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.

Starting And Growing Your Business

As an entrepreneur, it’s easy to fall in love with your own idea.

It’s even easier to think that everyone else who doesn’t get it is dumb or nuts.

Big mistake.

The counterintuitive side of this is that one of the best things you can do for yourself, your idea, and your business is to lay it out on the table for smart experienced people to look at and pick apart, and tell you what’s wrong with it. These are where the big lessons are learned and snags averted.

Of course, some people in business live just for this- to be problem identifiers, problem solvers, and carry the “you can’t do that flag.”

While I’m personally not very attracted to working with those people in business, the right people like this serve an important role.

Hearing what you don’t want to hear is often what you need to hear.

This morning I came across a very short and to the point list of core business “Must Have’s” from a group of people who have proven again and again that they know what they’re talking about – Sequoia Capital. They are one of the Venture Capital firms I look to. (Some portfolio companies include Google, 3Com, Oracle, LinkedIn, Electronic Arts, just to name a few you might have heard of)

The list I’m talking about is here at the Sequoia Capital Site, and I’ve quoted it below too.

I’m starting a new venture right now in a quasi-new business area for me (music and online music) and I’m taking more of my own medicine right now and meeting and sharing my story with people who will likely tell me why my idea might not work. I used to avoid this kind of thing in the past and now I welcome it- from smart people of course.

That’s why, as I read this short list on Sequoia’s site, I had some renewed confidence and clarity as I found that they look at many of the same things I obsessively look at and think about. The most important of which centers around not creating markets, but capturing them by fulfilling a large existing but yet to be “distilled” NEED.

I don’t sell things, I fulfill needs.

Here’s the list the list that’s posted on their website:

-Start-

Elements of Sustainable Companies

Start-ups with these characteristics often foretells the success of a business and the likelihood of it becoming a sustainable, enduring company. We like to partner with companies that have:

Clarity of Purpose

Summarize the company’s business on the back of a business card.

Large Markets

Address existing markets poised for rapid growth or change. A market on the path to a $1B potential allows for error and time for real margins to develop.

Rich Customers

Target customers who will move fast and pay a premium for a unique offering.

Focus

Customers will only buy a simple product with a singular value proposition.

Pain Killers

Pick the one thing that is of burning importance to the customer then delight them with a compelling solution.

Think Differently

Constantly challenge conventional wisdom. Take the contrarian route. Create novel solutions. Outwit the competition.

Team DNA

A company’s DNA is set in the first 90 days. All team members are the smartest or most clever in their domain. “A” level founders attract an “A” level team.

Agility

Stealth and speed will usually help beat-out large companies.

Frugality

Focus spending on what’s critical. Spend only on the priorities and maximize profitability.

Inferno

Start with only a little money. It forces discipline and focus. A huge market with customers yearning for a product developed by great” engineers requires very little firepower.

-End-

Ok- put this to use.

And Sequoia- if you guys want to invest, give me a call. Better yet, email me. Just know that I’m planning on a beta launch and driving subscribers and revenue before I look to leverage this, so you’ll have to wait til then.

Action Step For You If You’ve Got A New Business-

Take this list and give yourself a good while to run your ideas and strategy through each one. Then challenge yourself to deliver on them all with one coherent strategy. Your business, and most importantly, your customers, will thank you for it.

Remember- even true miracle cures don’t sell themselves. They need bad informercials for that…

Connecting To The Human Being (Customer)

I’m sitting here with a great friend and we’re talking about his latest exciting venture marketing one of my all time favorite writers/artists on the spiritual side of self-help- David Deida.

My friend will be launching a new monthly audio membership site at TheDeidaSource.com

Helping him with his marketing, launch, and social media strategy… first thing you should know is that we’ve got a couple of distinctions made. These are two important distinctions about his prospects and potential customers. They are:

1) Existing Fans- There are a lot of people who are already fans of Deida and love his work. How and what we’ll do to attract and market to these people is radically different than how we’ll handle “Newbies”

2) Newbies- If you’ve never heard of Deida, and more to the point you haven’t really been doing this kind of “work” on yourself, then how and what we want to put in front of these people to attract them and get them to convert (sign up for newsletter, blog, membership) is not at all what the existing fans will receive.

Point being, we are actually going to create 2 seperate channels to connect with and market to both these general audiences.

I’ve literally seen people triple their business with simple insights and distinctions like this, or become 10-20x better at attracting new customers with less effort. That is, once they find the right way to find, identify, and present a relevant message to these people.

Insight: Your products/services won’t sell themselves just because they are great, cool, or other people rave about them. What will sell them is how you connect the dots on how your stuff is valuable to your prospect.

So what if you’re pretending that all your prospects think and act the same way, talk the same language, and respond to the same things for the same reasons.

Big mistake.

That’s why I’m making sure my friend divides the camps in his marketing for his Deida audience and targets his marketing approach.

The point is simple-

When you think about who the actual recipient of your marketing is, and you stop pretending that they are all the same, you begin to dive into THEIR WORLD.

When you finally get past all your BS about what you know, and you start paying attention to them, you’re going to recognize some important stuff. Like how they feel, what they’ve done before, what’s worked for them, what hasn’t, etc. Simply mentioning that you know all this about them can make for good marketing. Great marketing goes a step further.

Recognizing “important stuff” about people in their past, and foretelling their future is arguably the single most valuable activity you can do as a marketer. Why? Because it allows you to paint a window of their world and place it in front of them. And when you do this, people can’t help but be amazed and need and ask for more.

At the end of the day- we all love being understood for our pain, our pleasure, our abilities and our weaknesses a whole lot more than we’d like to admit.

The internet is the ideal place to do all this with your customer, because they don’t mind passively opening up in this way.

How much time do you spend making distinctions about the personal experiences of your prospects, readers, and customers?

I’m always amazed at how business people can listen to and study marketing, and then totally ignore what they’ve been told and jump to stupid conclusions about what their customers would be interested in.

I’ll say it clearly-

If you’re doing marketing of any kind- you are not your customer, and you do not get to choose or dictate who your customer is or how they think, feel, speak, etc.

The market you have chosen to be in, and the channel through which you are connecting with and putting your message in front of people is what dictates.

Action Step:

Put some time into how and when your message will appear in front of a real human being. Sit back and imagine this moment. Then stop to remember that no one wakes up and says, “I want to read some advertising and buy stuff I don’t really need today.”

Now, what will you say to them given the CONTEXT in which they will hear from you?

If you want raving repeat fans and customer, you’ve got to give them a reason that’s already all their own.

On Perceived Value & Pricing

Is the price of what we buy determined by some logical measure?

Is there a database we all look to so we can see what the price of milk is, or should be?

Technically speaking, there’s something close. The CPI (Consumer Price Index). This is really a collection or set of prices pieced together to give economists a window into the world of consumer goods pricing and purchasing activity.

But for us regular folk it would seem that there’s simply a “logic” to the price we’re willing to pay for the everyday items we buy. At least most of the time.

Of course there are exceptional moments to this like .com shares in the late 90’s, or Dutch Tulipmania of the 1630’s where at one time tulips and bulbs were going for as much as luxury houses.

Economists have a term- a luxury good. This is a product or service that isn’t effected by great variations in price. These are relatively price “inelastic”.

When it comes to more complex things, the rules of the game can be changed. Radically.

In the information publishing world, of which I’ve played a part, there’s an important concept called “Perceived Value”.

In short, it goes that your product or service doesn’t really have a value other than the value that your market/audience/list is willing to pay for it.

Based on this, marketers who understand perceived value always always always test multiple price points for their products. No matter what they think the price should be.

And here’s the interesting part- once they test and get statistically significant data, they don’t always choose the highest profit maximizing price. And they don’t always choose the price point that generates the most revenue. At least true marketers and strategic business people.

Which isn’t what they teach you in Econ classes or business school

They choose the price based on a few variables:

1) Who is my core audience and what is their income level?

2) How does this relate to the rest of my products, and help to position them and this product by the pricing I give this?

3) What am I doing now, and long into the future, that this pricing will have an impact one? (For instance, if you want to build a large customer list to upsell your higher priced “back end” products to, then you might pick a lower price point that generates less revenue but many more customers. The importance being that someone who has already paid for something from you is many times more likely to buy again later)

I’ll go out on a limb here and say that price testing is simply the best thing there is in marketing.

Oh, with the exception of affiliate deals where you get your hands on someones qualified customer list for no up front expense, all in one fell swoop.

Back to pricing and perceived value.

Some publishers try to create or raise their perceived value with tricks and gimmicks. A common one operates on the principles of Urgency and Scarcity. “Buy now. This deal only good for 24 hours, etc.”

I believe that the average consumer online is growing a bit more savvy. You used to be able to use all of those old direct marketing closes and calls to action.

Nowadays those not only read and feel dated. Your audience knows better.

I’d say it’s time to evolve past this if you’re serious about having a great business where your customers are “Raving Fans” even after they buy from you. (Would recommend you check out the book Raving Fans)

How does one do this?

In short, focus more deeply and clearly on the problem or frustration or opportunity your product or service is trying to help your customers with.

By making sure you deliver clear personal value to the individual who becomes your customer. You’d be surprised what “value” is to your customer.

Sometimes it’s just feeling heard and understood.

Sometimes it’s a simple set of instructions they didn’t have before.

Sometimes it’s proof in the form of a video showing an actual customer using or having success with your product, and giving them a concrete example of success for themselves to model.

Once you’ve delivered personal value to your potential customer, then the benefits of your products speak for themselves.

Although it never hurts to make sure you clearly and honestly articulate the personal benefits of your product or service in no uncertain terms.

Perceived value is all in your customers mind.

All told, if you’re going to focus on your product or brands perceived value… spend more time worrying about the benefits to your customer and what physical, emotional, social, or financial experience you want them to have as a result of your product.

Do this rather than trying to focus on building a feature-filled doo-dad that never even has real value until a human being uses it and places a value upon it.

Everything else is fantasy in your mind.

C’Mon- Does Helping Others Really Help Me?

Like me, after a long day of thought and work you may have often been struck by a feeling you don’t exactly love-

“Did I just spend my entire day doing things for other people?”

Before you become even more frustrated as you realize this, it’s important to remember-

Creating a great business, making an exceptional amount of money, being loved or admired by others, or fulfilling an important purpose is ultimately about the things you do for other people. Not yourself.

Especially if you’re working in western hemisphere in the 21st century. People have way too many choices- vendors, partners, services, products, outsourcing, open sourcing, etc. No one really needs you. And this is a reality all business people and marketers are forced to deal with, or pay the consequences.

The truth is… being exceptional, irreplacable, and unequivocally gratifying others above and beyond their expectations is the very thing that brings you huge rewards, financial and other. Not creating something that is going to make you money.

To this end, when was the last time you sat back from your work “for others” and deeply contemplated the most personal needs, dreams, frustrations and desires of the people those who your work will serve or benefit?

The answer is, even the people who are the very best at this don’t do this “stepping out of themselves” exercise nearly as much as they should.

Instead, they’re focused on how their new product or service, intended to “Wow” the recipients or customers, will ultimately benefit themselves. (more money, more free time, less worry, make them look good/smart/cool to others)

Over the years I’ve talked to and worked with many of the top self-help gurus, even the ones known for being selfless in helping others. Most of them aren’t far outside of the “help myself by looking like I’m busy helping others” feedback loop.

Being of service to others is the highest form of contribution to yourself, and if you’re going to keep a high level of sustained work, creativity, and productivity in your life, and make what I’d call an “unfair” living doing it… then I would strongly suggest you get yourself focused on serving others and not yourself.

Stay focused on the payoff being measured by those you serve both in and outside of your business. This brings about inherently sustainability.

Check out “The Power of Full Of Engagement” by Tony Schwartz and Jim Loehr for some great tips and specifics on the importance of service to others at work/purpose.

Otherwise, even if are one of the many who succeed in spite of themselves… I don’t believe you’ll end up having that much fun, nor too many great friends at the end of the day after you’ve cashed out and bought your Italian sportscar.

Your TV, your SUV, and your house will all be bigger, but so will your expenses and the gap between you and the things that really bring joy and satisfaction.