing Your Book Online: Find Your “Hungry Crowd”

I’ll tell you a quick story. I have a close friend who started marketing an eBook of his own online about a year before I launched mine. This friend was someone who was more experienced than I was at the time. We’ll call him Eric.

Eric had written a book that was an amazing solution for his audience.

He also had some clear goals based on his online advertising knowledge and experience- to have a multi-million dollar business within 12 months or so. His plan made sense, and he even had all the right resources to do so.

Eric knew there was a big market out there for his subject matter and was excited about making it big as he had seen lots of others in our group do in different areas and markets.

Eric launched to some great initial numbers. He saw that this thing would sell, life was good, and he had it made. Or so he thought.

Eric grew his business quickly to just past the $30,000/month level after 4-6 months. Great right? Not when he found he couldn’t get past that point.

The scalability just wasn’t there in his market. At least in the medium in which his business operated- exclusively through online marketing and advertising. To make a long story short Eric spent 18 frustrating months trying to grow his business but was never able to get past this plateau level. (Even though $30,000/month is a nice little biz.)

About a 18 months into his business, something happened that really bothered Eric-

After struggling to grow his business and doing all kinds of brilliant things that should have worked but didn’t move the revenue needle forward, my friend watch as I started publishing my new book. Within just a few shorts months (3-4 I think) my business had outgrown his, and it was on a strong growth curve. My business continued amazing growth for the next 2 years.

Eric had a really tough time with this- as he’s one of those friendly competitive guys. He asked himself,

“Why was he so much more successful? Is he smarter than I am? Is he just lucky?”

He toiled over it for weeks and months.

One day Eric called me up and had to confess…

“Chance, I’ve got to be honest with you. I’ve been racking my brain trying to figure out why in the world your business is doing so much better than mine. At first I thought it was luck. Then I started feeling really bad about myself because I thought you were so much smarter than me, and your stuff was better. But then it hit me… it wasn’t any of this. It was your MARKET that was at the core of your success. Sure you’ve got great marketing and great products, but you’re doing way better in your business than I am in mine because of the market you went after.”

Eric hit the nail on the head. When you have a large hungry crowd, it can feel like having your products sell themselves. Although it sure helps to be really good at what you’re doing and to deliver REAL VALUE in what you do.

The question is, how is this actionable and usable for you?

First, think about what a “hungry crowd” is in business and in marketing. And then think about how can you think about yours and find it. Here’s a tip on doing that…

The magic of the internet gives us an almost instant ability to look at a market. Using some freely available tools we can see:

-HOW MANY people are searching for a specific word or phrase (for a quick guess at the “scale” of your market)
-RELATED SEARCH TERMS and phrases
-WHO ELSE is marketing to this crowd
-THE ADS the other people in your market are using
-HOW MUCH others are paying to market to the crowd

Where is all this data available for free you ask? Once place is through Google AdWords. You can sign up for a Google account and use their entire keyword research toolset for free with no obligation to spend a cent. www.adwords.google.com

I’ll put it to you this way- if it was even just 10-12 years ago, getting this kind of response data about any market/product category would have cost you many many tens of thousands of dollars to get at, as well as months or years of time.

Let me walk you through an example.

Let’s say you were a psychologist and you wanted to write a book on the common situation of “burn-out” you see in your patients and market it online. You know it’s a REAL ISSUE of concern and that people who have it really need help, and you know you have the answer

But is there a hungry crowd for the way you’re looking to approach then “burn-out” market? Is there even a burn out market worth going after?

If you first think about the fact that you’re looking to market your book online, you might realize that the people who are actually “burned out” aren’t online raising their hand in any way letting you as a marketer know that they are one of your target audience members. It’s very unlikely that someone who is burned out is online typing in “burn out” into Google for answers. Actually, they are probably more likely to be busy doing work, or zoning out watching tv trying to soothe themselves.

If you use the Google keyword tool in Adwords, you’ll find that there aren’t many people (relatively) searching for “burn out”. About 3,840 monthly searches for the phrase “burn out”. Also, there are over 52,000,000 sites indexed by Google who already have highly ranked information about burn out on their site.

Hmmm… Doesn’t sound like the ideal way to get at a hungry crowd. Sounds like “burn out”, even though it’s a big and real problem for people, isn’t something they’re hungry to know and search and learn about. It’s low on their priority list of things they identify as significant or important about themselves.

Now, here’s the strange part where it sounds like I contradict myself.

If you have a great book about how to cure “burn out”, and you do manage to get a great ad in front of someone who is really suffering from “burn out”, guess what? The odds are pretty good that they will notice your ad and have that magic “I have to read more about that” moment as a result.

But remember, the reason I’m having you look for a hungry crowd isn’t that people wouldn’t find your product useful… it’s that it’s going to very hard to find and target the right audience who is suffering from burn out on any kind of large scale.

Here’s another example-

I have a friend who’s a killer PR gal. Super sharp. She’s writing a book on how to do successful PR for yourself inside your business.

How should she approach finding her hungry crowd?

Well, there’s a little audience of people searching for “PR”, “free PR”, and “how to write a press release”. These are great targeted terms that a direct sales page clearly stating the benefits of how you can teach them to write a successfully press release that gets picked up is certainly going to do well in terms of convering, if you know what you’re doing with your copywriting.

But not many people are searching for these targeted terms. (What search marketers call “tail terms”)

To expand and find a bigger hungry crowd, she might think about what the larger issues/problem/desire is for people who could use the skill of being good at doing your own PR. This would likely be people/business who are:

-Having a hard time finding an advertising or marketing budget
-Don’t have a direct sales/copy system setup to sell their products
-Don’t want to get into the direct marketing/sales world and instead want to use PR
-better speakers and networkers than they are “marketers”

Considering all this, I’d bet you could find a larger hungry crowd using the following ideas and words and phrases as keywords, or even in your ad copy:

-free advertising
-advertising on no budget
-free sales
-free marketing
-no cost PR
-Bad At Sales? Try Free PR
-Why Direct Sales Is Tired

I think you’re starting to see how this works.

Someone who wants to “write a good press release” is part of a targeted audience. But people who don’t have an advertising budget but are dying to grow their businesses are part of a ravenous mob.

If you ask yourself “How can I target the larger audience that has a very defined problem/need/desire?”, and you focus on what real human beings are looking for and thinking about in THEIR LANGUAGE, you’re eventually going to have a shift in your thinking that will help you make your product address not just a real need, but a real need people are asking for.

There’s an old rule in life- don’t give advice unless people ask for it.

It’s even more true in marketing.

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