21 Ways to Market & Promote Your Book for FREE

1. Introduction: As an author, It's very clear what you love to do, right? You love the entire process of thinking through an idea, figuring out what your passion is about the topic or about the storyline. Getting into the writing mode, going into your writing back here, having time with your ideas and your thoughts, doing research on the book that you're writing, and then sitting down, laptop, pen, paper, whatever you use, and just allowing the words to flow out. I'm a writer, so I get that when you think about your life as a writer, the part that you crave and the part that you love is the writing of the book, the releasing of the words that are coming through you out onto the page that you can't wait to get into the hands of readers who are going to love what you write. It's an exhilarating process. Now, if you are an established writer, you also understand that writing in the span of a career as a writer is a very small percentage of which you actually do. As an established writer, you understand that writing is one piece of the pie. But when eighth of the pizza, which means the other seven pieces represent things like marketing, promotion, building your writers platform, editing, working with team members like graphic designers and editors and agents. You understand that the writing part, although exhilarating, is simply one piece and oftentimes a smaller piece when you compare it to marketing, promotions, and sales. Now if you're an aspiring writer, you're thinking, I loved the idea of writing a book but promoting it, selling it. I don't have money for advertising. What am I gonna do? Well, this is why this course is here for you. I m Cassandra von. I am your instructor for this course, and I am the author of over 29 books. And I have to tell you, I have spent way more time marketing and promoting my books than I ever have writing them. Now, what you'll learn about me is not only am I a writer and a speaker, but I am also a coach. So I have coached many authors and many business owners who became authors on how do you market and promote your book? And the one thing I've seen time and time again are people asking the question of, well, how much is this going to cost? And I can't afford to spend thousands and thousands of dollars on Facebook ads. What am I gonna do? What I tell those individuals and what I'm going to be teaching this course is that, yes, you can spend money promoting your book, selling your book, marketing your book. But there are so many free ways to do it. Begin with the freeways. And in this course, I'm going to teach you 21 ways to market and promote your book for free. Now, are these ways, can it be easy? Let me rephrase that. Are these waves going to be simple? Yes. Simple, yes. Easy. Not necessarily because anytime you are reducing the amount of money you're spending on marketing promotion, you're putting in a lot of sweat equity, which equals more time. So yes, there will be time investment, but by the, of course, you're going to have 21 ways to market and promote your book for free. Now, you can learn more about me by going to Cassandra von.com. You can learn more about me on my YouTube channel and you can certainly find me on Amazon where I have all of my 29 plus books available. The one thing I want to say as you join me for this course is this. Be ready to implement and be ready to implement a few of the strategies at a time. Not all 21, but you're going to learn each of the 21. I'm going to give you the detailed strategies. We're going to do walk-throughs of each of those 21 strategies step by step by step. So that you can reference this anytime you want to try a different strategy with a future book or with the same book over a long period of time. This is a course for anyone who really wants to not only write the book, you want to make sure the book sales are successful, you want to promote the book. You want to get into the hands of readers. You want people to know your work because you know how much it will change their lives if you are ready to learn how to market and promote your book for free at no cost. Then let's dive into the course. 2. What to Expect in This Course: Okay, so let's talk about what you can expect in this course. In 2001, ways to market and promote your book for free, you're going to learn the step by step walkthrough of 21 ways that you can market and promote your book at no cost. When I say No cause, I mean 0, not a penny zilch, not a $10 fee and out of $20 fee, not a twenty-five dollars for nothing. Free means free. Now the importance of understanding that is that 21 strategies is a lot. So I don't want you to go into this course thinking that you're going to, I'm going to give you these 21 strategies. I'm going to walk you through each one step-by-step. And now you've got to implement all 21 strategies for every single book you've ever written, or for every single book you plan to write. What I really want you to do, number 1, have pad and pen and notebook that is dedicated to the learning of this course. Have a dedicated journal or a notebook with a pen handy as you watch these videos. So you definitely want to be taking notes because they're going to be certain things I'm going to say that might hit you differently, that you might go high, really need to look into that. So first of all, be prepared as you watch these videos. Have a notebook that's dedicated to this course, have pen. Second thing you wanna do is jot down the strategies that really seemed to resonate with you. Now I'm going to give you 21 strategies. I do not want you to implement all 21 strategies for every single book you write. Some of the strategies are going to feel like, yeah, that, that is what I should do. And some of the strategy you're like, I don't know about that strategy. So I want you to have an open mind when you take this course. I want you to understand that you don't have to implement all of the strategies. Definitely not all of the strategies at once. And I want you to understand that more or less is more when it comes to marketing and promotion of a book. So a lot of people going to book marketing promotion, especially as writers. And they say things like you, everything, I gotta, I gotta throw everything at this marketing process so I can sell more books. While the problem with throwing everything and doing all things is that you are a jack of all trades and a master of none. So I'm giving you 21 strategies so you can pick and choose over time what you implement, but do not think you've got to implement alternative and strategies. Because what you will end up doing is you will be a jack of all trades and doing a little bit of all 21. But you won't really invest the time and the energy and the focus to get to mastery. And let's say two to five of the 21 strategies. The other reason I'm giving you 21 strategies in this course is because Some you're going to really grab it, gravitate towards and suddenly not going to like so much. And so you've got to figure out for your particular book genre, your book niche, if which strategies actually work best for what you're writing or for what you've written. The other thing I want you to really think about is whether you have an agent or you are self-publishing. I really want you to get this promotion and marketing of your book will always come down to you. I don't care if you've gotta deal with Random House or penguin. Yes, depending on how invested they are in you, they're going to have a marketing team and a promotion team and they're going to help you. But never to the level that you'll be able to help yourself. So I really want you to take to heart the fact that as a successful writer, you've got a master marketing and you've got a master promotion because nobody's gonna do as great a job of marketing and promoting your book as well. And the final point I want you to think about as you figure out, okay, what can I expect from this course? You are going to walk away knowing how did you, each of these 21 strategies from step one to final step in the implementation. You know, it's one thing to go Google, you know, try to go Google Book Marketing or Google goal book promotion. And you will spend hours, days, weeks, china, watch this YouTube video and listen to this podcast and you know, bits and pieces is all you're going to get when you try to do a search on your own. My goal for you in this course is to give you 21 strategies that I walk you through from start to finish. So you don't have to go Google it. You don't have to figure out how to do it all the ins and outs because you know what? I used to do those things, Googling and searching and watching YouTube videos. And then one teacher would tell me to mark it this way. And then another teacher would tell me the market that way. And they never provided the full solution. They never provided the a to Z step-by-step process. And in this course you're getting that for 21 strategies to market and promote your book for free. So I'm walking through, you don't need any Googling of anything else. This course will do it. So that's what you can expect. Please get your notebook or your journal and your pen. And let's dive into the course. 3. Why Book Marketing Matters: All right, so in this module we're going to talk about why Book Marketing matters. If you are a writer's writer, meaning you love to write and you don't really love all the other stuff that comes with writing, the marketing, the sales, the figuring out how to get published, The figuring out the literary agent. This is going to be a great module for you because I really want to go into the why Simon Sinek, why we do what we do. Because the y is what will keep you going. Even when you don't want to do any of the book marketing that you know you have to do. The y is what's going to keep you focused and keep you on task. Okay, so let's talk about why Book Marketing matter. So when you think about it, there are between 600,001 million books published every year in the US. Just think about that number. If you're in another country, just add much more to the, to this equation. But in the US alone there are between 600,001 million books published every single year. And on average, each of those books, 600 thousand to 1 million. They sell less than 250 copies. Each. Just say with that for a second. So people are pumping out authors in the US. I'm talking about all over the world, between 600,001 million books every single year. And on average each of these books, so less than 250 copies. Now, with this piece of data on book publishing, it, it becomes super clear that you've got to find a way to stand out in the crowd of 600,001 million in the US alone. It also becomes clear that the key to being not a part of the statistic and only selling 250 copies each is you've got to focus on not competing, but creatively. Helping people find your work. Connecting with the people who most need to read your work. And doing so in a way that is authentically, you really represents you as a writer, you as a person, you as a brand who was a business. The only way to do that is with book marketing. That's the only way to do that. And so as you go through this course, you know, I'm a writer's writer. I definitely have moments would like to add the do this again with bookmark or if I have those moments, I absolutely have them a lot. Okay. But it doesn't change the fact that I understand that book marketing as a part of the deal. As much as I love to sit and write and write and just let the words flow for me. I understand that if those words are actually going to get into the hands of the people who are meant to be transformed by them. The book marketing is a necessary evil. It just is. And so as you go through this course, really think about these numbers and the fact that you really want to be focused and centered on this is part of your job, It's part of your business book marketing because looking at the stats in order for you to stand out and be able to be a full-time writer. It needs to be part of your job on a daily basis, not even on a weekly, on a daily. All right, In the next module we're gonna talk about five things to know before you market your book. Five things you need to know before you market your book. All right, Let's get to the next module. 4. Point #1: Two Options, One Choice: Okay, so let's talk about five things to know before you market your book. And this first is super, super universal and so, so important to understand. And here it is. Two options. One choice, pick one. Let me say that again, and then we'll dive in two options. One choice, pick one. In other words, what am I saying? Time or money? Pick one. So when it comes to marketing your book, you're either going to dish out a lot of money to other people, outsourcing your PR, outsourcing your marketing, paying for Facebook ads, paying for YouTube ads. You're either going to spend a lot of money marketing and promoting your book and outsourcing that task to other people who have expertise in that area. Or you're going to spend a lot of time blood, sweat, and tears, doing the work organically building your writers platform, organically getting more readers, one or the other is going to happen, time or money. And in many cases, you will spend a lot of money to market your book. Realize that it's not getting you, you know, it's getting you people who are reading your stuff, but it's not getting you those followers who love everything you do, follow everything you do. It's not getting you what they call raving fans. So the first thing to understand before you market your book is you've got two options. One choice and you've got to pick one time or money. Now, you're going to hear me talk about it because I've done both. I have spent the money to market my books. I've also spent the time to really roll up my sleeves and create organic following and get more readers. And I have to tell you time, Trump's money and a lot of cases. Because the time that you invest in really connecting with readers, the time that you invest in using the 21 strategies I'm going to walk you through today, the time that you take to not simply pay for views, are paid for reads or pay for people to notice your book for a second, but then maybe download it for free, but then not really read it. It doesn't create raving fans and a lot of cases, but when you actually take the time to create content that you deliver to potential readers for free when you take the time to the unsocial and to interact with readers about the latest book you're, you're writing. It, it creates a relationship, it builds trust. And so the first thing I want you to understand before you decide what you want to do with marketing. I'm not saying that paying a PR specialist who's done this for 20 years is about idea or paying for Facebook ads is about lots of writers pay thousands amount than Facebook ads and they work for them. When I am saying is especially if you're new starting out, especially if you do not have 5000 dollars a month just to devote to Facebook ads alone, you've, you want to keep in mind that yes, there are two options. One choice and you've got to pick one time or money. And in this course, I'm going to teach you how to leverage your time so that you can implement some of these 21 strategies. So you get way more bang for your buck by using your time rather than having to figure out how am I going to spend thousands a month on YouTube ads or Facebook ads or Instagram ads or any of those things. So again, point number one thing you need to know before you might get your book. Two choices. One option, pick one time or money. 5. Point #2: Book Marketing is an Investment: The second thing you need to know before you mark that your book is this. Welcome marketing is an investment. It is a huge investment and it's a necessary investment. You're going to put a lot of time in this. You're going to want to make sure that you're evaluating every step of the way, what is working and what is not working in your bookmarks. Marketing, which means you definitely want to have some sort of book marketing plan for the next six months. Whether you put that in a Word document, you put that in a notebook or you put that in Excel spreadsheet, you want to create some sort of plan that says for the next four to six months, I'm going to use strategy a, strategy B and strategy C. I'm going to try it out on these books that I've written or this book that's coming out, let's say in January. And you want to have some sort of scheduled appointment on your calendar where you're going to look every single week, at least, maybe every single day and you want to assess, okay, what is my audio book sales? What are my regular book sales? How many waters am I getting it from the moment that I started using this book Marketing Strategy at week one, month, one, month, two months, three, and so on and so forth. Here's the thing to really understand about this whole investment idea. Less is more, as I said earlier, it's not about doing all 21 strategies. It's about picking the strategies that you feel are super relevant for your genre, for your niche, for your topic, for whether it's fiction or nonfiction. Picking the promotional strategies and the marketing strategies that you feel are really going to work for you. And then backing that up with consistently applying fewer strategies rather than more strategies over a long period of time. So four to six week, four to six weeks, four to six months. I wish it was four to six weeks, four to six months. And evaluating how your book sales are going every single step of the way. Now when I say that bookmark savings and investment, what I'm also saying is it takes way longer than you think. It takes much more time than you think. It takes many more hours a week in and week out than you think. And you might be saved yourself. Why am I spending so much time marketing my book when I should be writing the next one. I'm a writer. Writers, right? Why am I spending all but let me help you out with that. Your writer. And if you want to be a full time paid writer who lives off of the revenue that your books generate. 80 percent of your work life as a writer is going to be on the marketing and sales. And 20 percent life as a writer is going to be spent writing. And then nobody told me that when I thought to myself a long time ago, I want to be a writer and I spent all day and all I want to do is write books and you know, what they should do in the movies about what writers do and what writers today actually do are very, very different. So I want you to be prepared in a way that I wasn't prepared. You are going to spend the bulk of your writing life marketing and promoting your books, building your writers flat platform, connecting with new readers, engaging current readers. All of that lives in promotion and marketing. And so if you're saying to yourself right now, Well, I didn't I didn't decide to write a book to be a salesperson. I didn't decide to write a book to be a marketer. No matter what your profession, no matter what your field, you will always be the sales and you will always be marketing. So let's debunk the myth. I don't care if you're a florist, a doctor, or a teacher. At some point you are constantly on a daily basis in your job. Marketing yourself to other people, marketing your expertise so they trust what you tell them. Marketing your credential so you get another job or promotion. You're always in any profession, every single day doing marketing and sales. So let's just get over the whole thing about I don't want to be a salesperson, I just want to write, I just want to be a writer. Here's the thing you wanna do. You wanna invest whatever amount of time you need to, to deeply connect with your readers. So they hear you, they see you, they love your work, they wait for your books to come out. But the only way you do that is by investing a great deal of time from book to book to book into marketing and promotion. It's the only way. And so at the end of the day, the second thing I want you to know before you start marketing your book is that book marketing is an investment. It is a big one. And it does require faith. You've got to believe in your work and you've gotta believe that there are readers out there for you. And it also requires consistency because it's not about applying any of these 21 strategies, like set it and forget it one and done. That's not the way it works. It's doing this strategy day in, day out, seeing what's working, tweaking the strategy, doing it again, day in, day out for a long period of time. And a lot of people aren't prepared for that because it's like, well, can I just Smith thousands a month on facebook ads and can't that just get me all the book sales I need? Maybe. What do you want to spend $10 thousand a month on facebook ads and maybe not even make that money back at the end of the year? Or would you rather use some strategies that yes, require your time and attention? But build readers who are hungry for your work years after you've implemented that strategy. That's the question to think about. So again, point number 2, bookmarking is an investment. Let's get to point number three. 6. Point #3: Build Relationships: Here's the third to consider before you start marketing your book. You've got to build relationships to build your writing brand. Let me say that again. Builds relationships to build your brand. Now I talked about this in a previous point. It's not enough to have a lot of people who download your book, are lot of people who download your audible or a lot of people who purchase your paper back, but then it sits on their table or on their desk. And they never read it. They never get any transformation from it. They don't even get to know you as a writer. That is not enough. Now on paper that might look like quantity, but it is not quality. So when I say build relationships to build your brand, what I'm saying is, you don't want just any kind of reader of your books. You want raving fans. You want people who read your book and then they say, I'm going to buy it for my friends, I'm gonna buy copies for my family. So and so needs to read this. And so, and so needs to read this. You want readers who will read your book and B, so touched by it or so enthralled with the characters that you write, that they send you an email that says, I loved your book, that changed my life or I love this character. Where do you writing the next saga to this book? The only way that you get those kinds of raving fans is to build your writers platform. And your writers platform is the way that you create an environment on social through building an email list. Just connecting with your readers on a very regular basis. Again, relationships die without connection, all relationships. So in this way, in order to build that writers platform, you want to start to do things like hold FB lives and talk about the book that you're currently working on. Or if you know you've completed the book, have a little preview of maybe Chapter 1 of your book. Doing a Facebook Live or doing Instagram TV, or doing a YouTube video about it. You want to find deeply meaningful ways to connect to readers, to ask them questions, to ask them, you know, to share with them the picture of the cover of your book and then ask them, do they like cover a, are covered BY or cover sea. Talked about the title of your book and say Which title would reach up to you more. These are just little ways that on a daily basis, you can be connecting deeply with your readers so you convert them into becoming raving fans. Here's the other piece. It is not enough to have someone email you and say, I love your book, feels really great. But that's not enough. You also want to make sure that all of the readers that you're building into being raving fans, you are getting them onto your email list. And if you do not yet have an email list, here's what I'm going to tell you. Build one, find something that you can give for free. Maybe Chapter 1 of your book you can give as a PDF download for free. Build an opt-in page, build an email list. And you really want to at minimum get to 5000 email subscribers in two years now. And a lot of you who don't have any military go 5 thousand, How am I going to do? There are writers who have a 100 thousand email subscribers, 200000, 500000, and a million. It's gonna take you about two years if you don't even have an email list right now to get to the 5000. But it also means it's gonna take you an investment of a lot of time to build the freebie and the opt-in and to start really meeting people where they are in connecting deeply so they want to actually join your e-mail list. It's possible as my point, it requires an investment of time and heart and energy. And you can do that. You can do that. But it's so important before you ever do any of the 21 strategies in the walk you through, that you understand that building your brand is not about paying for clicks, or paying for views, or paying for downloads. Building your brand is about building relationships. One reader at a time, one person at a time. And then once you're doing that authentically in deeply, they will tell the world about you as a writer. And then you get more and more sales. And again, this is not something you do in a bootcamp style. This is not something you do. I'm going to put a Facebook ad out there and all of a sudden minimum, 10 thousand new readers, men and men enough, that's not relationship, that's transaction. Building relationships of any form. Take time. Be willing to take the time to build the relationships. So you build your writing brand. Okay, I've spent enough. Let's get to the next point. 7. Point #4: Consistency is King: Okay, point number 4. Consistency is king. So you'll hear me say this over and over again. Probably if you've taken a number of courses with me, you know, in every course I say this at some point, consistency is king. Especially when you're doing free marketing and public relations. Consistency is king. You've got to be vigilant, really consistent. There's a lot of time that goes into each of these three strategies, which is why I highly recommend that you pick a few of them that really resonate and hone in zone in, put your time. There are systems, processes, and procedures for each of these strategies that you're going to want to put into place so you know what you're doing, you know how long it takes, you know how long you've been doing it consistently. And these are not strategies that I call set it and forget it as the infomercial says, it really, to really get the most out of these strategies that we're going to talk about in this course, you've got to be vigilant, Lee consistent every single day app that you know, you really want to set aside, treat this like it's, it is your work. If you're a writer and you want to be a full-time writer, but you want to treat the marketing and the public relations like uncertainties at certain times for a pretty big focus block of time, I would say one hour minimum, three to four hours, possibly. This is the strategy. I use this as the strategy that I implement. And not only do you want to be vigilant and consistent about implementing the strategy or executing the strategy. You also want to be vigilant consistent about measuring its effectiveness. Not necessarily every day, but certainly every week, certainly every month. And you want to see what strategies are working and what strategies are not working. So as soon as you see a strategy is not producing the desired results, whether that's book reviews or downloads of your book or listening to audible, then you can make some changes, either in that exact strategy or pivot to another strategy so that you can reap the rewards of doing the work. Once again, it's not about a line we doing the strategy. It's about being consistent and visually consistent to where you've got a system for how you do the strategy, you know the process for completely doing the strategy. There's something to be said for doing the strategy. Not a little bit, not half the way there, but all the way to Z and that requires seriously being consistent. Here's the other thing I want to say. You will not see results overnight. This is why the consistency becomes so important. It's about trusting the process. It's about doing the work, and it's about doing it for a long period of time. But when I say long period of time, you might be thinking, well, what's a long period of time? Minimum three months. I would I'd like to say minimum six months, but minimum three months consistently meaning for how many ever days a week you say you're going to do this strategy. You're doing it those days, those hours, those times minimum 90 days. I would say really the sweet spot is about six to nine months for you to actually see the results and be able to look at the data on your book sales and your book reviews and your email subscriber list to really see the effectiveness of those things. The biggest mistake I see writers make is they try out of a marketing or PR strategy. They try it for two weeks. They don't see any changes in their book sales and then they go on to the next strategy. A lot of strategies, whether you pay for them or they're free, like we're talking about in this class. Take months. I mean, like six months, nine months, sometimes a year before you actually see that ripple effects start to happen, and then it starts to building compound. But if you were not consistent for the six to nine months to even start to see the improvement in your book sales, then you will have missed out. And then you know what happens. You're doing shiny object syndrome, squirrel, squirrel, squirrel. You keep jumping from strategy to strategy, but you never stay long enough in one to actually see it work, which oftentimes takes at least six to nine months, I'd say 90 days minimum. So this is the point I want to get to. Consistency is king. Make sure that you can commit to the strategies that you choose as a result of taking this course, would also be sure that you're applying the strategies consistently, persistently, visually over a long period of time. Alright, let's get to the next module. 8. Point #5: Public Relations (PR) Matters: Okay, so the fifth and final point you need to know before a marketing your book is this PR matter. Pr is public relations and it's your ability to get on local and national television, your ability to get featured in an article in a newspaper, in digital magazines, on guest blogging, on people's blogs, podcasts, interviews, all of those things where you're getting more into the public eye is what is public relations? And yes, lots of very well-known writers have agents and they have PR people or a PR team. You can do your PR on your own, but I want you to keep in mind that that is not a frivolous part of Book Marketing that you can simply ignore. I am a super big introvert and I do not like to be around a lot of people all the time. Maybe that's part of the reason why I'm a writer. But I will go speak in public. I will go do interviews, I will do podcasts, interviews. I will do all of those things because I understand that public relations is vital to getting in front of potential breeders for to you getting known as an expert in your field, to getting more interviews and more calls in and to establishing your credibility, especially if your genre is a non-fiction. Especially if you're more like, you know, someone who was writing about your professional career for the last 20 years, getting into the public eye is supercritical and it is very time intensive to do that. So the other thing I want you to keep in mind is that PR is also a thing that really revolves around developing relationships. That revolves around doing things every single day, seven days a week, like signing up for a free account on Heroku.com. That is HER o.com. And checking the needs of journalists around the world because they post their stuff to hair.com every single day. And submitting queries or emails of interest are sending ideas. So you can be chosen by one of those journalists to be featured in some of the biggest magazines and venues in the world. Again, this is stuff that requires you day-in, day-out to go check the daily hero email, to submit something, to have a bio ready to go, a head shot ready to go to make sure your website is up to par. So when I say PR is vital, it is vital, end it's time consuming. And there are things like you should have a bio as a writer, period, you should have a good headshot, a picture of yourself that you can use. And then from there, you should really know what are your angles to propose to local and national television that you can talk about topic a, B, and C based on the books that you've written. Now, there's a lot of legwork to that. There's a lot of time commitment to that. And it's vital. I know I sound like a broken record. It's vital. So I want you to just keep in mind that before you start, excuse me, looking at the 21 strategies that we're going to talk about, just understand that this is not a I can do all of this in six weeks. So I can spend nine months writing a book. And then six weeks I can do marketing promotion, and that will get me what I need. This is I am a writer all year long and I market and promote and sell books. All your lung both co-exist at the same time. And PR is one of those elements that you really want to be on top of every single day of the week. What's happening, you know, subscribed to your local newspapers, especially if they're digital in a digital format. Find out who the local journalists are, who the local producers, a TDR, get to know them, send them e-mail, watch their shows locally and nationally. So you know, the kind of people they bring on air. Again, building relationships and doing PR work daily, yearly. It is an intense endeavor and unnecessary one if being a full-time writers what you want. So, all right, let's get into some of the pre publishing book marketing strategies next time you, for the next section. 9. Strategy #1: Set Up a Book Pre-Order: All right, The first strategy, or the first set of strategies that we're going to talk about are the pre publishing, book marketing strategies. So these are the strategies that you can use before you officially. And I say that my air quotes, you officially publish your books so that the strategies are things that can be put into place before your book is officially available fully to the marketplace, force for sale. Now the first strategy, let's look at this. It is to set up a preorder for your book on Amazon. Now, this strategy sounds the name of it. This idea of a pre-order on Amazon seems pretty deceptive, right? Because the idea from a reader's perspective is that concrete ordering a book that's not yet available. Okay, so if I'm a reader in a preorder, something I know, Let's say for example, Bernie Brown is going to have a new book out. And so I know it's not ready for release. I know it's not released. So I'm going to as an avid fan of Bernie Brown, I'm going to pre-order it. Here's the thing. As an author I want you to understand, especially if you're publishing on the Amazon platform. Pre-order still means the book is done. Let me just say that again. Pre-order still means the book. Is that meaning give a book cover is done and ready to go. The manuscript is written, polished, edited, and ready to go. Because when you're doing your preorder, which I will show you in a few minutes. You've got to upload the manuscript and you've got to upload the book cover. And so the only thing pre-order actually means to you as a writer of this book is that you're not officially releasing it for sale. So it's not being shipped out to the people who are pre-ordered and pre buying it. It is just, I don't know, a marketing tactic to get people to really want to pre-order so that they are to get their copies of the book. So that's just one little thing because pre-orders and I'm seems like well, I'm not done with the book, so I can set it up for pre-orders. I could be getting sales while I'm finishing up the book. None NO. Pre-order simply means the book has already done. It just means it's not officially available for sale or purchase it which means it's not going out via shipping. People are just paying for it while they wait for whatever your official release date is. So that is strategy number one. Totally free strategy can use set-up a preorder for your book on Amazon. Now, you might be saying, how do you do that? The steps to implementing the strategy are that number one, you've got to identify what book you plan to launch. And you've also got to look at, hopefully you've taken my other courses on self-publishing 1, 0, 1, and on project management for writers. You will know from those other courses that for sure you need to have a spreadsheet, whether it's a Google Sheet or an Excel sheet that goes over all of your books that are publishing timelines, you are your own publisher, so you gotta be on your game about due dates and deliverables. So you've got your publishing timeline. And then knowing when you're going to finish the book, knowing when you're going to have the book cover, right? Like make sure your books covers created, which is step number four. Only when you've got the book cover plus the finished manuscripts. So done because written, polished, edited. Then you can go and Amazon kVp and set up your pre-order, but you're not done at that step. So the key thing you're going to learn throughout this course is that the strategy may be to set up the pre-order, but the book marketing aspect of it goes beyond the actual strategy, for example. So once you've set up your pre-order on Amazon GDP, which means you know, the day it officially is going to show on Amazon as available for pre-order that will be posted under or somewhere next to your book cover image. Then you've gotta do some more work. You want to create social media posts about the preorder. You want to create an outreach list, meaning 50 to a 100 people that you are going to reach out to the day that the pre-order is open and available and you're going to reach out to them individually one by one. Yes, it takes hours to do this, by the way, hours to create that will reach list and to actually do the outreach. So I want you to be prepared for that. It's time-consuming to personally connect with 50 to a 100 people, let alone to develop the list of who those 5200 people will be. And then you want to reach out to them via private message are taxed and say, Hey, I've got a new book coming out, it's going to be available for pre-order. Could you please share the pre-order link when it's available? And here's possibly a blurb I'd left free to use if you feel good about using it to help describe the book and what it's about. And can you share this on social? So that's the nature of the message. Then once you've reached out to your 50 to a 100 people on your outreach list. Then when the pre-order is live, you want to start posting messages about the pre-order. But I always say this. Not about spamming people. It's not about making every single post on Facebook and every single post on Instagram. From the moment the pre-ordered goes live about the pre-order. It really is about finding ways to tell the story of writing this book. To share concepts from the book, to share quotes from the book, to talk about some of the characters and maybe some of the challenges that you had in writing their stories. And then, you know, doing that consistently. And then weaving in every three or four posts a message about how they can pre-order the book. So it's really not, don't spam people with every single social posts. Really weave in a few here and there. And then of course, you want to post and share content, especially throughout the first week of the pre-order. That is super, super important. So now let's go through to a walkthrough on how to actually set up your pre-release ordering on Amazon, which once again, let me just say this. The books they'll has to be done, manuscript on a book cover done. And it's only a pre-order in the sense that it people are paying for it early. There's a certain release date, but they're not getting it shipped to them. Yeah. So let's let's jump in and see how you actually set this up in kVp. Okay, so let's look at this in Kindle Direct Publishing or TDP. So the one thing that I love about PDP is that they always give you super great directions on how to do anything that you're gonna do within Kindle Direct Publishing our GDP. So the first thing I want to show you is the actual Help area of PDP because you will find an in-depth, I'll call it article or KB, but it will give you everything you need to know about how to set up this preorder. It will give you how it works, the eligibility and requirements, reporting and royalty. How do you set up an upload your final file? How do you check status? How do you change a release date, whether it's move it up to lay it or cancel it. So I think it's really important to make sure once you set up your kVp account, you make use of the help section so that it tells you exactly step-by-step what you're gonna do. And I'm going to work, walk you through these first steps as if I were going to set up a pre-order. But once again, that a couple of things I want to say about this number 1, it overall, I want to be sure you understand how much time each strategy takes this particular strategy with everything from doing this part in kVp and uploading the pre-ordered book opportunity, let's call it to actually doing the outreach that we talked about to 50 to a 100 people to posting on social is going to run you anywhere from five to ten hours total. So keep this in mind as we go through all these strategies. They are very, very time-consuming. So if you're going to choose this strategy, just know it's a commitment of five to ten hours and just wanted to get that out of the way. So now if you're actually going to do this and i'm, I'm showing you from my kVp, what you're gonna do is you're going to click Create a Kindle e-book. So you'll click that plus sign. And then you're going to put in things like the book titles. So let me see if I can just put test to as the book title. And then of course I would put my name because I'm doing that, I would put the description. I'm going to protest to x and I want to fill that out. Notice you've got almost 4000 cat characters for your description. You always want to write your book description outside of when you're putting it here and then copy it into here and use as many of this 3,994, which is I think 4 thousand at the end of the day uses many as you can. It's really good for SEO. That's the side, okay, then of course you own the copyright. You're going to put in the keywords, which I won't do here because this is just an example, but you would always want to put in your keywords. You're going to set up your category, which I'm just going to choose a random one and let's just assume it's US foreign language. And then of course, you're going to put it in the minimum age. And the maximum age. I tend to write self-help stuff. So it's always 1818, 12th grade, 12th grade. And then here's where the pre-order begins, right? So it asks you, I am ready to release my book now or make my Kindle e-book available for pre-order. So once again, you would make my Kindle e-book available for pre-order and then you would put the date that it's available for pre-order. You'd click Save and Continue. And then the rest of it would look like the what you would do if you were actually publishing a book live. So this is where the pre-order spot differs from regular publication like ADP. Once again, I'm going back to this, these directions. A Kindle Direct Publishing does a fantastic job of guiding you through every single step. I showed you the beginning of the steps, but you would just use this help information to do that. And at the end of the day, keep in mind that a pre-order is still a finished book. It is still a finished product. You are done with your part of it. You're just delaying the actual official release when the book can be sent out or it can be downloaded to other people. So just keep that in mind. Again, five to ten hours that you'll commit to implementing this particular strategy. Now, let's talk about strategy number two in the next module. 10. Strategy #2: Set up an Amazon Author Profile: Alright, so strategy number 2 is set up your Amazon Author Profile and linked to social. Now I do consider this a pre publishing marketing strategy, provided that you already have one book published. So this is a strategy that you're going to leverage and use consistently, totally free to do using your Amazon author profile. But once again, in order to have an Amazon Author Profile, you've got to actually have a book published. So you can claim your Amazon author profile because you've published a book on Amazon. So this is a great republishing strategy for any book Beyond the first book. And so I'm starting with an example than an Amazon author profile a because I happen to love way dire. May he rest in peace and be because they think it's a great example of what is involved. You will notice you've got your picture, so you do need a picture to put on your Amazon off their profile. There's a follow button so people can actually follow you and they will get information on upcoming new releases and will also improve Amazon's ability, their algorithm, of course, to recommend other stuff to you. And then you've got to have a bio. So if you're going to set up your Amazon author profile, obviously you need a photo, a good one. You need your bio. And then obviously what you're gonna do is right up here you'll see all of the books that you've published and you've written. Now the reason why this is such a good free pre-publication strategy is because you definitely want to get people to go to your Amazon author professor, they click the follow button number one key piece that way, every time you release a new book in the future, if they have clicked follow, they will get notification that a new book is out without having to send an e-mail or do a thing. So I think that is super, super important. The next piece of this is that you'll notice that people who come to your Amazon author profile, they may not know all the things that you've written. They may not know every book that you've put here. And yet, if they're on your Amazon author profile, they can see what you've written. They can see, you know, they can go right to the books. They can click on them. You know, they can actually go ahead like looking at this, change your thoughts, change your life. They can click on it, they can buy it. Now with one click, there's just a lot of advantage to having an Amazon or their profile, which is so, so important. So once again, I think that is a powerfully important free thing you can use after the first book. Because remember, in order to have an Amazon on their profile used to be published on Amazon. So your first book is the way that you even get that particular access to a free amazon Author Profile. And so you'll notice that you'll be able to do that with relative ease. So now that I've shown you what an Amazon author profile looks, let's shift gears and let me walk you through this strategy in more detail. Alright, now that you've seen an example of an Amazon Author Profile, let's talk about the steps to this particular strategy. So strategy number two months again, is setting up your Amazon Author Profile, which as I said before when I was showing you a diaries Amazon Author Profile, you've got to have at least one book published on Amazon. So you can claim your book and therefore have An Amazon author to then create a free amazon Author Profile. So things that you'll need before setting up your Amazon Author Profile. So I want to list this site here so you know where to go to actually do that. It is very straightforward. You would just go to HTTPS colon forward slash forward slash author dot amazon.com. So remember author dot amazon.com. The site is very straight forward for you to login and set up your account, claim, your book. But let me just give you the things that you're going to need. So certainly you need to have a KTB account. I'm assuming if you've published a book on Amazon, you already have a Kindle Direct Publishing account. You've got to have a published book on Amazon. As I showed you with the example of Wave directors, Amazon on their profile, you've got to have a bio written, a picture. If you've got a blog, you're going to need your RSS address or feed they call it. If you want to link your blog to the Amazon Author Profile. And if you also want to share videos, you want to have links to the videos, let's say a YouTube channel or something like that. So it will populate also on your Amazon author profile. But once again, this is a process that will take you depending on if you've got. So if you're going to link on your Amazon Author Profile and the blog, the videos. You're going to connect social. You're definitely going to spend two to three hours just implementing and creating your author profile. And that's two to three hours if you've already got your picture and you've already got your bio written. If you've got to actually find a good picture, That's another 30 minutes. If you're going to actually have to write a bio, it may be a couple of hours. So we get and so long as you have your bio, your picture, two hours, you can have your Amazon Author Profile Setup. If you've got a scrounge and find a great picture, or take a great picture or write a bio because you've never written a bio before, then you can stack on another two or three hours process. So again, it should take you about two hours if you have the basic stuff that you need to implement this free marketing strategy. And again, just to, I don't want to sound like a broken record except I do You do need to have one book published on Amazon kVp account before you can actually claim that book and therefore create your Amazon Author Profile. So in the next module, we're gonna talk about strategy number 3, which is creating an author website. Let's get to it. 11. Strategy #3: Create an Author Website: Alright, let's talk about strategy number 3. And strategy number 3 is create an author website. So having an author website is super, super important for your brand, for every book that you're going to write for the longevity of your writing life. It is so critically important to create an author website. Now, the good thing about being alive today is that it is not as expensive, not nearly as expensive to treat an author website today as it was ten years ago. It's also not nearly as hard to create one. Very easily. You could create an author website on your own. They're super easy depending on the platform that you use. I I I personally use Wix.com, love Wix.com because it's super easy to use and they have many, many templates to choose from. And I'm going to show you a bunch of off their website examples that were actually created using Wix.com. Just so you can see the variety of what happens with a platform like that. But once again, this is a free strategy if, okay, so I'm going to give a disclaimer for creating author website is a free strategy. If number 1, you create it yourself, so you're not hiring a web designer, you are figuring out how to do it on your own and you're doing it on your own. And if you are not using a domain name, you're actually using a free sort of names. So if you create something on Wix.com, but you don't purchase a domain than your website address for your other website ends up being something like John Doe, Wix.com site slash John Doe. So it's kinda wonky, but it is if you're, if money is an issue, you can absolutely create a free site, a very long domain name until you can afford to purchase. Just you're John Doe.com domain name. So that's what makes the strategy completely free if AUG it yourself and to use whichever host you use their long domain name, which comes free and you can publish it on the Internet. So that's what makes his strategy free. Now let's walk through the steps to creating an author website. So there's a lot that you do to create an author website before you ever sign up for Wix or what are some of the other ones? Go daddy, You can do it too. I think there is a square. I think you can create a square website. So Wix is not the only one. There are many, many out there for which you can do the same thing that you can do in Wix.com. But before you even do that, before even create a free account on GoDaddy or Wix or any of the others. The first thing you've gotta do in either Microsoft Word document or you do it on with pen and paper, which is my preference, is you outline what tabs you want on your website. Now, when I walk you through the sample author websites in a bit, you'll see what I mean by what tabs do you want an About Me tab. Do you want a contact tab? Do you want my books tab? Again, deciding not only what the front of the websites gonna look like. So the first page you'd see when you go to John Doe.com, let's say. But what are the other pages on the website that you would like to have their really outlining what those are and what they contain. If you're a coach who writes books, do you want to work with me tab. So even though this is your author website, you're also linking it to your coaching because all of your books are related to your topics that you can go John. So once again, outline what tabs you want in your website. Start a free web design accounts. So again, when I say a free web design account, it could be with Go Daddy. It could be with we execute a square. It could be with any of the new up and commerce. But now you want to start the free account, which typically gives you access to all their templates and the ability to create your website in their platform. You don't necessarily have to publish it, but you can start to create the website so that you are going to create it. Then you're going to decide if you want an email address. Again. Now when you're going into the territory of I want to buy my domain name that costs money. I want to buy an email address that's specific to my domain name. So for example, my domain name is Cassandra von.com. I have an e-mail that I pay for a three month that's insulin, Cassandra run.com. When you start going into that territory now you're spending money, but you can still create the author website and publish it without doing any of those things, were spending any money. So if you want a domain name and hosting, you can always purchase it. That's not free. And if you want an email address, you can do that. But you still, even without purchasing of thing, can create an author website, can launch it and it can be available online for people. And then of course, once you haven't launched, then you want to include your website and all of your email signatures. So here's where the marketing comes in, right? It's not enough to have an author website if you never tell anybody about it. The point of an author website is for people to be able to go to your website to learn more about you as the writer. See all the books that you've ever written. Figure out how to contact you if they want to email you or get in touch. Maybe you put a blog on there. Maybe you sell product on there, maybe so cocci or services on there. But they want a one-stop shop beyond your Amazon author profile to find out all they can about you as a writer and what you write. So you could publish the author website, but if you don't put it in your all of your email signatures for every email address you have. I know lots of people are like me. They had like 15 email addresses. Put put it in the signature. For every email address you've got. You want to launch your website and you also, okay, So here's the other piece that's free. Gets a little, you know, it's a little intense, but Google Analytics is a great job of walking you through how to do it. Set up your Google Analytics once you launch your website. Because when you start to get to know how to do Google Analytics, then you get to see who's coming to your website. How many visitors are you getting from? What states, what countries, what areas, how long they spent on your website, what pages they went to. Just Google. How to set up Google Analytics on my webpage. If you Google that, you will find many places that will give you very straight forward directions on setting up Google Analytics. But again, let me just hone in on the book marketing part because I don't want this to be left out in the cold. Having an author website will not help you. If you don't share it with people. You need to put out in your Facebook business page. You need to put it on your Instagram profile. You need to put it on all of your social profiles, on all of your email signatures for every single email address you have. You need to make sure that when you're talking about a new and upcoming book, you've got a blog on that author website. And so you're pointing people to read the blog and subscribe to the blog so they can get the latest updates on you, not just from your Amazon Author Profile. Now, before I show you some example author websites, Let's talk about because I wanted to be sure throughout this course, I told you how long things are going to take. I have a pet peeves about people teaching other people all of these quote unquote strategies, but then not being honest about how long these things take. So if you are going to do this truly for free, which means you're the one who's creating the website. In general, if you have decent tech skills, I would say that it's gonna take you seven to 25 hours. Yes, I did say seven to 25 hours. If you're going to create this website and launch it all by yourself for free, 1725 hours. If you have decent textiles and decent tech skills means you can look at Google Analytics and you can watch a few YouTube videos and you can get how it works. You can go to Wix.com and you can sign up and you can plug and play with the templates that are there. If you're thinking to yourself, Cassandra, I am not tech savvy at all. So how is this going to work? Well, there's a couple of things when you're gonna have to go on YouTube and get more tech savvy. So that's probably going to take you ten to 15 hours of learning if you're not at all tech savvy, to just get to the place of being able to use a Wix.com. So ten to 15 hours to get yourself to a certain level of tech-savvy. Then it's going to take the 70, 25 hours to build the website because there's a lot that you've got to think about. Now if you are super tech savvy, if you view something like Wix.com or square or GoDaddy before, if you've created websites before, just not an author website. Literally when I create a new website using Wix, it takes me about four hours max, literally. But that's because I've created so many websites. So once again, anywhere from four hours if you're super tech savvy. Although we have to add, say 40 to 60 hours, if you're not tech savvy at all in each learn everything from scratch. Those are super, super important, understand, so you can allocate the right amount of time if this is a strategy you want to use, I'd highly recommend you use this strategy. Every author should have an author website, period, the end. And how do you know that the strategy is working? This is where Google Analytics comes in. You've got to set up your Google Analytics so that you can see the traffic that's coming to your other web site. The more traffic you're getting, the increases in traffic you're getting. That is what tells you that this strategy as a book marketing strategy is actually working. Alright, so I've gone into the steps. I hope I didn't overwhelm anybody. Yes, it is a little stressful if you're not at all tech savvy. I still know you can do it. Even if you don't have a tech savvy bone in your body, you can get there. All right, let's pivot and let's look at some author website examples. I want to show you some really good examples of other websites that I personally like. And that when I saw them had me thinking, ooh, I need to work on my website a little bit more. All right, Let's go to those author website examples. All right, so let's look at some examples of author websites. I'm going to walk you through five examples of what the author websites now these were created full disclaimer, using Wix.com. I'm sure you can create something as good as beautiful on GoDaddy and square and any of the other ones that exist out there. So you'll notice with this particular author website, the first thing that pops up, It's a hover. Opt-in. Literally it says join my mailing lists. I've got loads of strange and wonderful things to share and you can put your email and you can click Submit. Now, authors should always want to build their email lists. We also, this is a peace building or hemolysis of your writers platform. I'm going to talk more about that later about both of those things. But again, really great strategy with this author website is as soon as I come into the website, the website is grayed out because here's this hover box and it says, Listen up doing me. And then I can put my e-mail address and I can click Submit. So that's the first really good thing. Now you'll notice that the author's name is right at the top. Centered. News is just like Okay, here I found a Lit agent. You can also check out a blog post, I'm assuming, which says my journey to find a literary agent. So here, if we click, boom, there you go. It takes us to an article that talks about the journey to getting there, right? So again, this author is doing a great job on her website, tailor and assuming that her may not be tailored, doing a really great job of showing examples of her book. Also showing some information about her Writer's Journey, which is super important. She will talk about other things that's happening, that's on submission. And if you go down, it shows again her writing. Maybe that's a picture of the actual notebook, maybe not. I would think it would be. And then what she's just completed. And so unlike what I like about this particular website is that it's clean, it's simple. It's got pictures that are relevant. There's a blog you can click and visit her blog. It just super, super relevant. And i'm, I'm not a huge fan of the blog. I think it is a bit, There's too much going on over here. So I would have done the block set up quite this way. But once again, I love that. There's just such good branding to even the way her name, the font that's used for her name. So I loved that. And of course, if we go back to the top, anytime we see those three lines, we can click. And these are the tabs she's created right? Home writing about and blog. Again, she gives you another opportunity to receive for e-mail newsletter. And if I go to about this, of course will take me up tailors a guy C, I should never, I should never assume. Taylor's both a boy and a girl's name and any other of the gender pronouns, things that we're using now I don't know all of them but any of those so I shouldn't even so Taylor, I would assume it was he might be a different pronoun. He certainly has his representation. Children's author, and I love that. He gives a really warm picture. So the one thing I will say about author pictures, you want your picture as an author to really, you want to feel like the person who looks at the picture has met you. It shouldn't be some glamour shot professionally, all done, dressed up in a, you know, on the beat. Like it shouldn't feel like it's a totally produced, you know, Hollywood kind of picture. It should feel like I can tell that Taylor, this is how he dresses when he sits down to write. And I can see the smile on his face because he loves to write. And so I like that this is a very, this is a selfie. It's very normal. It's a black and white. I mean, all of this goes pretty well with his brand names, so I really love that idea. So this is the first author website that we'll look at. Let's look at the second because it's different than how you jump into the second you go, whoa, there's lots of red here, right? So now you know you're not dealing with the children's author right From go I don't even have to ask because I know I'm seeing what looks like. I don't even know what that San Francisco bridges called. You think at Golden Gate Maybe looks like the Golden Gate Bridge. Stuff is burning. Who knows what's going on? But I can already tell you that this is like a thriller writer or something like that. And rather than having you have a, an opt in a hover to sign up for email newsletters. The first thing you see, I'm John Clarkson, author website is buy my book, which is also not a bad way to go. So then we can go right to his page and we can buy his book. So I like that. It links right to that with a picture of the book in front. So again, he's a thriller writer, a swift movie and cinematic thriller. And if we go again, the tabs when we talked about what taps you're going to create. Notice that Taylor's tabs, we're home writing about blog, John's tabs or books. So you got all of his books that you can go right to readers reviews, interesting news and blogs, media assets about in contact. So we'll start at John Clarkson about so again, another really good picture. This is a little more professional. I would think that he got a head shot photographer to do this. But it still gets to the core of who he is as an author. He writes thrillers, he writes crime thrillers. The look on his face, He's holding his hands. All of that is an alignment with his brand. He has a pretty long bio which is okay when it's your author website, short bios on your Amazon other profile, by the way, this is, this would be, I would say this is way too long for your Amazon author profile. And then of course, he has frequently asked questions which I think is pretty cool, right. What am I currently working on? How do you get inspired to write is a great one. Where did you get the idea for your most recent book? And then of course you still have examples of things you can scratch here. He's got his email subscription. Again. Key to being an author is building a very powerful, large email list of raving fans. So you notice that's there too. You'll also notice if you go to readers reviews, that's super interesting. So he does pull Amazon author reviews, which I think is an interesting way to go because usually I don't pull my readers reviews into my website. So he pulls the reviews from Amazon and then he actually puts them, which I think is so good, good, also good reads reviews. And he puts them here for each of the books. I like that idea a lot. That's actually really, really smart. And then if you go to his news and blog, again, he has a much better structure to his news and blog than Taylor did. This is much cleaner. The pictures are bigger. It doesn't feel as crowded even though it's a very similar format. Because again, all of these sites were created with Wix. So the blog setup is pretty, pretty much the same. But this looks way cleaner and cleaner than Taylor's news and blogs media assets. Let's take a look and see what this is. So interesting. So media assets, in his mind means I just click the link on the book. You can download, I guess the cover so that you can actually reach it. You can also get it in different things like Audible and stuff like that. So that's interesting. And then finally contact. So content is important, but it's this simple really, when you create a contact page in Wix or Go Daddy or something else, it's a form and you set it up and there it is. And then you also have stuff like you can leave your email address on the side, or they can use this and click submit. And this little box allows them to opt in to the hemolysis at the same time that they're reaching out to contact you. So I like the fact that if they click that and say yes, not only sending you a message, but there are also opting into your e-mail lists, which once again is building your writers platform. So I love the feel of this website is Thriller to me. So he did a great job of making sure that it conveys from the moment you land on it, that this is a writer who writes thrilling kinda fade. Let's go to the third author website. Okay, so once again, first thing you see, this is grayed out. Not grayed out, but sort of in the background because they're like, join me for my e-mail list. This is what all authors should be doing. Joined me for my e-mail list all over the place. I liked that he put maximum twice a month. Now, I send out a daily e-mail. I'm on the opposite spectrum of that. But I loved that when he asked people to send up, he's letting you know, you're not going to hear for me anymore than two times a month. I think that is awesome. So then now we look at a jinx. Yeah. Satish da rein. I don't think I said his name right. That's kind of a pet peeve of mine, but I don't know how to pronounce it. So I think yeah. Has the book, The Hidden Agenda. Right. And he gives you is about right there. I kind of like that. His about is right there with this picture. Once again, this is a personable picture. It is not a glamour shot. It is not a professional headshot. I love like he's a proud Indian Canadian. I love that. His items are here. I love also that the latest blog posts are down here at the bottom. So you can see that. And again, once at the bottom, you can still subscribe for the email. You can click any of these links and you're brought right to Amazon, LinkedIn or any love. Anytime in your website you can put these little social links including Amazon. Absolutely fantastic. And then if we go to books, once again, almost all author websites are going to have a tab that's called books. So now he has the picture of the book. He has a description, a synopsis, and then he has a direct button that you can go click and buy on Amazon. You can read a free preview of probably his current book. And then again, you have the subscription stuff, love, love, love that. And then he has a blog, I would say most author websites have an about page, a book's page, a blog, and a contact for sure. And then he talks about different things related to, wow, so he does write like political stuff because they see a whole bunch of political stuff on here. Yeah. I don't know how I feel about that, but I will just say, I guess that's part of his branding, right? But he writes political thrillers or political stuff. He's an engineer by education, so we can see that. And so then he started writing, he writes crime fiction, okay, so it's probably really connected to it. He does say, he's fascinated about political, technological and other developments in the US. And he's a proud Indian, kinetic, Indian Canadian, excuse me. So still very interesting, very, very straightforward, simple and like the layout. If we go back to his home page, I like the fact that on the homepage you can find everything you're looking for, the books, links to the blogs, all of that. And you can sign up for the email list, so I like all of that. So that's another example, something again, each of these look very, very different, right? So Taylor's looks a certain way. John's Lucas looks a certain way. A GQ IAS looks a certain way. Now let's go to Alan, Alan Ge, or storyteller. So again, this is another wakes template. I've actually used this one before on my website. I love the simplicity of it. I also love that the contact is right at the bottom. You've also got the email. I just like this design in general. So if we go about Alan, certainly everything again, like with a ginkgo, everything's on the page. So that's really cool. You can see what he's been doing. And then we can look at some praise. So this is kind of some commentary about his work. And then he has shops so you can purchase either the books are on the front page and then connect, and then you've got the blog. So it looks like with this particular setup, the only thing that is on a separate page is this blog. I'm not quite sure how I feel about the picture sees used. I think they are not high-quality. So that reminds me to say one thing, be sure please, that any pictures you use on your page are high-quality, high high-quality PNG files preferably because that is not high-quality and neither is that. So I think all of that super important. But again, notice that for his website, in particular, it is one website where all of these tabs, except for blog, are all on the same page. I'm not quite sure how I feel about that. I get it. But I also would have liked to see rather than you just coming here to a different part of the page, that it was a separate page altogether. So but this gives you a view of a different type of author website that you can do. The final one is my favorite, so let me share this. So rami or Rowe me, I'm not quite sure. New step is basically a coach. You can see that. And she's written books and when I absolutely loved about her pages, look at our picture. Now this is a professionally done picture period. But whoever did her picture really caught her spirit, like cut her energy, her fib, her brand. So there are moments when it's time to have a professional photographer do a shot like this. So that not only can you use it on your author website, but you can also use it when you're creating a lead page or promoting a retreat. Especially if you're a coach, you're probably gonna want professional headshots done. So I love that she gives a little description about herself. Again, this is also a professional headshot, you can just tell. And she really speaks right on the front page to her audience. So she's not simply just say here, here's what she's saying. I'm on a mission to help you. And then she's got her book right there. And then she's also like, here's how I want to help you. So you notice that her whole website is not about me, me, me, me, me. Her website is about UUU you and I, and I loved the way the blog is laid out. So once again, clean. Not too many pictures, not too many blog posts at one time. Her books are here. Look at that, what get over your Deb. So and then she also, this is a really key piece when you're an author. Once you've built up a little bit of success, you've been featured on particular networks or in particular magazines. It's always good to put featured in and then include that there. And of course, as always, I talk, I'm going to talk about this later. Your writers platform. She's got sign up for my e-mail list, sign up for my email list. And so I love that. She says get to know me better, follow me on Facebook and Instagram where I share every day. So she's kinda letting you know that you can follow her on Twitter and Pinterest. But where she really is every single day is Facebook and Instagram. So you can click on those and follow her there. I really like that. So loved the look and feel of it. Again, you're going to see some common threads. There is the blog, right? So there is the blog, then there is the books. So you can go to either of her books. And I love the color choices that she made. You noticed that this site is very branded to a fuchsia, kind of a hot pink color, and also to a purple. So those are her branding colors and white obviously. So I love that it's branded socio well, it's also shows where you can order her a copy of her book. She is a former corporate chicken. She calls it first a lawyer than a PR executive. I can definitely tell she is a former PR executive because she certainly has this site is well done, well-done to the point of professionally done. And so then you can also see she's with Penguin Random House, so she is a published author, is one of the biggest publishing houses in the world. And so then she's also got tools which if you're a coach, this is where you can post book resources or other things. This is probably in one of her books. I'm not sure what that's about. And then of course, if you're a coach, you will always have a section on your website that's called work with me, where people can figure out how to work with you. And once again, you can subscribe to her email us. You want to be able to quote people to subscribing a lot. And then she's gotta give back page, which is very, very interesting. And then she talks about certain things. So I love that she also promotes for causes right here. So I think that's super interesting and unique. And then of course the contact page. And once again, this is a very professional. I won't say glamour shot, but professional kinda, you know, it's done by a photographer. They set up a shoud, they have great lighting and decide whether you want to use that. I think a more natural shock could have been better. But again, if this is her brand and she really wants to be like that PR executive kinda feel. That picture does it. And so once again, this is just a form and you've got the email address. So those are some examples. If we go from Taylor to John, to a Jizya, to Alan and two rho me, I think you've got pretty good examples. The main thing I want you to take away from this is there are so many different ways to do your other website. Also when you create your author website, It's not like you can't totally change the template if you don't get something out there that is simple and gives all the information that we've talked about. Don't try to be perfect about this. You're going to change your mind about what you want. You're going to want to change your author website again and again and again, that's a given. Don't get stuck on trying to create the first website as the perfect website because it won't be the perfect website because you're going to grow as an author. You're going to grow your brand in different directions. And before long you're going to want a different website anyway. So make it, keep it simple. You can do it for free. If you want the domain name and the email address, you can also pay for it. But this is a great strategy to use to build people's awareness about you. All right, let's get to the next module. 12. Strategy #4: Start Answering Questions: All right, let's talk about strategy number 4. And strategy number 4 is start answering questions on Q&A sites. Again, another totally free way to market and promote yourself and your work as an author, definitely time-intensive. So let me just talk about time before we even dive into this. It will take you two to three, maybe four hours to set up your profile to really optimize your profile and any of the answering questions Q&A sites that I'm about to go over in this particular module. So you can expect this setup of your profile is going to take you 24 hours to really do it well, to make sure it's optimized, all your links were to come up with a really great bios so that people know you're an expert when you're answering the questions that they put on the site. So the setup of the profiles will take you two to four hours. And then there's the going in every single day and spending some time answering questions which you want to do that consistently day in and day out. At least four or five times a week. And that alone is going to take you 48 hours every single week. So this is definitely one of them more time intensive strategies. I just wanted to be super clear about that up front. But over time, if you really are consistent with answering questions, your questions on some platforms get upvoted. People go to your profile than they go to your Amazon or their profile than they buy your books, then they join your e-mail list. I mean, this pays itself in dividends and is a totally free but marketing strategy that you can use. So strategy number 4, start answering questions on Q and a sites. So there are definite Q&A sites. Lots of them. I want to talk about three because those are the three that I really feel are probably the best and not a waste of your time. So Answer Bag, Stack Exchange. And Cora, I love core by the way. So I think Quora is the way to go no matter what your book topic is, even if it's fiction. So answer bag, it's answer bank.com. And this is where you can sort of answer different questions. You can also ask different questions, but you can also answer different questions and they will always tell you, excuse me, the trending categories. Then you've got Stack Exchange, nasdaq Exchange is a little bit more for this sort of techie person. Write it. I mean, they do ask you plenty of questions about various things. But once again, I attend if you like, StackExchange is really for finance questions, tech questions. It just feels a lot more Wall Street ish to me, men, just general anything and everything's so again, you want to go through the questions that you see at StackExchange and see if that's really the best environment for you. I love Cora personally because it covers every possible question you can imagine. You can actually optimize your profile really well in core.com. You can create a space on core.com and you can also keep, as you notice in the left-hand panel, you can keep certain categories up on your Quora profile so that you can go directly into those categories to answer questions, you'd have to go searching around for what questions you're going to answer today. So I really, really, really like core.com allot. Also, there are many, many authors and coaches and consultants who draw a lot of business by spending a ton of time answering questions on Quora. So once again, this is not a strategy that you can set it and forget it. Not a strategy where you're only gonna do You know, an hour or two a week? I would say four to eight hours a week going in every day for an hour or so and answering questions. And that's on the conservative estimate of how much time you're going to spend. So really think about if this is a strategy you can commit to, and if this is a strategy certainly want to use. So of all three, you know, answer back stock exchange and chloride highly recommend using core.com. And again, it's a free strategy, it just takes a lot of time. Next, we're going to talk about strategy number 5, sharing your book writing process on social. Okay, let's get to the next free strategy. 13. Strategy #5: Share Your Book Writing Process on Social: All right, let's talk about strategy number 5, which is share your book writing process on social. Once again, strategy number 5 is share your book writing process on social. It is super important to share, not simply the publication of the book or the launch of the book. You know that after story, it's important to share the writing journey with your readers. They actually really want to know about it. They want to know how easy it is for you, how hard it is for you, what you're thinking about as you write your book that you actually really want to know that about you. And it's a way to build connection. It's a way to build trust with your readers, is also a way to create a raving fans and especially when you do it via your e-mail list. It's also a way to add email subscribers because then they can get that information, deeper information about your writing journey through your emails. So this is a great freeway to both market and promote your book. So there are many, many ways that you can share your writer's journey on social, you can post about the writing that you're doing, maybe some writer's block you're experiencing the research that you're doing. You can post a picture of yourself, you know, at the New York Public Library for example, or at your local library on Instagram saying, Hey, I'm doing research for my next book, my historical romance or what have you. You can also talk about the publishing process. What is it like? What part of the process are you in? If you've got a literary agent, just, you know, there are lots of ways to really share tidbits of your journey with your readers. You can also, if you're somebody who's writing nonfiction or you're writing self-help or personal development. You could also take different topics that you're covering in your book as you're writing it in, really hit home and teach more about that topic. Or really talk about an excerpt from the book you're currently writing. Really ask questions, you know, like get some qualitative research out of it as you're writing by asking your readers, you know, I'm writing about healthy boundaries. What are your thoughts on it? Or I'm writing about narcissistic relationships. Have you ever been in one? What was your experience of it? Those are just some examples of ways you can help people understand what you're writing about as you're writing it, but also get their input. You can post pictures of your book covers and say, Hey, I'm thinking about doing this book cover or that book cover. What do you think that's a really great tool in helping people feel like they're on the writing journey with you. The most important thing to think about when you're sharing your writer's journey on social is you want to serve your readers with inspiration, encouragement and joy. You don't want to be the writer who goes on social goes, Oh, this is so Dig is a long and I've got writer's block and my life is still hectic and I can't find a time for right? Like you don't want to be a downer as you share your writer's journey. You really want to be in a blister. And so you want people to know that yes, it's hard and it's challenging. And maybe you do have writer's block, but you wouldn't want to be anywhere else. And you're excited to share this part of the book with people and you can't wait for people to see the book cover. You want that energy, joy, and adventure to come out in everything that you post about your writer's journey on social. Now, the other thing you can do is you can use Pinterest to market your buck. So Pinterest is a really fun platform. You will definitely find that it'll be helpful to create an author or a business Pinterest account. And again, it's kinda the same thing. You create a Pinterest account, you making a business account, it becomes your author Pinterest account. It's not hard to start a Pinterest account. It's pretty straightforward, but you want to remember a couple of things. If you're going to use Pinterest to market your book, you should comment on other people's pins. Because the more you comment on other people's pins, the more they will go to your profile. So your profile and see that you're an author. And then go check out your boards on your profile. You also want to make sure that you created least 10 boards on your Pinterest account. So boards, you know, most people have a Pinterest account, So they know it boards are, but boards are kind of the homes that has certain kins within a given topic. So let me walk you through what 10 boards every author on Pinterest should have. You should have an About Me board. I think I call mine. What I love to teach. You should have a board that gives the links to your social media accounts in your website. You should have a board that is dedicated to your books. What I loved to CH, what I love to write. A board that is dedicated to your blog. So different blog posts or pins in that board. Books that you actually like. So who were the authors you like? And what books from them do you actually loves writing inspirations. Again, you're sharing the journey as an author, so that's another board. And then the remaining four of the 10 or topic related to your book subject. So whether it's a certain historical period or the certain nonfiction topic. You want those last four boards to be super relevant to whatever it is you write about. So those are at least that the 10 boards you want to create on Pinterest. Now, other ways to promote your book on social. Asked for book cover feedback. I said that earlier people love to give feedback on book covers. It's kind of, I don't know, it's a little strange, but people love it. They just, they love filling up like a part of it. And they also really want to know when you select it. Which one did you choose? And was it the one that they voted on for you? So people love but cover feedback. You also want to do virtual other SB lives or IGTV or IG Reels or LinkedIn live? Yes, video, video, video. I can hear all of my introverted writers out there going. I don't want to be on camera. That's why I'm a writer. I feel your pain. And yet I still have to go on camera. I'm going to say the same thing to you. It's really important that people get to see you on video. I know it's a daunting task for us introverts, but you've gotta find ways to do virtual FB lives. Igtv, IGTV don't do all of them like choose one LinkedIn lives. But you do wanna do live opportunities on webcam, on video to really speak to your fans, your readers, to share your writer's life, possibly to run a book giveaway during those FB lives, or you can just run a book giveaway in general and certainly create an F, FB facebook. I'm, I'm assuming everybody knows what that means. Facebook community around the theme of your books is certainly make sure that you build some sort of Facebook group. Private, not public, private, so that you can let people in around the theme of your book. So those are some other ways. So there are lots of ways you can do it on Twitter. You can do it on Snapchat, you can do it on Tiktok. I'm not on tiktok, so I couldn't tell you the first thing about how to do that object. Ok. But use social to promote your book. It's totally free. It requires the time. Now let's talk about time that it takes. All depends on what you do. If you're just posting on Instagram a picture of you at the library doing research every now and again, it might take you a couple hours a week to consistently post stuff. If you're doing FB lives and IGTV and LinkedIn lives. Well, you've gotta write the scripts. You've got to create the outlines. You've got to actually go ahead and conduct the FB live, which I would say please do it twice a week, not just once. And then you've got after you do after you like, go in and respond to comments and questions that come in when people watch the broadcast. So if you're doing the video thing, that's going to be anywhere from three to eight hours. And that's going to be anywhere from three to eight hours if you're doing it consistently, I'd say you're probably missing five to ten hours every two weeks. So 20 hours a month if you're doing regular FTP lives or things like that. So once again, it really depends on what you're doing. It could be anywhere from 20 hours a month, upwards of 25 hours a month. It just depends on what you wanna do. But let's go back to 1. These are all free strategies. These are all strategies that are, that you basically do yourself. That you invest, you know, you roll up your sleeves and you'd get it done and that's why they're free. But free also means that it takes a lot more time. So the balanced to free is that you've got to invest, invest a lot of hours in it, so that's the balance there. All right, so in the next module we're gonna talk about strategy number 6, podcast interviews. Let's get to it. 14. Strategy #6: Podcast Interviews: Okay, So the first book release marketing strategy that we're going to talk about is doing podcasts, interviews that are launched and released right in alignment with the launch date for your book. Now, I don't want to spend a lot of time talking about the theory of this because I want to show you how you actually go about doing it. It is a lot of time. And I'll have like where you're going to hear me say this for almost every strategy. But I think one of the things that really peeves me about people who teach these things is that they don't tell those who are learning how to do these things, just how long things actually take. So when you're thinking about it, getting a podcast interview is easy. It is, there are so many new podcasts out in the world. You could get a hundreds of podcasts, interviews if you really wanted to invest the time to do it. But easy does not necessarily equate to fat. So when you think about doing these podcasts, interviews, in order to get them, you've gotta do a number of things. You've got to number one, do research on all of the podcasts that are out there. Which ones would be relevant for the book that you're about to publish. And then you've also got to go to their websites, learned more about the podcast or who they are, what their businesses when they began this podcasts. And then you've gotta go to their actual podcasts. You've got to listen to a solid, I would say three to five episodes just so that you understand their format. Do they do interview, do they do panel discussion? Is it on video and audio? Is it only audio for the podcast interview? Get to know the kind of guess that they bring on the kind of things they talked about, then you want to go to wherever they give you information on becoming a guest on a podcast to figure out how to submit your request or submission to be a guest, who to contact, how to contact them, what to say when you contact them. All of this, sometimes it's very straightforward in that you can go to somebody's website and they've got a tab for their podcasts. And they have a tab for becoming, you know, get interviewed. But a lot of them don't. So it means a lot of figuring out following them on social, learning more about their podcasts, learning more about how they get podcasts, interviews and how they select guess, and then reaching out to them. Now when you reach out to them with the first email, they may not respond to you, which means you've got to have a process for follow-up e-mails and maybe DM them in on Instagram. So there is a lot of process to doing this, but literally doing podcasts, interviews that launch at the same time as your book or right around, there is one of the best ways to market your book for free, other than all the time you have to spend. So let me show you what this whole process looks like and walk you through the exact steps of what you would need to do to begin securing podcast interviews. Let's get to it. All right, so let's look at the details behind strategy Number 6, podcasts, interviews with Released time, launch of your book. Okay, So one of the first things you're going to do, as I said before, is to really start doing some research on some podcasts. And there are many ways that you can do that research. Typically the way that I start when I, when I know I have a book coming out and I'd like to be featured on podcasts is I will go to Google. Who, who doesn't go to Google? I'll go to Google and wild type up. Let's see. Let's say I'm writing a book about Woman Entrepreneurs. I'm not, but let's just say a podcast about women entrepreneurs, right? So then I would look that up. Now you notice already right at the top, I'm getting all of these podcasts that are related to women entrepreneurship. I could also do podcasts, Let's just say about parenting twins. Let's say you're writing a book about parenting twins. Once again, I can look here and I can see all of these different podcasts about parenting twins. And I might decide, for example, not that I have twins, are not parenting twins, but I might have, I might say, for example, okay, so I'd really want to write this. I have this new book about parenting twins. And so I'm going to start by googling and searching for those podcasts that really are focused on that. And then I can easily click from here. So you'll see twin adversity podcast. So I go right to their site, and then now I am right on their site. So essentially what I wanna do is I want to do a couple of things when you are researching. For me, cancel that when you are researching podcasts, you certainly want to make sure number 1, you figure out what these podcasts are about. So I can look at that. I know that Natalie Diaz is the host of the podcast. Notice right here on her front page, she says Want to be guest on the twin diversity podcasts. Scroll below and find the application. There will be many podcasts that actually have an application or a contact form that you can fill out if you want to be a guest. That makes it super, super easy. For example, with this one, I would definitely go to the bottom. So let's hear it Here it is right here. So she's got a Google form. I can tell that this was made with Google. It's a Google form in she said If you want to be considered to be a guest on the twin diversity podcasts, please plead the form below. So you would put in all of that information. Let me scroll so you can see it. Your full name, your email address, what topics you're interested in discussing. Are you pregnant with twins? Are the already here? And then tell us a little bit more about yourself. So this is a pretty in depth podcasts. Why do you want to be a guest on our podcast? If you could have dinner with anyone dead or alive, who would it be and why? So those are sometimes they throw in really interesting questions just to see kind of how you would answer it. But before you actually fill this out. So let's if people want to be on podcasts, if you don't know how this works, they would jump to this form and they would fill it out first, I would suggest this is what I'm showing you this strategy. Do not fill this form out first. What you wanna do anytime you want to be on somebody's podcasts are a number of things. Number one, you go right to their site, you go to the About Us page because you need to learn about this particular person's mission, why they're choosing to do that. You also want to learn what else do the offer besides podcasting. So they probably offer classes or they talked about the pregnancy. You want to look at their blog when you look at their podcasts, for example. You also want to see, well what's going on and you want to make sure. So now she has the university podcast and the twins tailpipe gas. So now when she know she actually has tube but gas, not one. So then you want to make sure before you ever fill out the form to be a guest, you want to make sure that you go to the podcast, preferably that you subscribe on Apple podcasts, so I could listen on Apple podcasts. Amazon Music is a pretty new and to me, but I guess now it's on Amazon music. You can also listen on Spotify, but I would certainly go to Apple Podcasts. Let's see, we're clicking that takes me, I don't know if it actually links. It should. Okay. Yes. Okay. The computers just being a little slow. So then you want to go to Apple podcasts. And you want to actually, number one, subscribe to the podcast that you would like to be a guest on. Number two, you want to listen to a minimum. This is why the strategies time constrained by the way, a minimum of three to five episodes. And preferably the way that I like to do it is you listen to the latest episode, which the latest one, according to this as July 28th. Then I like to scroll down a little bit more. I'd like to see all of the episodes. Then I find someone that's really interesting. So maybe I might listen to this postpartum one for April, but then I go all the way back. If I'm only listening to three and I want to listen to something from a long time ago, so I'm going to keep going down until I get to something. Let's see, that is way, way down there. Well, this podcast has been around for a minute. So literally I would go back down probably as far back as I could go and listen to one or two that are from the very beginning of the podcast. So we get a flavor for how the podcast has evolved. So I might listen to you how infertility may make you better parent from 2018, I might even go with more mirrored separation after twins. And then I would go as far down as I could go straight to the very beginning of it. Look, even back to 2018 miles podcast has been around for a minute so that I would go as far back as I could go. And I would certainly make sure that I listened to some of the episodes, at least two of them, right from the very beginning. So for example, now I know this is the very first episode. I certainly would highly recommend that you listen to their very first episode. You go up about eight to ten episodes. And then you listen to one that appeals to you. So I might listen to and to twin 30 week primi twins, and then I would go to the most recent and pick a coupled. So you'd have 3 from your most recent episodes. Then once you've listened to, let's say the three to five episodes, I would also look at their customer reviews just to see what people have been saying about them. Because again, in general, you want to be featured on podcasts, but you don't want to be featured on a crappy podcasts that people give one-star to constantly are consistently. So I would look for 0.305 is not bad. I would read the reviews, but once you listen to three to five, hopefully more than that episodes, I would also make sure before you fill out their form or send them an e-mail, you also leave a review because it's just, I'll call it good karma, but it's really good. Oh, podcasters, I'm a podcaster, so I know this. All podcasters appreciate you subscribing on iTunes U, leaving a really great review if it warrants it, obviously an honest review and just letting people know what you like about their podcasts. So I would make sure that you've listened to a number of episodes. First, you have subscribed, you have left to review plus and commentary, not just the stars, but some actual feedback, right? And then you would go back and fill out their forms. So that is essentially how you start researching for podcasts. And once again, once you find their iTunes link, it will lead you right to subscribing to them. I would say don't subscribe to them on all platforms like iTunes, his great period, you'd get subscribed to them on SoundCloud. You can subscribe to them on iTunes. I'm sure there's some art, Amazon music like this one is. There's also Spotify, I would say if there were two that you followed them on or subscribed on, it should be iTunes and it should be Spotify. Those two preferably, but definitely first and foremost, iTunes. So I would look there for them. You can also find podcast on SoundCloud. I host my podcast on SoundCloud. I think it's a really easy platform to use. And then it also puts my podcasts episodes on iTunes as well, so it's super easy. So you can also, if you want to search podcasts, let's say podcasts about business, I don't know, I'll see, we'll see what it comes up with. So again, you can even go to SoundCloud.com and you can start to search podcasts things here. And maybe you might find a different podcast show that it is only on some Cloud that is not on other platforms. And you can do your research there. You can also cite search for podcasts on Spotify directly on Spotify. Because again, there could be Spotify podcasts that are only on Spotify, that are not on iTunes. So when you're doing the research, I would highly recommend that you look for podcasts, starting with Google search. Then you can look for them on iTunes, you can look for them on Spotify, you can look for them on SoundCloud. And what you want to do as you're doing this research. Because obviously you're doing the research, but you've got to actually take down the information somewhere, is I certainly want you to create a spreadsheet. I'm showing you now an example of a spreadsheet that you could use. Because I want you to know that it's one thing to keep it in a notebook, but you actually want a living document that you can update on a regular basis. So you are keeping up with what's going on with your outreach to podcasts, to be featured as a guest. So number one, a column that has the number. So I know how many podcasts over all I'm outreaching to. Then I want to put in a, column B, the name of the podcast. Then I want the name of the host or hosts. I also want their Instagram account, preferably for the podcast. If they do not have a specific Instagram account for the podcasts, then you can put the IG handle for themselves, right? And then of course, the website to the podcast or to their main website where they do have a tab or page about the podcast. And then I always like to put what is the first outreach date. So meaning whether you filled out the form that they have to be a gas or you send a direct e-mail to them because they don't have a form or guest application. What date did you do that? What were the results? So you can always expand this out so you can make this longer and put detailed notes about did you hear from them, Did you not hear from them? Especially if you don't hear from them, there should be a second outreach date, preferably two weeks after the first outreach, I would give them two weeks because lots of people who podcast like myself, very, very busy, not great at responding Johnny on the spot. And so it may take up to two weeks to you to hear back from them. So I wait two weeks. What was your second outreach date? What were the results of that again, you might want to put detailed notes and then also any other notes besides what you're putting about the results of those things so that I would definitely create this kind of podcasts outreach spreadsheet so that you can keep track of who you're reaching out to so you're not duplicating outreach. But also what were the results? Are you falling them unsocial? Especially Instagram or you commenting on their stuff on Instagram. Make sure if you're following them on Instagram. You're also building relationship by liking their stuff, commenting on their stuff. So when you do choose to outreach to them, they know who you are. That's really important. So you definitely want to make sure you have some sort of spreadsheet. I love Google Docs, so I use Google Docs for these kinds of things, but you get for this in Excel, I'm sure you could find a way to put it in Evernote as well or notes if you have an iPhone. So you do want a document that gives you the podcast outreach to the other pieces. If they do not have a form, you may be asking yourself, what do I say to these people, right? Like if there's no application, there's no form. And you're thinking to yourself, okay, So what do I say to them when I email them? Well, so this is just a generic template that I tend to use. I do customize it to each and every podcast depending on what I hear when I listened to their three to five episodes. But basically it's something like, hey, how's your day going? I came across your podcast, make sure you put the name of the podcast in and loves the topic or loved the genre, or love what you talk about. I was in awe of your take on Blank and episode Blake. So you have to hit them from the Go with information that tells them that you have been listening to their podcasts. So I like to start with and love the fact that you said this in episode this and I learned so much from this other episode blank when your guests, so and so talked about this. So I typically like to refer to at least two different episodes in it so they know that I haven't just listen to one. I've listened to a number of them. And then I go into myself as a coach and speaker. I'm on a mission to blank blablabla. Listening to your podcast, maybe think about boom, this topic level of LA. And I was wondering if you're currently looking for any guests for your podcasts. And then I actually ask the questions because when you say I was wondering. Well, that's not really a question. That's like I was thinking about that. So then I get super direct and I go, Are you currently looking for gas? If so, what's the process for submitting a request pitch to be a guest on your show. Thanks so much for all you do in the world. Sincerely. So to me that is the first outreach. Now, going back to timelines, I said you wait two weeks, then you come back to the second outreach. And in the second outreach when I haven't heard from them, then it go high. And I always ask people how their day's going. It doesn't matter who I'm communicating with professionally, personally, if I'm sending a text message, I fully believe that you should always start with asking anyone your communication with how are you. We live in a world where people oftentimes forget to ask how other people are doing. I'm a firm believer that every conversation should start with, how are you? So then the second outreach ago, How's your day going? I emailed you a few weeks ago about the potential of being a guest on your podcasts, that name in the podcast. I wanted to follow up and check in to see if you receive my email. Are you currently looking for podcasts guest. So I'm asking the question from outreach 1 again, and then I'm stating what my intention is and love to be a guest and would love to discuss the opportunity further at your earliest convenience. So now I'm really putting the ball in their court again. And then I say, Have a wonderful day and I look forward to hearing from you. So setting the intention again, sincerely your name. So those are examples of templates that you can use when you're doing this route about reach, it keeps it simple. But again, the heart of this strategy is really getting to the bottom line of you've got to know their podcasts, you've got to know their backstory. You need to do research on who they are. You've got to listen to a number of episodes. This strategy in and of itself depending. Let me just go back to the spreadsheet depending on how many episodes you actually want to reach out to. Every podcast outreach typically has taken me two per podcast outreach, probably three to four hours to do. And that three to four hours and includes the listening to the three to six episodes, the doing research on their site. So like if you're going to reach up to ten people, you are talking 40 to 50 hours to reach out to ten different podcasts. So yes, it is a very time-consuming strategy to use, but it is really well worth it because people will be listening to your interview on that podcast. Five-year should now, ten years from now. So it carries weight for the long-term and it's free. And really all it takes is the sweat equity of doing the things that I talked about in the strategy. So yes, it is time-consuming, but it is so, so, so, so worth it. And you meet some pretty great podcasters who then become your friends, who you then do things with later in business, writing or what have you. It's so good for relationships and getting to know people that you would have never have gotten to meet Had you done anything else. So it's really, really good in that way. So that is strategy number 6. So once again, you are definitely doing your research and then you are coming back and putting that in a spreadsheet so that again, you have something to work with. All right, we're going to talk about strategy number seven next, which is lectures and talks at local venues. Let's get to the next strategy. 15. Strategy #7: Lectures and Talks: All right, I happen to love strategy number seven because it is one of the easiest book marketing strategies that you can use. And it's actually a really fun strategy if you like to talk to other people. Now, again, I'm an introvert. I don't want to be in massive crowds for long periods of time, but I certainly love connecting deeply with other people. So this is strategy number seven. Really lecture and give talks at local venues. So I'm not talking about being a Tony Robbins in a stadium with tens of thousands of people. I'm talking about really tapping into your local community, giving talks at colleges for free, talking at a lunch and learn at a Chamber of Commerce event for free, talking to local book clubs, you know, at the library, scheduling a little event at your local library renting out. Oftentimes there are many libraries. We'll rent you the space for free, not charge you and welcoming the community so you can discuss a particular topic from your book or even discuss the book itself if it's a fiction book. So there are so many ways that you can give local talks that you can share with people. You bookstores. If you have, still have bookstores wherever you live, there are just so many opportunities to share your passion for your subject, to share your passion for writing with others. Speak to writing groups about your writing process. There's just so many ways to do it. Now the key to this strategy is you've gotta have what they call a signature talk. I always say have three to five of them. But if you have at least one, and now your position to really reach out to the Chamber of Commerce, reach out to local professional groups and organizations. Say, Hey, I see that you meet as a support group once a month. Do you ever have speakers? Can I Would you be open to the idea of me coming to speak to the group I'm the author of such and such. And I love to talk about this topic. Those are the ways that you start to get in. And here's the really great thing, number 1. What I love about speaking at local venues is if you can position it just right, you can get somebody to use your phone to video, you're giving that talk. And then you can put on your website, you can put it on your YouTube channel. You can put it all over social and start to build up your speaking side, which oftentimes, especially for non-fiction writers, there is a speaking opportunity that leads to a paid speaking opportunity based on the topic of your book. You can also buy speaking at local venues, start to build that writers platform. There are so many people when I was speaking years ago at chambers of commerce, who still follow me today. Who download my books faithfully today? Who purchase my books faithfully today? All because they happened to be at one Chamber of Commerce event. They heard me speak. We talked afterwards and they got on my e-mail list. They buy my books, they're raving fans. You just never know what connections with opportunities you're going to find when you start to really reach out and speak at local venues. Now, there's a lot that goes into that. So let's go to the part of this particular strategy where I walk you through the signature, talk, the reaching out, the what do you say in an email? The how do you find opportunities? I'm going to give you some examples of that. So not only are you hearing for me that this is a great strategy, you also can see clearly because I'm about to walk you through it, what specific steps you would have to take to actually get that whole thing going. Alright, Let's get to it. Alright, so let's talk about strategy number seven and a bit more detail because I do really want to talk about this idea of what do you do, how do you create your signature talk? Obviously, we've been talking about the fact that this is a great strategy. It is completely free. You can do local talks in a variety of venues. You can talk at bookstores, you can talk it. Look with support groups, conferences, Turkish groups, Chamber of Commerce, writer's conferences, colleges, I mean, in actual college classrooms, if there's a topic that you're an expert on, there are so many ways to do that. The heart of this strategy though, is what we're about to talk about, which is crafting your signature talk. So let's go there. So when you think about a signature chocolate's going to definition of what exactly is the signature talk. Because if you Google it, you're going to hear a lot. You're going to read a lot of different things, watch the videos and a lot of different ways. A TED Talk might be a signature talk, but let me give you a more specific definition. So a signature talk is a speech that is uniquely you, uniquely you like your viewpoint, your life experiences, your personality, your tape on a particular subject that you're writing this book on. It is a speech that is like it has you written all over it. That's why we call it a signature talk, right? It has your signature all over it. It covers a specific topic. And that topic really, the way that you deliver that topic reflects your expertise, your brand, and also really speaks to your target client. Now a signature talk is also a talk that's delivered in a way that is really authentically you. So if you're somebody who hates suits, they're not gonna go into a Fortune 500 company and give us significant talk wearing a suit, just because everybody else in the room is wearing a suit. If you're really the person who's in a pair of jeans and cowboy boots or cow girl boots. Button down top. That's how you're going into that talk. Because once again, this signature talk is authentically, it's delivered in a way that is authentically you. Now, let's walk through an example of a signature talk. So let's say you're a coach who specializes in career coaching. Okay, we're just using this as an example. Your coach, you specialize in career coaching and you really want to hone in on your ideal client who's making a major career change at midlife, age 40 plus. So although you could coach anybody on changing their careers, you, your ideal client really is somebody who's 40 plus. At midlife, they want to make a major career shift. Here are some things to consider. Targeting a specific profession or fields. So for example, are you writing a book about shifting your career from accounting to a more creative endeavor at midlife that is focusing on a specific profession. Are you focused on writing a book about lawyers taking their skills in law and using them to build non-profits, again, still focused on attorneys, but in a very unique way in terms of mid-career shifts, what's the core message you want to share with people who are making a career transition. So again, this goes back to the signature piece. There are lots of people out there who are going to talk about career transitions in midlife, tons of people. But what is your unique, definitive belief driven? What is your core message about people 40 plus making those transitions? So what's that core message that you want to share? And what key points can you make in this talk that will be powerful, actionable, and authentically part of your approach to career transitions. So what are the key points that you want to say in this particular signature talk? So that helps you really get down on paper what is going to be in the signature talk? Now, signature TOC Titles, this is a really important piece. Your signature talk titles need to be compelling, intriguing on brand and problem solution oriented. It takes time to come up with your signature talk, right? Like I could create a signature talk that that's called the obstacle is the way I think I've given that top before or own it. Or I could come up with a senior talk that says, you know, believe, password, you see what you want something, you want a title that doesn't give away everything you're going to cover in the message is authentically you on brand is problem solution oriented. So it's like you give a title that lands, write a title that says own it, or title that says, Get out of your own way. But then the subtitle gives you a little hint at what the solution is that you're going to provide during the signature talks. So it's problem solution oriented and it needs to intrigue people, it needs to get people to go. I wonder what she's going to talk about, or I wonder what he's going to talk about. So again, it takes some time to come up with the right title, but you'll know it when you land on it. But you want to brainstorm a lot of titles until you really feel passionate about the title. That is going to be the title of your signature talk. Now the elements of a signature talk. So there are a number of elements to a signature talk. So as you're going at once, you have your title, so your problem solution oriented title on brand. Now you've got to actually write the signature talks. So the parts of a signature talk are number one, the meet and greet, the powerful opening your story. You'll always have to put your story in the mix of this. It makes it authentically you. The content, the gift, the offer, and the wrap up. In a nutshell, your signature talk is, you start with a powerful intro. You welcome everybody. You start with a powerful andro. It could be a question. It could be a story. What you wanna do the meet and greet so that your high-energy and you set the tone for the energy in the room. So acknowledged people see people welcome them. Ask a powerful question, tell a powerful short story. There's your meet and greet. So then the powerful opening is where you really want to get people to start thinking because you're taking them down a journey. And then you open with a question and you get the audience thinking you may ask a question and give them some time to answer. You may say, I'm going to ask you a question. I'd like for you to think about your answer as we go through this session. And so you ask them out pen and paper so they can write the question down and you start with a powerful question that gets them thinking. Then you tell your story. You tell like not all of your life story, but you tell a story that you, that you know aligns well with the core message of your signature talk. So a to get to know you. So it establishes connection. They get to know why you're talking about what you're talking about, why you've written a book on what you've written a book about, it establishes both connection and credibility. Then we go into the strategies, the content. Now we're teaching the three most important strategies to solve their biggest problems. So we have started with a powerful question. We've gone a little bit into your stories so that they can have connection and credibility. Now you're going to teach, you're going to train, you're gonna give them like here was the problem we're talking about. Here are three amazing solutions you can implement starting today. Then the gift. So you need to offer them a free gift. So this is either a free copy of a chapter in your book, a freebie that they can send up for your email list. You always want to you with a signature talk. Get people to subscribe to your email list. Then you also want to go deeper by saying here's an offer. You can work with me one on one. We can do at a coaching session, a free 15-minute consultation. So we go from the contents of the teaching, the gift, join me, my e-mail us, you can keep up with me, right? Subscribe on YouTube. What have you offer? Let's go deeper individually, one on one, and then the wrap up where we review the key points, we review the strategies and you leave them with a heavy hitter. The ball is in your court. This is your life. Here's what I'm going to ask you to do about it. Get up and take this one action before the end of today, call to action, and then the top end. And then you do some Q and a after that. So those are the elements of a signature talk. Now create and tweak. So here's the thing. It's so important to create and tweak your signature talk. You're not going to get the perfect signature talk the first time you write it. You really want to write your signature talk. You want to come up with all of the points that we just talked about, make sure all the elements are there. Then you want to read it aloud, and then you want to edit it until it sounds powerful to you. So you want to edit it until it sounds powerful. Now, let's take some time and let's actually walk through how you do the research on finding speaking opportunities. Because I can, you know, we've talked about the fact that this strategy lectures and talks at local venues is powerful. It's free, it's a free way to market your book. We've talked about how do you create a signature talk. But let's go into the fact of, well, how do you actually find these speaking opportunities? So let's transition, and I'm going to give you some examples of how you actually do the work of finding these opportunities. All right, so before I show you how to search for speaking opportunities, I do want to start with this spreadsheet because this is a great example of a template that you can build yourself because everything, you want to keep track of everything. Bottom line, you want to keep track of the number of organizations that you reach out to for speaker opportunities. You want to keep track of the organizational name, the website link. What kind of speaking opportunity is? Is it a conference? Speaker description? It was at a conference. Is it talking in a bookstore, doing a book reading? Is it for a support group at church group? So you certainly want to describe, right, that the speaker description, what is the offering that you get? What what are you going to be speaking about two. And and in what venue. So that's really important. Who is the contact name of the person who reached out to or the person who is overseeing the call for proposal and then their email address, and then when you reach out to them first, so when was the first contact? Typically you would put the date here. If you have more than one signature chocolates, they've created three to five, which is always great to have in your back pocket and number of them. Which signature talk are you thinking about doing for this particular speaker proposal? And then what were the results of either the call for proposal or the outreach and the date that you send a thank you note. It's so important whether somebody gives you an opportunity to speak or not, to always send a thank you note. Always, always, always tend to think that is super, super important. So those are the things you really want to consider when you are doing lectures and talks at local venues. All right, so now let's get to that. How do you actually find these particular topics? Let's get to that part. Alright, so let's walk through how do you find these speaking opportunities? So typically, physically they start with Google. And so what I'll do is one of the first things I'll do is I will research call for speakers 2022 or whatever the next year is going to be in the case that when you're reviewing this course. So I will look for speaking engagements are opportunities that are coming up next year, meaning 12 months from whatever the year is right now. And so I might go call for speakers 2022. I might do it on my topic, right? I might say, let's just go with leadership because I could talk about that. So then I would look there and maybe that gets me a little bit too far ahead. But and then I look a little bit better. Maybe I'll I'll dive into, maybe I'll do one that says developments, call for speakers 2022. So again, you're just testing different things out to see if there is any opportunities Speaker submissions. Let's see, call for speakers. So once again, and then I'm going to open it in a new tab. And I'm going to see events with open calls for speakers. Again, I do see that ISACA conference Asia 2020 has a cough or speakers. North America has a call for speakers. Let's see. And when I hit these links, I'm really trying to figure out, well what if because SATA, right, so I looked at it and I say, well, what is this thing? So then typically I'll go back. And I will say, well, what is this? So ISACA looks like it's cybersecurity stuff. So you do have to do a little research. You dare to figure out, well what is this thing? And then you go back to where you were so that you can see open calls for speakers. So again, I might suggest starting with just a general coffers, speakers 2022, because then you're gonna get a lot more that's obedient. And you can also really look at them and take a deeper dive and say, well, what does this mean? So you've got a regional conference. Well, what is that about? I can tell that this is, let's see, call for speakers, lectures, best practices. And so you can also download. So then you'll also want to download their coffers speakers. This is going to happen. Oh, it's already passed, but this was in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, so they actually have a call for speakers. The call for speakers is always great because it will tell you what they're talking about. And so you can then read whether this is the right fit for you. You can also read what their proposal requirements are, what the deadlines are when they're selected. And then you can fill out the form is submitted. So that is one way I would start if you're looking for a call for speakers. The other thing that I would look at is let's see guest speakers application. I might say chamber of commerce, right? 2022. Let's see if that pulls anything that might be too long. So once again, if you look at something and you go Speaker opportunities, you've got the land Chamber of Commerce. If you are in Virginia, that may be super-helpful if you're not the ones again, because I wanted to narrow it down, I can also narrow it down to my states, right. So you can look about speaker application for South Tampa Chamber of Commerce. Once again, the key here is that you certainly want to look for things in your local area, at least someplace that we're willing to drive. But you want a Google search it guest speaker application, or call for speakers. You want to look up those kinds of things that way. You could also say speaker application, bookstore, reading session. I don't know, that might be too much to ask for. But again, you want to look at it. If I just take up the reading session, you can look up your local bookstores and you could figure out who offers what, right? And you can find out who are your local bookstores. So instead you might want to say, let's say bookstores in Los Angeles, California. If you live in California, and what you'd want to do there is go to their websites and in particular. So if I look at skylight books, I might go to their website directly. And then from their website, I might go to their events page, for example. And I would just check out what kind of events do they do. So notice they do have a lot of in-store signings with authors. They do have some things happening on crowd casts where people read from and discuss a particular book. So then you know, because they do do events, you also want to reach out to them and find out, you know, are you open to having a new author come and do a reading or do something live on crowd cast. Is that a possibility and reach out directly to them and you can find out their information by finding out, you know, going to their about page, who they are. I'm definitely go there but then also go to contact. So you know who to contact about any of those given things. So I just wanted to give you a sampling of what it looks like for really doing the research. It is time-consuming and you're going to hear me say this over and over again. It is super time consuming, which is fine because at the end of the day when you get opportunities to be a speaker and you get to share your signature talk and you apply to do a TED talk even that's a great example of something that's free. That gives you so much air time. It is an awesome thing because then it exposes you not just to your local community, but it exposes you to the world because most of these things are available virtually and are also available online. So please, please, please be sure that what you are doing is you're certainly leveraging the power of speaking to both create a signature talk, but then also to move forward and start to connect with your audience in a real time way. Now the hours for implementing this can be, you know, it depends on how many places you want to look to speak. It's definitely a solid two to four hours each week. If you're looking every single week, it could be more depending on how intensely you want to look and then fill out a call for proposal, submitted application, creating your signature talk is going to take you anywhere from five to seven hours. That's ballpark. It could take ten. So keep in mind, there's a lot of investment in this, but it really works when you're speaking. People loved to hear. People speak who are engaging in, who are authentically themselves. So please, please keep that in mind. As you look for speaker opportunity is alright, let's get to the next strategy, which is strategy Number 8. Having a free period for your book and asking for early reviewers. Let's get to it. 16. Strategy #8: Have a FREE Period: All right, So Strategy Number 8 is have a free period for your book and asked for early reviewers. And what I want to show you in this strategy is number one, how do you set up from Kindle Direct Publishing your free period, which is really the easiest part of this whole strategy and takes the least amount of time. But then to, once you've set up your free period, what exactly do you do next? So a couple of things. So I'm showing you from my kVp, Let's say I wanted to start a free period. And again, the free period is not for paperbacks, just, I just want to get that away. It's for Kindle, your e-book only and it's not for audible. So what you would do is from your kVp account, you would click these three dots. You would click promote and advertise. So that would take you to a new window and you have to have your book enrolled in KTB select. So let me go back a minute and say when you first set up your booking Kindle Direct Publishing, make sure that it is signed. It signed up for ADP direct because kVp select excuse me, because then you can do things like free periods. You could do a Kindle countdown deal, or you could do a free book promotion. So then in this window you would click free book promotion. And you would click create a new free book promotion. And then from there you would be directed to put, okay, What is your start date? And keep in mind, you can do a maximum of five days. So what I've always read is that you want to start on a Sunday typically, and then you want to end. Let's see where we're going with this so that it's still you want to start on a Sunday, when do you three it's kinda where that It's only doing four or five days. That's strange. But so okay. So it's saying you can start on a Saturday day and then you can end on a Wednesday, which is a little odd. It usually lets me do something different, but let me let me go a little bit further and it won't let me do that. Let me try something a little bit different. This training is C. Let's try with a different book. So let's say we're gonna take this one and I'm going to go promote and advertise because that looks been around longer. So I'm gonna click free book promotion. Create a free book promotion. Here we go. Now, I'm not sure what happened with other book. It didn't give me the full calendar, but this is what you should typically see. You should see that you have a full calendar available to you. So let's say you want to start on a Sunday, going back to what I was saying before. And then you wanna go five days out, so you want it to be Sunday through Thursday. And then the moment you click Save changes, it will save this. Now, I don't want to do free promo for this book, so I'm not going to save the changes. But again, I wanted to show you how you actually do that. You typically want to start your free promo on a Sunday, you want to end it on a Thursday. It will always be running, I believe in Pacific Time, which it says right here. So you set up the free promo here, which is the first step in this strategy, then what you're gonna do and let me, this is the time-consuming parks I'm going to switch. Now you've gotta get ready to ask people that you know predominantly to review your book for free. So this is where all the work on the strategy goes when it goes into, because what you're gonna do is you're going to send out a number of messages. So the heart of this strategy is you want to ask people know who you trust to give you an honest book review. You know, not all five-stars. If it's not a five-star book, but an honest book review, they're going to write a blurb about it. You want to give them the opportunity to do so. And so I always use a very standard copy when I send out the messages. And the first thing you're gonna wanna do. And even before we get to the messaging, so where I like to start is the spreadsheet. So number one, you want to go for, I would say for a minimum of about 30 to 50 people that you reach out to. So in this particular book reviewer spreadsheet, I like to keep the number of people, obviously in column number a. I want to put the reviewer's name and column number b. Typically I'm reaching out to them on Facebook's, I'm doing Facebook Messenger. But if you're sending e-mail, then you can put their email address if you feel like you need that. I don't typically need that. So I'll put their reviewer name, the date when I sent them the first email and we're gonna go through the copy in a minute. Then I put Y or N, yes or no. Did they say yes or no? So I could put that there. And then if they said yes, obviously, then I'm going to put the date where I do the second message, the date of the follow-up, then the review due date and I might fell up again on the due day or if on the review due date and then the date the review is posted. Now the timing of this is everything. I typically like to set up the free period and GDP for two weeks out from when I ask people to review. So you don't want to set up the kVp phi free promo day this Sunday. And then you ask people on Saturday if they could download the book. And then start reviewing. You wanna kinda give them some time. So typically what I'll do is I will schedule the five-day free promo, two weeks from today. And then I will start reaching out to people starting today because I'll say the frequent muster, it's in two weeks. Could you done with the book and then I will literally ask them, I'll give them a due date, typically, probably a week after the freebie, the five-day free promo ends to get me the thing. So I'm literally giving them three weeks to a month from the time I initially asked them to read the book and to download it for free and to leave a big book review, it just gives them plenty of time. But it also isn't so long that they forget about it. So I will do the review due date, the date the review is posted because I'm always looking to follow up with them when they say, hey, I posted that review typically takes a day or two for you to see it on your Amazon. But this is a spreadsheet that's really important because you've got to keep track of everybody you asked. Because again, you want to ask 30 to 50 people and you want to be able to keep track of who said yes, Who said no and when you follow up with them. So this is time-consuming because you've got to come up with a list of 3250 folks. And so that teams to 600. Think about who you want to ask, who could really do this? Who could do it? Well, who's going to flake on you? You've got a lot you've gotta consider to come up with the list first things first, get your list of 30 to 50 people. Now, the emails or the Facebook messages that you send out. So typically what you're going to say is, and I always do something like this. I will start out with a request for a book review message that says, Hey, how's your day going? I was asked people how their day's going. And then I'll say, hey, I've got this new book. I'm promoting one of my books. The free period is going to be from this state to this day. I would love your support. I'm looking for a group of 30 to 50 people, 20 people who are willing to download the eBook for free, read it and deliver an honest review within two weeks of that free periods. So again, I am setting the free period from two weeks from the point that I said this first message, I'm letting them know and the free period is going to be I'm also letting them know that two weeks from the free periods end, I would like to have the review posted. And I'm also telling them really specific details about what that requires because when I did this at first, I would never tell them. How long will this take? And that was the first question I get. Well, how long is the book? How long will this take me? So now on the first message I say, the book is approximately 100000 words in Microsoft Word. It's about 50 pages. I'm really looking for you to download it by the end of the free period. Here's the link that you can use and then please submit it by this state. So literally I give them up to a month from the end of the free period, usually about two weeks is the best. And then I'd say then my final thing in this first message is, would you be able to download the book for free, read it, and leave a review by this review deadline. Thank you for support. Most people say Yes. I very few people who've ever said no to this because I've built in so much time for them to actually do the work. I've looked and know everything they need to do. I've looked the note, you know, just how much it's going to require of them. And so most of the people that I reached out to you for this, they always say yes. So it's pretty it's a slam dunk. Plus I'm going to people that I know and people that I love. And so they're willing to read the book. So when the free period actually starts now people are going to forget. So let me just say that people are gonna forget. So you gotta have another message ready to go when, because people will forget, because it's two weeks away. So then I will send another message that day, the first day of the five-day free promo. And I will say, Hey, thanks so much for being willing to download, read, review the book. It's now available for free download for the next five days. Please let me know if you have any trouble downloading the book, you can download it and I give them the link again. Typically they'll, they'll respond to this second message and I'll say, hey, I downloaded it, can't wait to read it. Then you've gotta do a review follow-up. And then this is where you're going. All right, how are things going? Because so the review follow up really is that you do a kind of a day or two before the review deadline that you gave them. And it's sort of like, uh, reminders, they haven't done the review to do their view, but it's a nice reminder because they're saying, Hey, how are things going? I want to take a minute to say thank you again for being willing to create time and space to read my book and leave a review. Amazon doesn't notify me when people leave reviews. I wanted to check in and see if you're able to read the book and leave an honest review, please let me know if you'd left their view. Thank you so much again. So it's a nice way of saying thank you. And if they haven't done the review, they feel really pressured to now go do the review because you're thanking them for something they promised they do and they haven't done it yet. So that final review follow-up will usually gets people to handle their business and follow through on their commitment, which is awesome. So once again, you are putting the number, the reviewer name, the date of the initial quest, did they say yes or no that David, she followed up with them the review date and the date the review is posted. And you're also going back to check on your Amazon to see if there are additional reviews. So that's really, really important. And that is the strategy now in terms of how long it takes. So it does take up to 30 minutes to set up on kVp, that five-day free promo. That's the easy part. But the whole thing that I just showed you with the messaging and the deciding who's going to be in the mix of this and who you're going to ask. That is going to take you two to six hours for the marketing during the whole free period. So all of these messages, all three of them. Plus keeping up with this spreadsheet, that's going to take your total to six hours. Now, keep in mind that you're really shooting for over 100 downloads on the first day of your book, and that you're getting at least 10 solid book reviews as a result of the free period. That's why I'm saying you want to ask 30 to 50 people because what you're really wanting at the end of the day, and this is how you know, you've succeeded with this strategy. At least 10 solid reviews posted, period, at least 10. So one other piece I wanted to show you, and this is not the free started this strategy because some people are looking at this and going pass a lot of time. It is lot of time. And if you've a lot of different books that you've written, It's a total of anywhere from about six to eight hours total per book that you'd periphery period that you're doing. So another option that people use, this is not a free option, but I wanted to show you people also go on Fiverr and what they will do is they will hire somebody like BK nights or enter 2020 who will promote their book for free and fiber. And typically, I don't understand the whole backend of how they do this. I will just tell you they have built up a really big following, or they've got a really big Facebook group, or they've got a really big email list of people who are avid readers and so you pay them, you know, anywhere from 15, it says starting at five, but it's not really starting at five, anywhere from 15 upwards to 50, 60 bucks. They will promote your book during your free period to their thousands of people. And lots of those people will download your book and some of them will read it and number of them will leave reviews. And so this is the paid way to do it. But again, I'm going to tell you, this is nice. If you want to spend the 1550 bucks. But a, it's not free. Be, nothing is as effective as the organic pull of people that you know and trust, leaving you honest book reviews. So I would still choose this free strategy over a five or paid strategy. You know, if you have the money, do both. But I certainly would make sure that you're doing this piece too because it really does matter. Those reviews really, really do matter. So that is strategy number 8, having a free period for your book and asking for early reviewers. Now, let's go to strategy number nine, which is post to social consistently and hashtag your book, quotes from the book, super, super important. Let's get to that one. 17. Strategy #9: Post to Social Consistently: So strategy number nine, posts to social consistently and hashtag your book. So this is a really important strategy that if you use it over a long period of time, you will start to build a following of people who not only read your books, but they follow you on social. So whether you're deciding to use Instagram or Pinterest or Twitter or Facebook. The heart of this strategy, because it is a free strategy, is to post consistently. And so each of those different social platforms, whether you are choosing Instagram or Pinterest, they have different approaches, a different ways that you create images. But essentially what this strategy entails is you would create the image, whether that's a quote from your book or the book cover itself, or maybe a picture of you late at night with your glasses on, staring at a computer screen because you're writing a book, you would use something like Canva to create the image in the size that works best, whether it's Facebook or Instagram or Pinterest. And then you would post now the key to the strategy and the key to it working to promote and market your book for free is that you've got to post consistently. There are a number of apps that will help you figure out the best times to post. Even. Software programs like HootSuite isn't great example of that. Or later where you can create a whole bunch of posts. You can schedule them to launch on certain days, at certain times. And then you have it automated so that it's releasing your content. The key to posting on social and hashtagging your book. So either the name of your book or the name of you as an author, I typically say hashtag. The name of your book is that you are actually helping people get a sneak peek into what the book has to offer them a sneak peek into you as an author. And then you're also helping to build that connection, that relationship, because you might put a post, Let's add Instagram that says book discussion. 30 minutes joined me on IGTV at seven PM, let's say. And then that way you're promoting not only for specific content from your book like a quote, but you're also promoting live events that you're holding on that social media platform. And then you can put it on stories, you can do Snapchat. They were just a lot of different things that you can do social that key, the key. So there are a couple of keys to using this free strategy. So you're not paying for Facebook ads, you're actually posted a Facebook, for example. Then the first key to the strategy is you want to understand that every post should not be. Please buy my book. You don't want every post to be pleased. Gary van or Chuck has this book called jab, jab hook. And in the book he talks about the fact that really what you wanna do is you want to spend two posts jabbing or giving great content. And then one post hooking or asking for someone to do something like buy something. So again, the idea is nobody likes to be sold to. With every single post. You want to find that rhythm where you have a few posts, two, maybe three, where you're offering value and you're, you know, you're sharing insights and your sharing quotes from your book. And then in the caption, if it's Instagram, you're posting some tips or to-dos or helpful insights. And then every three to four posts, That's your hook. Pre-order my book. Join me for this FB live. So again, it's not being overly salesy, but when you use social consistently people look for you, they follow you, they make comments and other piece of socialist ask people to comment. And each caption, whether it's Facebook or Instagram, with a question, if it's Pinterest, pinterest plays by different rules, but it also is one of the biggest search engines out there. So making sure you have a beautiful image within the image. When they click on it, it links either to where they can pre-order your book or to your website is also important. Now, let me show you the backend of this and what this looks like in action, and then we'll keep moving on. All right, so let's talk about strategy number nine. Again, another free strategy to market and promote your book. This is posted social consistently. And hashtag, your book and hashtags really are important. I'd say most important for Instagram. Definitely valuable on Facebook, not so valuable on Pinterest or LinkedIn. Although LinkedIn is as started using hashtags in a more regular fashion. So this one is really, really important, obviously when you write your book and I'm especially talking to self-help, personal development slash non-fiction memoir writers here, I don't know that this applies as much if you're a fiction writer. But if you're writing books where you really want to help people transform their lives in some way, shape, or form, where you want to share your story. You do want to make sure, and I'm gonna tell you about my approach to doing this when I write books. You do want to make sure you have somewhere saved, whether it's in Notes on your iPhone or it's an a Word document or a Google document. You want to have a list of really powerful quotes that you have pulled from your book. So the way that I approach this is typically when I'm doing the second edits of the manuscript of my book, I will also have a highlighter because I've read it three or four times at this point. And I will highlight the quotes that I know I want to make into quotes, which is what I'm about to show you that. Then I have it highlighted, printed out, highlighted. I know which quotes are the ones that I really want to use. And then what you wanna do is you actually want to create some sort of image for, for the quotes. Put the quotes in there, put your name, I typically put my name and then the specific book that I wrote from which the quote came. And then you want to be able to share that unsocial. Now, if I'm doing it on the fly, meaning I'm not in front of a laptop or a computer. I will use an app like Fanta, which you can get on Google Play. You can get it in the Apple Store that is right on your phone and you produce the images on the phone. If I have more time though, what I am going to do is I'm going to use Canva to produce those quotes. And what I love about Canada is one, it is easy. Now there is a free version of Canva. I use a paid version of Canva. So you can use a free version, but I will say you get all access to the photos of the things if you use the paid version of Canva. So what I do want to show you is how you actually create a quote that is, that is built for using on social and sharing the quotes from your book. So typically in Campbell, what you do is you go to templates and let's just start with an Instagram posts because we can easily in Canada turn it into any other social post. So let's say I want to create a blank post. So that's what I'm gonna do here. What I love about Canva is that there are so many ways, you have so many templates, so we'll just use, I recently use this template. So again here now I've got the quotation marks. I can actually switch and put my name here, right? So I can say, since it's from my book, I can say put my name there. I can also, one of the things I like to do so that I give myself more room is I like to ungroup these so that I can change the size. So see now that I've ungrouped it, I can make this a little bit smaller because they think that's pretty massive. See, that's a little bit too small. So now I'm going 28. Let me just make sure I can get all of that. 28. And so let's just pretend this was a quote from my book. So now I literally can change it to where I want it to be. I can also change up this photo. Let's say I'm writing a book about, I don't know, somebody who's thinking about creating new life. So now I can replace this photo here. I can also change the coloring, my color, my branding colors tend to be purple. So then what I can do here is I can make this purple to match my branding colors. I can also change my name to make this purple. I can make sure that this background is truly white, the level of white that I want. So I use a lot of purple and white. If you've ever been on my Instagram, you know, I use a lot of purple and white. Those are my branding colors typically. So you can change the coloring, you can change a lot of different things. Let's say you don't like this particular quote that you've put from your book. You can then go back to templates and you can say, okay, let me look at some different things so I don't know if they have a particular quo, but then let me just go to look at all the templates. Let me go to, All right, so then, now maybe what I wanna do is I want to use a template that looks more like this. So now I've got the same thing. I want to template that looks more like this, but again, I want to deal with my branding colors, so I'm going to switch it up a little bit. I'm going to put my brand and colors. Again. This might not be what I want in terms of that light color. I want it to be white. And then if I look at it, let me just get to this piece. Okay, again, I'm making sure that I'm replacing all the original colors with migrating colors. Now I may also want to put a different picture. So when you go to the photos, you can really choose something better, right? So now I'm in the other piece you wanna do is you want to change this? So I might say book name, quote one. Let's just say that. So you wanna make sure you name it so you know which number quoted is that's within your books. If you have ten quotes, you start with quote one, quote two, you go all the way up to quartet. Now this is built for Instagram, right? The thing that I love about Canva is that it's so easy to make a copy of it in the right size for another social media platform. So if I wanted to, first thing I'm gonna do is I'm going to click resize. Now what I want to be able to do is I want to make it four. Let's see if I can find what I'm trying to make it for. So at this point I want to switch it to true, true, true, true, true, true, true. I don't want it to be a Facebook video, but I do want it to be let's see, let's see if I can find Facebook. There we go. So now I can resize it for a Facebook post. I don't want to click resize because that will resize my Instagram post. What I wanna do is I want to copy and resize. And then when I copy and resize, now, it is the right size for Facebook. So the first thing you wanna do with that, once you've resized it for another. Social is I would put book named quote, one Facebook post. So that I knew it was a Facebook post, but Instagram and Facebook, the sizes are pretty similar. So if I wanted to resize this and I wanted to make it for Pinterest because petrous is a totally different size. We can certainly talk about that later. You can do a 1000 by 1500 or 1080 by 1920. Let's just go with the 100. 100. Now I'm going to copy and resize it again. Soon now you will see it. It looks way different. I've gotta do some things for the Pinterest post that soon I'm going to rename it first because I got to know which one it is. And I'm going to put it here, right? So now you see what the Pinterest posts, it is longer, it is taller. So I now need to do a few different things. This takes a little bit of time. I certainly want to make it bigger. I certainly want to make my name bigger. So I'm going to mess with this a little bit until I get it the way that I want it, right. Because at the end of the day, I want it to be something like this. And I might even do things like, you know, the flowers looked fine. But I might even remove those in the background. I might pull this lower. Pull my white box a little bit lower, so it feels like it's more even. And then I might even do something like add in the link to the book right below here. So again, there are some changes that you didn't necessarily have to make from this one to this one that once you get to a Pinterest posts, you will have to make. Now, if we go back here, I do want to resize it one more time so you can see what a Twitter posts would look like. Because once again, that is different. I'm going to copy and resize. And then I'm going to name it. Let's see, I'm going to make sure it says Twitter post. So that when I come back to these things, I do know which one it is. So again, I probably take out the flowers or the Twitter posts and going, wow, this is so way different with a Twitter post. I would probably mess with this a little bit so that it is even this way. I might even change this photo because this photo might not work. For Twitter. It could still work, but I don't know if it really would work the way I want it to. But now you notice for Twitter everything's got to be longer left to right. And then you've gotta make this stuff bigger. So again, you would mess with Twitter and Pinterest a lot just to ensure that it looks good for that particular platform. But this is a free strategy. Now, if you're using Canva, it is going to take you a while to do these for, you know, ten different quotes. Let's say out of your book you're looking at probably it's a three maybe four hours total if you're good at Canva, if you're just learning camera at are probably take you five to seven hours. So just something to consider. The other piece to really think about is you're not done once you create these posts, right? So the first step is you create the quotes and you create the post. But the second step is you actually need to post in a social. And so the freeway to do that is you just manually post them to social. So you know, in your book is releasing the week that it, of its, of its release, you start posting to social, you know, a quote a day, maybe two quotes a day wouldn't be posting any more than two quotes a day because it's overkill. But there's a paid way you can do this. And I'm just going to show you two examples of that. For all of your platforms, HootSuite is a great way to prescheduled these posts. So you don't have to actually be unsocial every single day. You can schedule them, they go out, boom, boom, done, done. But again, that is something that is paid later is a great Social media planner where you can do that with Instagram and a really great way in a visual way. Again, you pay for that. You can create a free account. But typically to get all the features, you also want to pay for it. So those are two ways to sort of save you a lot of time because you've got them prescheduled. But again, you can do with the freeway. You can create them in Canva with a free Canva account. You can post on social the first week of your books released. And then, you know, you wanna make sure you hashtag. There's a whole science to hashtagging. So I would just say, you know, Google, what are the best ways to hashtag on different social media platforms? And you want to put on Instagram specifically, I think it's approximately 20 or 25 hashtags per post. So the name of your book, your name and things, hashtags related to the topic of the book. All of those are super, super important. So that is strategy number nine, posts to social consistently and hashtag your book. Now we're going to go to strategy number 10, which is ask your friends to post and promote your book on their social, on their social media, which is different than asking them to read your book for free and review it. Totally different. But let, let me walk you through how do you ask your friends to post and promote your book on their social? Let's get to the next strategy. 18. Strategy #10: Ask Your Friends to Post and Promote: All right, so strategy number 10 is asked her friends to post and promote your book on their social. So this is a little bit different than the whole book review thing Because you're not asking them to actually read the book and promote the book on. By writing a book review, what you're actually asking them to do is to use certain language that you are going to specifically give them. And on a specific date or during a specific week typically tied to your launch, you're going to ask them to post this on their social media. And you want to be really specific about what social media platforms you want them to post. Do you want them to post this to Facebook? Do you want them to post it to Twitter? Do you want them to post this to Instagram? Preferably no more than two social media platforms, but again, definitely Facebook, I would say definitely Instagram. But keep in mind, you've gotta give them the Canada images or that the post images that you want them to post in addition to the language. So first thing you're gonna do, just like with the book reviews, you're going to list out all the people that you're going to ask. Typically you again, you want 30 to 50 to post on social specific language that you give them and so you get the date of the initial request, whether they said yes or no, the date of the follow up. But also you want to ensure that they actually did post a mandate of the posting that you're gonna give them the date range. Some people say, could you please post them this day? Specifically? Some people say, could you post, you know, during this week, Monday through Thursday kind of a thing? You will give that to them. And then of course, any notes which you probably need more space there any notes related to asking that person? So the way that it works is typically your initial request is pretty short. It's like, Hey, I have a new book coming out. I would love your help promoting this on social. Would you be willing to share info about my book with your social network? That's the question. I didn't put how are you but please always put How are you doing? How's your week going? How's everything in your world if you haven't talked to that person a long time, that's super important. So that's the first request. Then when they say, Yes, I'd be willing to share, then you go, Hey, thanks for being so willing to help promote my book. Here is the language, there's the blurb I'd like you to use. And the blurb could be as simple as this. I've seen blurbs that are much longer, which is fine, but you've got to figure out what copy you want them to share. So typically it's my friend at whatever your your user handle is, has a new book coming out. And then you give them the description of the book. And then you say check out her book on Amazon. And at the particular Amazon link, be sure to download your copy today and typically you give them an image that is sized appropriately using Canva for the Facebook, Twitter, whatever you're asking them to post it on. And you make sure it's a picture of the book, not a picture of a quote from the book, a picture of the actual book. And then you just ask them to post that. And then you would come back here based on if they said yes or no, so that you can keep track not only of whether or not those people said yes, I will post on my social. But then also the date that in the notes I would put what platforms you ask them to post on. So if you ask them to post on Facebook and Twitter, make sure in the notes you put that. If you ask them to post on Instagram, make sure you put that so that when you're supposed to be checking to see if they actually posted, you know, you, you recall what platforms to go to. So this particular strategy will take you anywhere from four to six hours. Again, the reason it's time-consuming is because you're asking 30 to 50 maybe more and friends. And it takes a lot of time to individually send the messaging that we talked about. And you're not really sending one message, but then you're also following up. It is also helpful once they have posted, you just send a quick message that says thank you again. I so appreciate your support. You're the best, Something like that. So that is the strategy that really is related to asking your friends to post and promote your book on their social media. Totally free. Lots of time because you've got it individually reach out to people. You're not sending a group chat. You're not sitting a group email. You want this to be very personal, which is why you want to reach out to people one-on-one. But again, it works. So this will take you about four to six hours per book that you asked how this request for n, one other thing you don't want to bombard people, so don't use the same people with book number, book number 2 that you do with book number one. And yes, it might be hard to come up with 30 to 50 different people, but you really want it or not. Every single book go to the same 30 to 50 people really try to vary it up to mix it up. So that is strategy number 10. Now we're gonna go to strategy number 11, which includes the post publication bookmark getting strategies. We'll start there. This one in strategy Number 11 is create a series of YouTube videos that discuss excerpts from your book and help you build a YouTube channel. All right, let's get to the next strategy. 19. Strategy #11: Create a Series of YouTube Videos: Okay, so let's talk about some post publication book marketing strategy you can use. So in other words, you've published your book. It is launched on Amazon and now it's time to market the book so you get sales and you get raving fans as readers. So one of the things you can do is create a YouTube series, a YouTube channel, a YouTube playlist, where you discuss different aspects or excerpts from your book. And how were those of you who are thinking, I do not want to go on camera. I do not want to be on video. I don't want to do any of that. Here's something I just want you to think about. When you are looking to solve a problem. Do you go after you Google it? Do you go to Twitter or do you go to YouTube? Just think about that for a second because YouTube is one of those massive search engines, like Google, like Amazon, which is actually a search engine if you think about it. And YouTube is a place where people love to learn new things. They love to learn how to do things. They look for the answers to their life questions. They tend to do it on YouTube more so than, let's say Twitter or Instagram or Facebook. So there comes a moment where you want to get over your fear of being on camera. It is not fun. I'm not a fan of being on camera, and I do it a lot. As an author, people like to see a face. They like to hear a voice. They loved the idea of an author having a video where they talked about either their book, where they talk about a key lesson in the book, or they really walk them through a deeper dive on some of the concepts of the book. Even in situations where it is a fiction book. One of my favorite shows is outlandish. And I love watching the interviews from the woman who wrote the books. I'll, I can't remember her name, but I love hearing how she was a professor. And so she did all this research writing and that she decided out of the blue to write an historical romance. People love the backstory of why authors wrote the things that they wrote. So I'm gonna show you some of the backend like how do you actually do this? How do you upload a YouTube video? What does it look like? How do you determine a topic? I'm going to show you some of those pieces. Let me just preface by saying, yes, building a YouTube channel. Building a successful YouTube channel is time intensive, time-intensive. But there are a number of teachers out in the world like Sonny Leonard Uzi. A lot of people who teach you every single thing you need to do to do that. So I would highly recommend that if you find that you can use your phone and create some YouTube videos about your book and you get really good feedback from that. And you want to go all in on building YouTube channel that you then monetize. So you're earning money not just from the book, but also from ads on YouTube. By monetizing the channel itself, then definitely find a teacher who can give you all the details on every single step. Now, let, let me show you a couple of things. Hopefully it will calm any fears you have about building your own YouTube channel or at least creating some YouTube videos that will help fans and potential readers learn more about your work. All right, so let's look at what I'm, how you would actually start your own YouTube channel. I'm gonna give you the, the beginnings of the steps of that. Once again, I will just say this is a very time-consuming strategy. I would highly recommend that you take a YouTube course, find one, take ones. You can learn all the nitty-gritties to the analytics, to how you name particular YouTube videos playlist. Because there's a lot to it and a lot to the data analytics of it. Well, let me show you how you would build a YouTube channel. So first things first, you'll notice that this account does not have a YouTube channel, so I would click create a channel. It would ask me to upload a picture which I'm not going to do and the name my channels so I could name it something and then click Create Channel. So in this way it would create a channel for me. Now, couple of things to keep in mind. You don't get the actual extension of your euro URL to the YouTube. Like you can't personalize youtube.com forward slash a name until you have a 100 subscribers. So what you're going to find is now that you have created your YouTube channel, you're going to be able to do things like upload a video. You also can customize the channel, which will bring you to YouTube Creator Studio. So there are lots of things you want to be able to do and there are lots of great free training with YouTube Creator Studio. So there's a tons, tons of things you can do. You can, you know, you definitely want to put it in a very good description for your channel. This is going to be your URL until you get a 100 subscribers. And then you can take this long, ugly thing out and put in what you want. You can also. Add links to your website into other things. You can also put your contact information here so you can do all of that. You can do branding and you can make sure you add. You can upload a banner image so you can look for that and take care of that. You can also make sure that you have a watermark if you want to do that as well. And then your layout, you can, you definitely want to create what they call a trailer video so that you've got a trailer for people, evidence subscribed. And the trailers videos where you tell people what the channels about, how often you're going to post new videos and what they can expect to learn from you. So you would click Add over here to upload a trailer video, and then you can also have a featured video. So probably one of your best watched videos once you start getting videos up there, you're going to add that one so that returning subscribers can see it. And you want to change that featured video every so often so that you're returning subscribers aren't seeing the same video every single time. The other thing you can do is add different sections to your channel. So once again, I wanted to show you the basics of starting the channel, but nothing is better than actually taking a course on YouTube. So you learn all the ends, all the Alex, what do you do first, second, third, fourth. This is super time-consuming. So I would say it's probably going to be about ten to 15 hours a week a week. So it's not a one and done thing. It is a constant thing, ten to 15 hours a week. And it will definitely help you increase subscribers to your email list. It will help you increase just watch time so that you can eventually monetize YouTube. It will help you do a lot of different things. So YouTube is a great strategy, but please keep in mind that it is super, super time-consuming. The other thing I do want to show you are some really great YouTube channels that are super popular. And I will just show you a couple of things. Dr. Ramani is one of my favorites. She is a clinical psychologist who talks about narcissism. So if you look at she's, she has really, if you ever take a YouTube course, she really does all the things that you're going to learn how to do Youtube the right way. So she's got her banner. You see her name? She is 731 thousand subscribers. She has a very consistent thumbnail, which gives the topic that she's talking about. Her picture is in each of those thumbnails. She's got not only in sheet, she uploads a video every single day. It is super her I didn't want to know how many hours she puts into having these things reported, even if she has a whole team to produce, produce them. Because even recording a video, researching, writing, scripting, and doing it every single day video is crazy amounts of time. So then you've got all of her videos, but then she's also broken things down into playlists. So that's the power of playlist. If I only wanted to look at certain things on playlists, like the glossary of narcissistic relationships. I could go right to our playlists and see that right there. So this is a prime example of my account. All the social is here. She inputs where a workshop is happening. Really, really wonderful, wonderful example of doing a YouTube channel, right? And there are many, many people who do their YouTube channels. Absolutely, right? So I just want to give you one example of that. So this is definitely, I consider it a post publication book marketing strategy because it will require time every single week and it's about consistency. And again, ten to 15 hours a week. But in a year, if you do this consistently, you will see the numbers of readers and raving fans grow pretty, pretty dramatically. All right, In the next strategy, we're gonna talk about FB live, Facebook Live, and IGTV Reels, Instagram stories, all the video stuff. So let's get to that strategy. 20. Strategy #12: Facebook Live and IG TV: All right, let's talk about strategy number 12, which is Facebook Live and IG TV videos, super, super important strategy. Now for all of my introvert and writers like myself who do not like being on camera, Isaac going camera, I don't love it. I call it a necessary evil, so I have no nice way to say, do your best to get over it. Get over the fear of being on camera. People love to see you. They love to see authors on video. It is a super, super important strategy. And the way in which you would use this particular strategy is, let's talk about the different ways you could use it. So you certainly want to use FB live to provide regular updates on your book as you're writing your book. I'm not a huge fan of that. Typically when I go into writer mode, I don't want to come out from writing to say, Hey, I'm currently working at Chapter 2. Lots of writers do it. It's a very effective strategy. I like to be a turtle under my shell. The book published the book. Then I come out and start doing videos and things and talking about it. So use FB live to provide regular updates on your book. That's one tip, second tip. Conduct an author interview that is the second tip. So you might be writing a book or have written a book on a certain topic, you find another author who wrote a book that really compliments your book. You're having a joint interview and you're talking about the topic that both of you have written about. So that is another way that you can use video to really help surface your book topic and to also help surface another author's topic. The third thing you can do is if you're going to do a lecture or a talk, bookstore appearance, you can have somebody putting that on FB live in real time so that people who aren't able to meet you at the bookstore or good and lecture and talk. They can still experience it virtually through Facebook Live. You could also, lots of authors host a weekly live FB show. So they have a regular show that happens the same day in time every single week. It is a super great strategy for building your list and for building your writers platform. Once again, very, very time-consuming, right? Because you've got a plan out the content weeks in advance. You've gotta create a publication schedule. You have to have your notes for each of those particular weekly live FB sessions. And then you've got to schedule the time to do that. So that is a much more time-intensive usage. If you're going to have a live FBA shell. And then also you can come on randomly, whether it's on Instagram, Stories, reals. Do an Instagram TV episode where you provide tips and inspiration to aspiring writers. So that is another way that you can use this things, whether it's FB or its other Instagram. Now, so five tips to promote your book on Instagram. You definitely want to make sure you have an IDT, IGTV channels. You want to make sure you have that. You've when you do IGTV episode. So let me go back a second. When we were talking about FB lives, typically they are done in real-time. They are live? Yes, you can do an FB live that you don't show to anybody and post it later? I'm not really sure what the point of that is. I don't do that. I think it's a waste of time because you're probably easily decided not to show it to anybody. So I think you should just throw yourself out there and FB live. Do it live. Yes, you'll mess up. It's going to be okay. But with IGTV, you what I like about IGTV is that you pre-record the videos, pre-record the videos, then you post them. It shows up on your IG, your profile, your tiles, but it also shows up on your IGTV channel. So with IGTV, what I like about it is you can write your scripts in advance of what you're going to say. You can practice it, then you can record yourself on your phone. You know, you have good lighting, you have a good audio. You can create your recording and posting schedule. You can make sure you have all the things you need and then you post your videos on IGTV is reals are little bit different. I've watched a lot of reals. I haven't done any Rails yet. I don't know what kind of find them. Very silly. People seem to have a good time doing them. I don't know that I'd have a good time doing them, but reals are really the latest IG thing where you have music in the background and the knee of written words at the bottom of the screen and you don't really say anything. I don't know. It's a little strange, but supposedly it does a lot for your Instagram account. So Rails or something to look into. And then the IGTV, the IG stories are just little snippets so you can record an IGTV video. Take a ten seconds of the video, put it on stories. So it's not like you're creating a different video for IGTV in The New Yorker story is reals is a little bit different. So that would be a different video. But once again, what I like about IGTV specifically as pre-recorded, I can script it. I can set up a recording and posting schedule. I know what I'm gonna do. Pretty, pretty awesome that way. So there you have that. So next we will talk about strategy number 13, which is post quotes from your book directly to Pinterest. So we have talked about posting on social, but this is a little bit different strategy because now in this next strategy, we're going to look at Pinterest analytics. All right, let's get to the next strategy. 21. Strategy #13: Post Quotes From Your Book on Pinterest: All right, so let's talk about strategy number of 13, which is post quotes from your book on Pinterest. Pinterest is a really big search engine. So when you think about Pinterest, the target audience or the target users on Pinterest tend to be women. They tend to be moms and wives. They tend to be individuals who are kind of millennials slash Gen Xers. But definitely it is a very huge market to reach on Pinterest. And so this is a free strategy that can be leveraged really, really well because you post quotes from your book to Pinterest. Creating beautiful. Because again, the beauty of the pin, beautiful pins. You can hyperlink the pins so that when somebody clicks on the quote or the pin quote on Pinterest, they go straight to where your book is available to be purchased. So it's an awesome way to create buzz, but also to get somebody directly to the place where they can purchase your books. So this is strategy Number 13. So when we talk about implementing the strategy, first thing you've gotta do is you've got to set up a business Pinterest profile. Now, if you're a writer, you may be saying to yourself, but I'm not, I don't have a business. That's a whole other course, but let me just say you should have an LLC. Even if you're the only member of your LLC as a writer, you should have your own publishing house. If you're self-publishing, your own publishing LLC company, which would then give you the ability of a business Pinterest profile. Even as an author, you are your business. So even your name as the author is your business Pinterest profile. So set up a business Pinterest profile. Then you want to create at least 10 boards, all related to your book and or genre. And then you want to use some software like Canva, I highly recommend canvas because it's easy to learn, easy to use free or low cost to create beautiful pins and then link your pins to your author website or to your blog posts. So what you would hyperlink that the quote pins to is either your author website, a specific blog post on your author website, or directly to where they can purchase it on Amazon or purchase it from your author website. So that's how you would link the pins. And then you certainly want to check your Pinterest analytics to see which pins get the most traction to your website. And of course, create more pins, create more pens. This is, this is a strategy that really is going to take you probably about 30 minutes, just set up the Pinterest account. If you do not currently have a business Pinterest account, it will take you about an hour to at least create the 10 boards. That doesn't mean fill the board with pins. Just to create them will take an hour. Then it's going to take you. And I'll show you this in Canvas in a minute, 20 minutes to two hours for every three to five pins you create in Canvas. So if you've got 10 boards, Let's say you're going to have 10 pins, ten quote pins on each board. It is going to take you about two hours to create five pins. So four hours for ten pins for each board times 10 boards, that's 40 hours. So if you're going to properly fill those 10 boards, it's going to take you about a workweek, 40 hours to get all of those on each of those 10 boards. And then the upkeep it. And that is you're going to add pins every single week, which will be another hour or two that you spent on Pinterest every single week if you're adding one to two. And then you're also doing a weekly analytics review, which typically takes about 15 minutes, maybe 30, if you're really doing a deep dive every single week. And you do want to be evaluating or analyzing your Pinterest analytics every single week you want to know when the views go up, when the views go down, you want to know which pins are getting the most traffic, that sort of thing. So the key indicators that your strategy is working if you're going to use Pinterest to promote your book, as you want to make sure that you're looking at your Google Analytics for your author website. And you want to see what are the sources of the traffic increases that you're getting. If the source is, according to Google Analytics, is Pinterest, that lets you know that your Pinterest strategy is properly leading. It's converting to traffic to your website. So that's going to be your key indicator that the strategy is working. Now, let's go. I want to show you how you would create a pen using Canvas. Again, you could use many things to do. This. Canvas to me is the easiest. But let's take a look at how you would actually create a pin and Canvas. Alright, so here we are in Canada, we're beginning of the area about is called templates. So you certainly want to go to the social media arena of things. Typically what I like to do, you can click on social media here and we'll give you a whole bunch of choices. I don't think Pinterest comes up as easily as the other ones, excuse me. And so you would click Pinterest pins. So now you can see that there are bunch of templates that you can use. I typically start by saying create a blank Pinterest pin. So from there you create a blank Pinterest pin. Now you can start to look at all of the different options you can create. Pinterest video pin, based on a template, you can create a food interests pin, a wedding Pinterest pin. It, the list goes on and on. I tend to look at all results and so I kinda wanna see what else is available. And so when you're creating it, I would say stretch out with templates. Don't try to create all of this on your own. There are many, many templates. If I'm gonna do a quote, maybe I will use something like this, right? So I'll put my website at the bottom. I'll put the quote from my book. I might hashtag it. I might also do something like this so I can put the quote from my book, the name of the book, and then the link to where somebody can purchase it. But once again, you have many, many options that you can absolutely use. Key thing is you want to make sure that you properly titled The Pinterest. So typically I'll put book name, Pinterest one. So then I know that's the first quote from that specific book. And I know it's from, it's for this particular image is meant to be used on Pinterest. So again, you've got so many options when you look at Canva so many ways. And let's say I really didn't like this picture. I could always go to photo. And I could say, let me just put woman thinking, right. Let's say I just want to put not have daily reminder. I want to make it the name of my books. I bring it down a little bit, the quote up a little bit. It always lets you know when things are properly centered, which I think is awesome. And let's say I don't want this because I'm not talking about a time, I'm not talking about a date. But I want to have a situation where maybe for my own benefit, the quote is a little bit higher than name of the book is a little bit higher. I don't need this thinking block thing. I can kinda get rid of it a little bit perfect. I can get rid of that. I can get rid of that. So see now I have just the quote which I can center. And then I can also center this, and then I can also center that. So let's say I really want a woman thinking, right? So now I can move this to the bottom. I can move the quote more so to the bottom so it aligns with the page. And then of course this would be my book name. So once again, you can use many different things. You can easily replace photos. And so here I might make this more like a thinking bubble. And I can certainly make sure that I find photos that go with my brand colors as well. The key thing here is to remember that Pinterest pins look a little bit different. They have different sizing to them. And Canva makes it super easy if we go back to here to really structure it because it's already built it. As soon as you click, create a blank Pinterest pin, the sizing is already perfect for Pinterest. So just keep that in mind and you can keep playing with these things until you actually find what you want. And then again, you can always play with this and you can put things wherever they feel like they fit most readily. And so that's the beauty and the ease of Kanban just to keep in mind. And you always, when you do a Pinterest pin, you want to make sure you put your quote somewhere. You let them know which book it comes out of your name as the author within somewhere down here you want to put your website where they can find out more about you as an author, but also where they can purchase the book. So that is how you would use Canvas to create a Pinterest pin. Now let me quickly show you analytics. And again, analytics are interesting because you could, there's so much you can do with analytics. But what I wanted to show you is that there's always going to be a tab on your Pinterest page that says analytics. So you would click the tab, you would go to overview. So if you go to Pinterest, you can go to overview and then overview will bring you here. It will tell you how many impressions and whether that number is up or down in real time. It will tell you how many people are engaging with your, your Pinterest pins. So like actually clicking on them, spending time on them before going to something else in Pinterest that will tell you whether the engagements or up or down. It will also tell you your total audience size, whether that is up or down, and then whether or not you have engaged audiences, right? So the number of printers who engage with your pins. And if you need any of those definitions, you can just click this little I and I'll tell you the number of times your pins were on-screen. That's impressions, engagements as the total number of engagements on your pins, including clicks and saves. And then total audience is the total number of printers who have seen or engaged with your pins. And then engaged audience are people who really click, Save your pins, engaged with your pins. And then you can see performance over time. So it also gives you an understanding of how many impressions and then on what days. And so you can look at that. It also will show you the top boards that really do well for you. And so you're able to look at that. And then it will also go into the top pins. It will tell you the source, it will tell you the type, right? And so they also have the option to promote if that's what you wanna do. So Analytics gives you a whole lot of information, which is why I say on a weekly basis, if you're going to commit to using this strategy on Pinterest, you want to schedule a consistent weekly appointment with yourself that's 15 to 30 minutes. So that you can actually go about really getting, getting a sense of whether your Pinterest strategy is actually working. And again, you're going to check Google so that you figure out what if the traffic to your other website is really coming from Pinterest or if it's coming from somewhere else. All right, so that is the strategy Number 13, posting quotes from your book on Pinterest. We're gonna get to strategy number 14 next. And in strategy 14, we're going to talk about how did you guess blogging on your books topic, which again, is another freeway to market and promote your book. All right, Let's get to the next strategy. 22. Strategy #14: Guest Blogging: Alright, let's talk about strategy number 14. And strategy Number 14 is to do guest blogging on your books topics. So let me just say this again. This is probably about 1000 time that you're hearing me say this. This is a very time intensive strategy. Most of these 21 strategies, because they are free, because they can do so much for your book. They are going to require sweat equity. They are going to take a considerable amount of time. And this is one of those strategies that for sure is going to take you a considerable amount of time. So let's talk about the steps to implement team this strategy. So number 1, first thing you've gotta do, you know, most people think of guest blogging and they go, Oh, I gotta find blogs and then find out what topics they want. And then I need you to write a guest blog posts. Know, that is actually not the first step. The first step is to set up a guest blog posting spreadsheet. And that is going to house where you keep all the information about what, who, and what, and where and how, and all the updates about submitting for guest blogging opportunities. You've gotta have some system, some organized way to really keep in mind where you've been applying, what you've been applying to, what you're trying to write and where you are with those things. So the first thing you've got to do is set up a guest blog, a blog post you spreadsheet. Second thing you've gotta do is find guest posting prospects. Typically what you wanna do is go to Google search and put keyword plus guest blog, keyword plus right for us, both of those searches worked really, really well. And then number three, you want to read the guidelines for guest posting. You'd be shocked by how many people tried to send an e-mail to somebody who they know has a guest, allows guest blogging. And they never even looked at the guidelines for guest blogging. So they're asking redundant questions. They're pitching them things that aren't even relevant. And it's super clear to the person who's blog it is that you did not actually read the guidelines for guest posting. So make sure you read those guidelines. Step number four, right, and amazing guest posts. You've got to have samples of your writing. So when you are submitting for guest blogging opportunities, they're either going to ask you for samples of guests, blog post that you've done before or that you would do given their guidelines and topics. Or they're going to actually give you the topics they want and ask you to write something and submit that thing to them for potentially use on their blog. So you've gotta have some really good samples. Again, this is time-consuming because you need to sit down and think about the kind of things you want to write. Think about the guest blog posts you want to produce, and then you've got to produce four to six of them. So you've got a really good portfolio or simple if you're writing. And then five, you're going to reach out to the site owner with a list of topic ideas along with the links to your published work. So published work means not simply your books that you've written and published. It means examples of guest blog posts that you've written, that you've published. Both of those things. That's why you've got to spend some time creating four to six samples of your work. So let's take a moment and let's look at how to set up a guest blog posting sheet. Let's do that real quick. All right, so what you're looking at right here is an example of a guest blog postings spreadsheet. So as you've seen in other spreadsheets that I've shown you in this course. You'll obviously want the number so you know how many blogs you're actually reaching out to you. The name of the blog, the link to the blog, who the contact person is that you're going to be reaching out to. So the blogger or whoever runs their blog, their contact name, the date of first contact. So when did you first reach out to them? Because obviously, if you don't hear back in a couple of weeks, you want to reach out again. And then you want to be able to describe your pitch description. In column F, I would suggest you put the description of what you're pitching, the sample works that you send. So maybe you hyperlink to that, but then also what you're hoping to write for them. So as you get feedback from people as they respond to your contact form or your email, you can go back to the spreadsheet and say, Oh, what was I going to write about? So you can jog your memory relatively fast. And then what were the results? Do they say yes? Did they say No? Do they give you feedback? You certainly want to put the results in column G. And then you certainly want to send a thank you note, whether that is physically in the mail, if at all possible or if it's electronic, you do want to send a thank you note. So you also want to indicate the date where you sent that thank you note. So this will help you keep track of which blogs you've reached up to the date that you reach out to them. Who was the contact person, what were you pitching and what were the results? So that way you're not getting answers back from different blogs, but then mixing up what you were going to write for them or what you need to write for them. All of this is cleared up by using a guest blog posting spreadsheet. So this is the spreadsheet that you would use. Now, let me just show you real quick because we did talk about those key words and what you want to do. So I might put like deaths logging, right for us, right? I might just put that in there and to see what they're talking about, you do want to skip all the things that say add, let me just go there first. So skip those. Then you might want to go to other places where maybe there will be some like right for us if I open that up, let me see what this as I don't even know it's surveys sparrow. You might want to be able to write for surveys spare, but maybe I want to get a little niche year, right? Maybe I am a fitness person. So I'm going to do fitness logs, right for us. So now what I'm going to start to see is, okay, women fitness magazine, they say right for us. Let's see if they actually have opportunities there. So now they're like, okay, yep, so here's a prime example of a guest blogging opportunity. They can tell you if you've got tips and tricks and you want to write interesting and helpful articles for our readers. They give you all the guidelines right here. And then they give you the form that you can submit right here. And they actually want your article right here. So once again, keep in mind that when you start to get really focused in honed in on what you really want to be able to write about. It becomes easier to find those reading opportunities of which there are a plethora out there. So you've got girl gets strong. Once again, share your story. Do you have a positive fitness story? Do you have a health story? Who can become a gigi S writer? It gives you all of the guidelines, all of the rules, right? And then it also tells you what you need to do and you can get in contact with them through their contact page. So I wanted to give you a real sense of how easy it is to find guest blogging opportunities, but also how important it is to do your homework. Do your research, be very specific about the kinds of guest blogging opportunities you're looking for. And then read their guidelines. Read their guidelines. And of course, of course, of course, make sure you've got your guest blog posting spreadsheet. Alright, so now we're gonna move to strategy number 15. We'll talk about that next, which is create a virtual conference around your book topic. Let's get to it. 23. Strategy #15: Create a Virtual Conference: All right, so let's talk about the 15th, 15th strategy that you can use to market and promote your book for free. And strategy Number 15 is create a virtual conference around your book topic. Creating a virtual sounds harder than it is. And yes, it is super, super time-consuming as most of these strategies are, but it is so worth it and it is so much fun to do. But this is strategy number 15. Create a virtual conference around your book topic. Now, you might be saying yourself, what is a virtual conference? What is that exactly? So a virtual conference is a conference held in a virtual space and you've probably seen yourself. I kinda got that. What exactly do you mean? So let's look at the purpose of a virtual conference. So the purpose of a virtual conference is to provide an interactive, real-time virtual educational experience that offers in-depth information through a number of interviews with a number of experts. So in a virtual conference, you are the interviewer. You are locating experts on your topic, i e, the topic of your book. You are covering a very specific subtopic that connects to your book, but also can be, problems can be solved by the experts. You're going to interview. You interview a good five to 15, upwards of 20 experts. And you use those either live virtual interviews are pre-recorded interviews. You put them together into a virtual conference. So that is what a virtual conferences. You're essentially the interviewer. You're like the Oprah of the whole thing. And even though you're an author on a book of a similar topic, you are really here to share the wisdom of the experts you've recruited to be a part of your virtual conference. Typically they participate for free, that you do not pay them to participate because they're getting promotion. Your book is getting promotion. And you're asking them to share this virtual conference with their email list. So that is what it is. It is a real-time virtual educational audience that offers in-depth information through a number of interviews with a number of experts. Now, the goals of a virtual conference of the following, definitely one of the biggest goals in, in doing all the work that comes with a virtual conferences, you want to build your email list. So typically you're going to look for experts who have relatively large email list that's at least a 1000 people, if not at least 5000 on their email list. Because you're going to ask them as part of being an expert featured in your virtual conference, you're going to ask them to message a number of times, their entire email lists about the virtual conference. You're going to ask them to do that. So number 1, you're building your writers platform because one of the main goals of a virtual conference is to build your email list. You're going to grow your writers platform because now that you're the Oprah of this thing, people are going to start to see you as an authority on the subject because you're bringing together all of these experts, you've written a book, and the Tsarina, a virtual conference also is a moneymaker. So it's a Moneymaker a number of ways. It's a moneymaker because you will offer the, the live attendance of to the virtual conference for free. But if somebody wants to have all the recordings of somebody wants to watch this not during its initial airtime, than they would have to pay a certain amount of money to get access to the recordings. So you can bring an immediate cash flow by getting people to register and pay for the recordings because they know they can't be at every live event. And you can also get immediate cash flow because you're going to offer them an opportunity to work on a more, on a deeper basis with you, either through a half-day workshop that happens a few weeks after the virtual conference or in a group coaching program. But there are many ways that you can leverage your virtual conference to bring in immediate cashflow. And then you can also enroll them to purchase additional training, coaching, even books from you and work more deeply with you. So those are the goals of the virtual conference. In essence, it helps you build your writers platform, which is awesome. Now, this is one of the most time-intensive of the 21, of the 21 strategies that we're talking about in this course. I would say this one is the most time-intensive because it just, there's so much planning, there's so many things you have to do. So I've given you 12 Steps and they all take a lot of type. Number 1. You've got to select a really solid conference title. Something that's going to pull people in that really explains the problem that you're solving for people who attend. That explains what this is about. You, you're gonna take a little time to develop the conference title and make sure it's really good. Step number two, you want to determine the conference link. So are you gonna do five interviews? Are you going to do 10? Are you going to do 20 amine? Again? The more interviews you do, the more you've gotta search for those experts, recruit those experts. They've got to say yes, you've got to record the interviews or do them in real time. So you've got to determine how long is this a one-day conference, a three-day conference, attended a conference. And based upon the link, how many experts can you get him there, which is really step number 5. Step number three is outlined with conference structure and pricing. So before you even like build the conference registration page, you need to decide how the conference is going to work. Is it going to be virtual, real time is going to be pre-recorded. The structure of how many interviews are people going to attended day. And then how much are you charging for the recording is how much you charging for any additional offerings that you're going to offer after the conference. And then step number four is create the post-conference sales funnel. So again, you're going to want people to go deeper with you after the conference. It's not just about them attending. You want them to coach with you, consult with you, buy more books from you. You have to build that sales funnel before you hold the conference. So creating that post-conference sales funnel, which has a lot of pieces to it. This is this is a very time-consuming step. Number 4. You've got to do that before you actually hold the conference. Step number 5, decide the number of experts should be interviewed. So I just talked about this. Are you gonna do five experts, 10 experts, 20 experts. I've seen upwards of 50 plus experts. Which man, you've got to have a team for that. That's a lot of time. But you need to decide how many experts over a certain number of days would you like to interview for this virtual conference? And then step number six is research experts to invite. This is time-consuming. It's going to take you hours, two hours and hours and hours, like go in and say ours like four and talking hours like 20 plus 2 research experts to invite in a typically you want to find people who've also published books because they tend to have really good email lists. And so you want to research those experts so that you can invite them to be a part of the conference. And then you've gotta invite and confirm experts. So there are a number of e-mails you need to send out. The first is an invitation if you don't hear back from them. A second invitation I've seen I've had people send my way three invitations, some of which I haven't responded to you because life gets super busy and hectic. But again, you might have to reach out to your experts, your potential experts, more than two times to even get a response back. And then you've gotta go through and make sure that they have sizable email us, at least 1000 email subscribers. You've gotta make sure that they want to participate. You've got to give them the dates and make sure that they're available to participate. So there's a lot of in step number 7, emailing back and forth that happens, which again is time-consuming. Then step number 8, you want to pre-record the interviews. You can do it live. Live is just a bit different and there's so many factors, I would say, if you're going to use this strategy the first time out of the gate, do not do a real-time live conference to a pre-recorded interview based conference. It's just so much easier to work out the kinks when you're recording them outside of people actually attending. And then step number nine is setup a conference registration page, which typically you would do with something like lead pages, dotnet. But you've got to set up the place where people can put in their first name, their email address. And they can say, Hey, I want to join this free virtual conference, which by the way, virtual conferences should be free. The pay part comes in if they want the recordings to keep in mind, you're setting up a registration page that says, Hey, join this five-day Virtual Summit, this free five-day virtual summit. And they've got to be able to put their first name, their email address, and then click Register. Step number 10. You need to create a conference marketing plants. So it's not, you know, how, what is it? Field of Dreams said, if you build it, they will come. Well, that's not true in business. That's not true as a writer, That's not true. And marketing, if you build it, if they don't know about it, they're not showing up for you. So you've got to create a conference marketing plan and step number 10, so that you can start screaming from the virtual rooftops to let everybody know that you are doing this and please attend. So you do want to create a conference marketing plan. Then step number 11, start marketing one to two weeks before the conference releases. So one of the biggest mistakes that people will make with a virtual conference or submit whatever you wanna call it. They will think, man, I want so many people to attend. I need to start working this thing two months in advance. People forget, you know, if you've ever signed up for virtual conference, you forget. So recency is your friend. In terms of marketing, you do not want to start marketing any earlier than two weeks before the first state of the virtual conference. No more than two weeks before, because otherwise people are going to send up and totally forget about Jews. So certain marketing one to two weeks before the conference releases. And then step number 12 launched the conference. Launch it. There you go. And look, here's one thing I will say, your first couple of virtual conferences, you may get very few people and you may feel super discouraged for all the level of work that you put into it. Don't give up. Don't give up. Keep going, keep going, keep going. Do it again and again till it becomes something that's a science for you. Eventually you will figure out how to market it. It will work if the conference title and topic are right. That's a big if if the conference title and topic or right. It will work. Keep going. All right. How long does this take? I told you this was the most time-intensive one. It really is the most time intensive out of the 21 strategies, 30 to 40 hours a week for four to 12 weeks. Boom. I wish people had told me this and they didn't. I loved the idea of a virtual conference. I still do, but I wish people had been more transparent with me about just how many hours and how many other things you've gotta put down for the time that it takes to do this whole process. It literally is 30 to 40 hours a week for four to 12 weeks. Literally. Literally. So I just want you to understand that because lots of people to yeah, do virtual summit. Just put it together this weekend, launch it next week. None enough. If you're doing it right, it is 30 to 40 hours a week for four to 12 consecutive weeks. Count the cost of that and see if you really have the time. And also evaluate what you would have to put down and not work on for 30 to 40 hours a week, for four to 12 weeks to make sure that this strategy is worth it for you. Alright, we have talked about this strategy. Now let's get to the next video and we're going to talk in the next video about strategy Number 16, leveraging multiple freebies to create an email list. Your email list is key to selling books. Key to selling books. Let's get to that strategy. 24. Strategy #16: Leverage Multiple Freebies: All right, so let's look at strategy number 16, which is leverage multiple of freebies to create a big email list of raving fans. Raving raving fans. Okay, So there are a few things. As a writer who wants to make a full-time living writing, your email list is critical to that. So building your email list, whether you are writing your very first book or you're reading your 50th book is super, super important and needs to be a focus for you all of the time. And so this particular strategy, which I like to classify under long-term book marketing strategies because you're going to be doing this forever, is building your email list, getting raving fans on your email list. And the best way to do that is to create a freebie, attach that free download, whatever that is to your email list, and create a lead page, an e-mail list, integrate the two, and then write a series of follow-up emails, which we like to call a follow-up email funnel, so that you already have programmed when people sign up for your email list to get the freebie, you already have a number of e-mails for a period of months already ready to go. So let me just walk you through a couple of things. Now. First, let me talk about hours. Creating the freebie alone is going to take you 48 hours. So let's start with, we'll go there 48 hours to create whatever you're gonna offer for free. The first couple of chapters of your book, maybe an audio talking through some of the main concepts of your book. Maybe, you know, a free resource guide or a free book study plan for your book. Those are some examples of freebies to create that in Canvas. Preferably, it's gonna take you about 48 hours to create an email list is going to take you one hour to do that. So meaning actually I'll show you this in a minute, creating the e-mail list in something like a Weber. And then creating the lead page is going to take you two to three hours. And then writing the follow-up email funnels is actually going to take you a long time because you're writing like ten emails are gonna go out at a certain cadence that you sat. That will take you about five to ten hours. But let me walk you through number 1. This is lead pages. It says.com needs to be done that. So you can use any opt-in page builder. I usually pages, but use the one that fits for you. I think click funnels has some stuff. There are other brands of opt-in pages. I think a Weber even does her own landing pages. Now we call them landing pages. They're not called lead pages. So the first thing you've gotta do is you've got to build your lead page. So I want to show you a couple of things about that. So if I go to page type and I'm in lead pages now, it's probably way different in click funnels or anywhere else. I know I want to create a free resource and download. So I can look at these templates and I can say, Oh, I could create something to give to my readers, right? So maybe I want to give him an author excerpt. I want to give them a sneak peek of my upcoming book. So what I can do is preview this lead page. And I could say, oh, so I could put my author name, I could put a catchy phrase to let me know, to let people know what they're going to get. And then I could put a little blurb and then I could either have them preview the chapter are unlike the full chapter. And then I put an image of my book cover right here. So you notice that lead pages or any of your landing page software, things, they're going to have built in freebies that you can offer as an author. So that is an example of one. Here's another example of one. Let's say that what I really wanna do is I want to give away. I don't know, a free video course that relates closely to the book that I'm writing. So in this way, maybe I'm writing a book about makeup. And so I could actually record a video so that I could help them understand step one, which I'm probably covering at length in my book. And then I can say to them, get this free course, get this free course from me subscribed to the course. And then when they click subscribe to the course, then they can get at least the first lesson of the course by entering in their email address. So once again, the point I want to make here by showing you this is that it's not like you're a computer programmer and you are creating these things from scratch. A lot of these software landing page, people, they give you a lot of things that literally it is ready to go for you. So you go here, you put your picture, you put your name, you say subscribe to my newsletter. That's an easy way to do it too. And then all you do is click the template if you want it to give away a free guide. Let's say your self-help, right? Or personal development, you want to give away a free guide, then you can put a catchy title here. You could say, hey, this is a step-by-step guide. They could click Get the guide and they'd put their e-mail address and say Send me the guide, then you would create it. Now. The lead page or the lending page is just where people sign up. It is not the source of how they actually get the downloadable things, the freebies that you're promising them. The source of the freebies is actually something like a Weber. So if i so you've got to integrate lead pages with a Weber. I'm just going to give you a snapshot of this because there are lots of steps I would highly recommend taking courses on using things like a Weber or lead pages or whatever you choose to use your software. The companies themselves offer a lot of free training, so that's super helpful. And so what I would do first, right, like I'm looking at this, there are a couple of things I tend to do first. So before I even make the leap page, what I tend to do is I start by building the thank you page because the thank you page doesn't have to be integrated with my email marketing system. So the first thing I would do is choose a thank you page. So maybe I'll choose something super simple like this. And I will create the thank you page. Thank you. And then of course I'll change some of the stuff here. So I'll create the thank you page. Then I will go into a Webber and I will click create new list. So now when I create a new list, I can actually set up my list. And I can make sure that I have send her email and all of these things once I've set up my list, so it's named in a Weber, that is when I come back here. So I've created the thank you page in lead pages, I go create a new list in a Webber. Then I would go to the free resource and download page, figure out which one I want to be able to use. So maybe I will look at this one and go, Hey, that looks really, really good. I could give away a free guide with tips and recommendations. And then I'd click, Use this template. And then the fun begins because now that you've created your list in a Weber, your e-mail list name. You can I'm just going to put this test five. I'll just name it something strange. Test five. And now I can start actually creating the lead page. And once I've created the page, I will actually integrate it with the list that I just created on a Weber. So once again, I don't need to watch this video, but I see everything is here for me. I just make changes to the logo. I put my logo in it. I might put the book cover of my thing in there. And where it gets really interesting is when you have to do the actual integration. Because a Weber, your or your e-mail marketing software is what is capturing the email and the name. But you've got to integrate it with this. So you would edit the pop-up, right? Let me just make sure I can see the form, the integration. So I would edit the integration. Perfect, here we go. Edit the integration. Okay? And this is where I would say No, choose where I want the data, the form data to go. And I'd wanna make sure that the form data is actually going. See I already have an integrated to a Weber. And then I could choose any of my a Weber lists to have it go to. So the main thing I want you to understand about this is you have to connect whatever software system you're using to build your lead page with whatever software system you're using for email, to hold your email contacts, and all of that fun stuff. So you've got to integrate the two so that when people actually see your published lending page, regardless of the software you use, when they click this it at, their information is actually going to, you're a Weber so that they're now going to start to get those emails that you set up. So that is the strategy with leveraging multiple freebies. So let me just talk about the multiple freebies really quick. You don't just want to create one leak page, right? You actually want to create a number of lead pages and offer a number of freebies. And typically I like to do at least one new freebie every five or so books that I've written. I'd love to say when the Froude be per book, but that doesn't happen. Because then if you know that you only have one freebie that you've offered in one of your books. You know, every time somebody joins that list, it's because they bought that specific book because that freebie offers only in that book. So this is not about just creating one freebie. This is about creating a number of freebies. I take three to five on average. So once again, creating the freebie takes 48 hours creating an email list, as I showed you right here with a Weber, takes about one hour to just create it. But the integration, right, can take you a number of hours to make sure that everything's working. And of course, writing a follow-up email funnel will take you five to ten hours. So this also is a time in intensive strategy, but it is a vital strategy to your long-term success as a writer. Alright, so that was that strategy, strategy number 16. In the next module, we're gonna talk about strategy number 17, which is posting regular blog content to sites like Medium.com. All right, let's go to the next module. 25. Strategy #17: Post Regular Blog Content: All right, So you are looking at strategy Number 17, which is to post regular blog content to sites like Medium.com. So I like to think of Medium.com as a baby, Huffington Post. And so it still isn't to the level of Huffington Post. But what you will notice is that it covers a bunch of topics in general, on medium.com. You can sign up for free, you can become a member. But if you look at just the topics that it covers, if you're a writer than any sort, there's going to be a topic here that really relates to the topics that you're writing about. And so what I want you to really think about is it medium is the way for you to have a very public blog presence without starting your own blog. And it seemed by a whole bunch of people on a bunch of different topics in areas. And you get a lot of email subscribers through medium when you're writing content consistently. So I think that's super-important. Understand about medium. And it is what it says here. It is a place to write, read, and connect, and it is easy and free to post your thinking on any topic. So if you're somebody who says, I'm writing these non-fiction books, I want to be a thought leader. One day medium is a great place to start writing down your thoughts and your ideas and putting them here. So what I will say is that you really want to before you actually get started. So if you click that Start, it's going to ask you to sign up right before you even join medium, before you even do this, it's so important for you to explore the kind of content that does well on medium. So if I look at, look at trending on medium, this is going to show me what topics are trending. This is going to show me what kind of things people are interested in. It is also going to show me some of the latest articles in different areas. And so that's going to give me a sense and a feel for, is this the right medium for my topic? What kinds of subtopics within what I write about would be really great for me to post onto Medium, you know, like, like five habits of highly ineffective remote workers. Awesome. So if you write about remote workers that, that shows you right there with this particular article, this is a good place to post. So you certainly want to explore the kind of content that does one medium by doing a little research on its site. But then you also want to brainstorm the topics, post ideas that you'd like to write and post to medium. And then you've gotta do some logistics. You've got to figure out, well, how often do I want to write on medium During do that one time a week? Do I want to do that five times a week? How often do I want to do that? And then you really want to sign up for a free media accounts. So click the Get Started button and sign up using your email address or Facebook or Google or what have you. And then you really need to go ahead and do your medium profile mixture. You completely fill out your medium profile, your post description, your bio, and then start writing your Medium posts. I would highly keep in mind that I would highly recommend that you have a medium spreadsheet where you keep a listing of all of your medium blog post titles, a description, the date you published it, the number of words of that medium article, and then a week and a month and six months out, how many people have viewed the article. So you keep your own metrics on what is, what kind of topics people are really enjoying. Medium also, I believe on a weekly basis will send you an email on it automatically that says, how many people have viewed your Medium posts? What was the most popular? So they will help you stay in the know about your data analytics. But you certainly want to create some form of spreadsheet that allows you to do that. And then also at the bottom of every Medium posts, you can put a short bio. And then you can also put a picture of your one of your books that can be hyperlinked to take people right to your writers website, or to your blog or to Amazon where they can purchase it. So always plug at least one of your books at the end of every medium post you, right? So that is the strategy using medium, obviously having to process much harder to get on because it just has that brand recognition. You've typically got to know somebody and having it imposed, get in with a writer, get featured. But medium is like a baby Huffington Post. So it's really good to get on the platform now and start to really leverage the platform to build your writers platform. So that is stretching totally free, totally free. And typically it takes me about an hour to write and post when Medium post. So it will take you probably a couple of hours to set up your spreadsheet, 30 minutes to get started to sign up. So you know, you click the Get Started button, you sign up. And then it probably another hour or so to build out a really good profile. So four or five hours for the startup to use medium. And then from there probably an hour to two hours to write each medium post. And depending on how how many posts you want to do week again, that could be anywhere from three to five hours that you devote to it every single week. So that is the time investment. And the way that you'll know that this strategy is working for you is again, going to Google Analytics. I don't know if I've showed you Google Analytics, so let me just go Google Analytics and checking your Google Analytics. I mean, that's the bottom line of that. Checking your Google Analytics to make sure that you see where the traffic is coming from. That's the important thing. Where is the trap, where are the traffic sources? Is it organic search? Is it direct? Is it referral, and then what pages are people on? So once again, when you start to really get into Google Analytics, it will show you where people are coming from. And if you start to see that as you write more Medium posts, people are coming from medium, right, to your website. That's really, really good. That's a good sign. So once again, medium is a great place to write blog posts and a blog without filling the need to set up a blog. And it's totally free. So that is strategy number 17. Now let's go to strategy number 18, which is adding a blog to your author website and writing post consistently. Let's go the next module. 26. Strategy #18: Add a Blog to Your Author Website: All right, so this next strategy is adding a blog to your author website and writing post consistently. So there are many different platforms that you can use to get your domain to host your website. Wix is a great example of one, but there are many other than weeks, but I'm going to show you in weeks how you would do that. So if I wanted to create a new website, I have no idea when I'm going to call it, but let's just come up with something. So if I wanted to create, I will say I wanted to start a blog. But no, I kinda wanna do something like a hola. Let me see writer. Let's just see what writer comes up with. Weeks allows you to search for a few things. I never really use their search function, but okay, I'm going to edit a template. So I'm going to edit a template. I'm going to see, okay, let's say I want to create my own writer, my own writer website. Let's say I already have it, but I'm just going to, we're going to use this as a test site. So let's say this is my writers website. And what I wanna do is I want to add a blog to my author website. So let's just talk about the freebie nature of this. So you can pay money to get your personalized domain name. You can pay money to host it. So that's stuff that customer journey. But also with sites like Wix, you can have an absolutely free account and a free website published to the web. It has a really long Wix.com, blah, blah, blah names. So that's the downside of a free, but this still can be done totally free. So let's say this is my author website. And the one thing I want to do, let me just show you the preview of it so you can see what it actually looks in previous. So let's say that this is my author website. So I have reviews of my book, I have upcoming appearances. You can learn more about me, but you will notice that I do not have, so I can go to my books and you can see what my books look like them. So you sell my books. But I do not have a blog. Let's say I wanted to add a blog, so I would go back to editor. And again, the steps are going to differ depending on what platform are hosting platform you're using. But let's say I want to go my blog, right? And let's say that I really want to, others, some sort of blood manager. Okay, Let's say I want to create a post. I have no idea where this is going to go, but I'm just going to say, so in weeks you're going to add some sort of blog post. But you would go to blog and you would add it. And then here's your dashboard. This is what I really wanted to show you. So currently this is having me set up a blog post. And I'm just going to call it blog post one, right? We don't want to get fancy with this thing. Blog post 1. And then I'm going to start writing test, test, test, test, test, testing, testing. Okay. And then I'm going to, let's see. So then I'm going to have that be there. I could actually do some things with settings. I could display a cover image. I could add an image right here. I could add a video right here, right? So I can add a video, and I could paste the URL from YouTube, Vimeo, or Facebook. I could also add a file if I wanted to add some sort of file here. Okay, so I could add any of the files, so that's fine. And then I would click Publish, just showing you a test. So I would say, Okay, help me. I want to view this maybe later. So now I can see all of these particular, you know, I have this new blog post. So there already were some blog things here, right? And I can see all of those things. But I can also, let's see. So now I've got that published. Now you can go back to my main menu rate. I'm going to blog. I can see the published blogs. I can also schedule the blog posts. I can also see what drafts I have in here, and I can also categorize my blog posts. So then when I preview it, obviously she's using news to me blog post because here it is. So one thing I would say is don't, if you're putting a blog on your author website, don't call it news. That's just very confusing. Call it blog because I didn't know that that was her blog because she called it news. But anyway, this is a template, so don't worry about it, but call it blog. So let me, let me go back to editor because this is going to annoy me and let me go back to do menus and pages or know what I wanna do is I want to manage the menu up here. And I'm going to click the three dots, and I'm going to rename it because I don't like it being called News. And I'm now going to name it blog C. So then I'm going to come here and I have to actually rename that one. And now I can rename it here. I can save it. And now I'm going to preview it. Here we go. There's the blog post that I just created. Here are the other previous blog posts. So I'm gonna bring you back to the homepage and preview mode, I'm gonna say, okay, now we see blog up there. So the beauty of this strategy is that you can bring people to your website by having a blog attached to your author website. And so all they do is they click here and they go, Okay, here's the latest blog posts. They can also subscribe to this bite away. They can also subscribe so that they are notified directly via Wix or whenever you're using of a new blog post as it comes up. So keep in mind that they can also subscribe to it. So once again, I just showed you how if I were using Wix, I would add a blog to my author website. Please make sure it's called blog or not something like news. And then of course, what you also wanna do is you do want to have a blog spreadsheet. You do want to have a blog spreadsheet. Let's see if I've got a blog, blogging spreadsheet, but I think it's stillborn. And you're blogging spreadsheet would look a lot like your guest blog posting, except it would be the number, it would be the blog title. You might have a hyperlink to it directly from your site. So you could see that let's go back to where I was, the ribbon right here. So you might have it there, but again, you need a spreadsheet to keep track of what you're doing in there and what you're posting and what are the titles and also the number of views and the number of comments, you know, the number of hearts that you got from it. So those are the things now, the thing about blogging. And I didn't say this about maybe the median blog posting or the guest blog posting. Blogging is time-consuming. You are a writer. If you're taking this class, I would guess that you want to write books, you've gotta figure out how to balance your time between the writing of your books and then the writing of blogs. There are only so many hours in a day. So you really want to make sure that you think about, do I want to blog on medium to? I went to blog on my webpage. Do I want a guest blog for other people? I can promise you there are not enough hours in the day for you to do all of the above and write books. So if you're going to choose as opposed to doing medium or as opposed to doing guest blogging. If you're going to choose to have your own blog on your off your website. The time that it's going to take you to do that is one to two hours to add the blog to your author website. And that means not only adding it, but like setting it up to where you have a few blog posts already written on there. So that's going to be a good one to two hours. And then two to four hours to create the blog post spreadsheet along with your titles and descriptions for one to three months. And then it's going to take you hold the presses for this one to three hours to write and schedule each blog post? Yes, One 23 hours per week because there's a lot you got to pick here to decide the picture. I mean, like there's a lot to this. You've got to decide what picture you're going to use. You have to decide the title. You have to decide what the subtitle is going to be. You have to actually write it. You know, there's a lot that goes into each blog post. So one to three hours to write and schedule each blog post. And the way that you're going to know the strategy is successful is how many shares you got when you share it to social, how many views and comments you get, and also how many people subscribed to your blog, on your website. That is how you'll be able to gauge success. So that is how you add a blog to your author. Website. Key thing is consistency. Key thing like if, if, you know, for whatever reason your other website really doesn't have to be updated all that often it's pretty standard, pretty basic. You don't have to update it every single week. But blog on your website, It's a little bit different. So if you know you cannot at least write one blog post a week on your blog, on your other website. I would say go with something like medium or do guest blogging. But even guest blogging requires a level of consistency. So just think about how consistently can I write on my blog, on my other website before you decide to use this strategy. All right, that was Strategy Number 18. Now let's get to strategy number 19, which is register as an author at GoodReads and add the author widget to your author website. Let's get to it. 27. Strategy #19: Register as an Author on Goodreads: All right, so strategy number 19 is also a free strategy that you can use to promote and market your book. And it is strategy number 19, register as an author on GoodReads.com, which is what you're seeing on the screen, and add the author widget to your website. So what I wanna do with this strategy is really tough. Talk to you about the importance of good reads. So this is one of the strategies, once again, time-intensive. You want to be sure that you are, you know, like if we go to authors down here at the bottom, let me just show you. So if you go to authors, I'm not going to send out because I have a good reads account somewhere else. But again, you can become a good reads author for free. You can join their author program for free. You can have an author profile on Good Reads. You can run a giveaway, you can connect your blog, you can advertise your books. You can take questions from readers using the Ask the author component of good rates. You can write reviews, you can comment on other people's books as a way to sort of build your brand on GoodReads. The main thing you want to do is claim your profile because obviously you have to have a book that is published and, uh, has that information. And then once you're on there, Here's the thing about good reads and let me just go back to the homepage that I think is super important. Understand. You want to sign up for good reads, and it shows you how to do that. You want to claim your other profile. But GoodReads is something that you just can't do once by sending up and setting up a profile and leave it there. You really want to be if you're going to use this strategy. Now full disclaimer, I don't use this strategy. I don't have the hours to devote to good rates. I do have an author profile and good rates. I do not use this strategy because it is time-consuming and I add rather bright Medium posts and do other things, youtube and other things. The key thing about good reads is that if you're going to use this strategy, you need to be able to actively, beyond good reads. I'm engaging readers, engaging other writers, writing reviews of other people's books that are in your genre or niche. You want to be able to do that on a regular basis. So literally what I'm saying is it's going to take you about two hours to follow this and declaim your other profile. It's going to take you one to three hours to learn how to use the good reads marketing tools because there's a lot of marketing tools on here. That's one thing I'll say. If we go back to the other stuff, There's likely said you can run a giveaway, can connect your blood. There's so many tools for authors that are awesome and good reads, but it's gonna take you a good one to three hours to learn how to use these specific tools. And then you're going to need to spend one to three hours a week to answer reader questions, to write reviews of other people's books, to run giveaways. It is a long-term strategy that requires your presence on GoodReads one to three hours a week when she finished the five to seven hours of setup. So this is a strategy where there's five to seven hours of setup than one to three hours each week to really build traction over a long period of time. It is a good strategy. There are books that have been written on how as an author to leverage good reads if this interests you, I would totally say, go find those books, learn how to become an expert at using good reads as an author. But again, it is time-consuming and you don't want to be doing 10 strategies at once if you're gonna do this one I would say, than try to do one to two other ones that are not as time-intensive as this will be in the long-term. So this is the strategy Number 19, using good reads as an author specifically. In the next strategy, we're going to talk about a very simple, not so time-consuming and super effective strategy, which is strategy number 20, updating your email signature. Let's get to it. 28. Strategy #20: Update Your Email Signature: Alright, so strategy number 20 is update your e-mail signature. This is one of the shortest amount of time spending strategies of the 21, if not the shortest and one of the most effective. So what you are seeing here is an e-mail signature examples. So you want to set up whether you use Yahoo or Outlook or, you know, I use Google for everything. So I'm going to show it to you and Google, but there's ways to set up your email signature in all of the e-mails software programs. But essentially what you wanna do is you want to have an e-mail signature that says something like Have a great day or sincerely comma your author name, your web author website, check out my latest book, check it out on Amazon, and then put a hyperlink, sue that book on Amazon. And typically also like to put a picture of the book here as well. So let me show you really quickly. This is so effective. This will literally take you about 30 minutes. If you have trouble with tech, maybe up to an hour. But then it just every time you compose an e-mail from that email address, boom, it pops right up. So it's and then people who are new to you, who maybe you're emailing and passing for some other random reason. They see, oh my goodness, she's an author. And then they go check it and click the link and check out your website that click the link and check out your book. It's a really awesome way to have marketing going 24, 7 every time you respond to or send out an email. So let me show you and it will appear here. So I'm just going to copy this so that I have this available to me. And I'm going to show you how to set it up in Google because Google's what I use. So you will go to this at all. I didn't know what it is. Little wheel of some sort. And you'll click See All Settings. And then when you go to see all settings, what you wanna do is scroll down and you want to scroll down until you get to the signature right now the vacation here go signature. So I've no signatures in this email account. I would click Create New, and I'll call this, let's call this author's signature, just edited. Realize you have to name the thing. So other signature then I'll click the little pencil. Okay, I have to do that. Now. I can just Control V because again, I took it from here and I'll just put my name. Okay. Let's take it. And then I'll put my website, I'll put check on my latest book. And then from Canva I will pull my picture of my book. So I would just let me see how I can link that up. I think you can just paste it. That's one easy way to do that. I would literally get my picture and then Control V. Also, you want to put your picture of you in your e-mail address, but that's a different topic altogether. And then what you would do is you would say, okay, do I want my signature right? For new email uses? Yes, I'll click off their signature. Do I want my signature showing on Reply or forward use? Yes. Yes. Yes. Let me just say this. You don't want the author's signature to only appear. Okay. So let me go through and say this. I want author's signature to appear every time I compose a new email. And I want all of my replay forwards the author's signature to appear. You want to make sure you choose both. So anytime you responding to somebody, the author's signature automatically populates. Anytime you're sitting out in a new e-mail, the author's signature populates. And then you're going to click Save Changes. If you don't click Save changes, it will not save. And so notice what happens now that we've saved the signature. Every time I click compose, there it is. Right there. All of it's there. Every time I reply to an email, this signature is also going to be there. This is a very powerful strategy because people will click on your author website link when they see a picture of your book and your signature and you say Check it out on Amazon, they will click the link. They will email you back and say, Hey, I know you're an author can ask you a question. Super free, super good way to market and promote your books. Is this whole author e-mail signature piece. So pleased, develop an author e-mail signature. Follow the steps that I just walked you through to set it up. If you use Gmail, figure out how to do it and outlook, if you use Outlook or Yahoo or something else. And start for all of your, all of your email addresses. If you're like me and you have 10 e-mail addresses, all of them. Make sure that, uh, signatures there. So that is strategy number 12. Now let's go to strategy number 21, which is the final strategy. I don't sticky us a long time to get there, which is cross-promote your new book with other books you right? Alright, let's get to that strategy. 29. Strategy #21: Cross Promote Your New Book: All right, strategy Number 21 and we are finally at the final strategy in this course in 2001, ways to market and promote your book for free. Here it is. Cross-promote your new book with other books, you, right? Okay. So if no one's told you, anytime you're writing more than one book, which I really hope you are planning to write at least 10 books if you want to be a full-time writer getting paid from full-time writing. You want to make sure that in every book your cross-promoting, so you write Book 1 and then in Book 2, at some point you refer to book one. You write Book 3, and then in Book 3 you refer to books 1 and 2. You go back and edit book one. Now you can refer to books 2 and 3. In book one, you want to make sure that in all of your books, at least 2345 times throughout the book, Don't be salesy about a W spammy about it, but you want to be able to, when you're covering the key point, say, yeah. And in Book 6, I talked about this at length, that when people have a hyperlink, when they read your e-book and they can just click and they can purchase that other book because they want to dive deeper into the point you made in this current book, somewhere else in one of your other books. So what does cross-promotion involved? Right? Let's talk through some strategies for cross-promotion. Strategy number 1. It's really, really important that you don't wait till you've written a whole book to figure out where you're going to incorporate links to your other books. You really want to identify in your book outline which books you're going to cross-promote. And you want to outline which chapters and which books you're going to cross-promote. So your book outlines should give you the play by play in the blueprint of what other books you're going to cross-promote. What chapters you're going to do that in, in y, right? So that's strategy number 1. Strategy number two is you want to keep a spreadsheet containing all of the books you've written and which books were crossed promoted in which books. So if if you've been with me this long, even know how many spreadsheets I've shown you. You want a spreadsheet that lists all of your books. And there should be a column for cross-promotion where you indicate which books you cross promoted in this current book that's on that row of your spreadsheet. So keep a spreadsheet that says which books you've written and which books were crossed promoted in which books put that in a column in your publishing spreadsheet. Strategy number 3. Be sure that your end of Book contact info includes a link to your Amazon Author Profile. So it's so important that each of your books at the end of the book link you to the Amazon or their profile because at your Amazon Author Profile are all of your books, not just one. So if you want a quick way to just get everybody to one place where they can see all the books you published. Make sure the link to your Amazon Author Profile is listed at the end of your book in the contact info. Now how long does it take to implement this strategy? Again, this is one of the faster strategy. Faster for sure. One to two hours to identify books to cross-promote. If you are doing this after the fact, you know, sometimes you've written a few books and even realize that you were supposed to be cross-promoting. And so now you have to go back and figure out where you're going to edit the book. Where are you going to re-upload the book? This takes a little bit longer. If you've already written those books and scenario to go back and figure that stuff out. Typically if you're starting with the book outline, one to two hours to identify books to cross-promote. If you've got a backtrack because you've already published these books. I would double that time two to four hours because you got to figure out where and when, and then you gotta make edits. One hour to rewrite our edit the contact page. But you should have in the back of every single book you publish. And then one hour to verify it, integrate the Amazon Author Profile into the manuscript. So you wanna make sure that that Amazon Author Profile is at the end of the book at your contact page or learn more about me page. And so again, the total amount of time for this strategy is three to four hours. If you're including the cross-promotion from the book outlining stage on, if you've got a backtrack. Now we're talking about four to seven hours instead of three to four. But still in the grand scheme of all the strategies we've gone through all 21. This is one of the shortest strategies and still super effective to use when you want to promote and market your book for free. All right, Next, let's talk about how to select and apply your top three strategies. Because again, what I said is, I'm giving your 21 strategies in this course. I don't want you to use all 21 strategies. There's not enough hours in the day. I want you to choose 33, maximum, 12 to preferably until you hit master m is one to two and then you add a third. So let's talk about next, how to select and apply your top three strategies. 30. Select Your Top 3 Strategies: Okay, In this section of the course, we're gonna talk about how to apply the strategies. And as I said at the very beginning of the course, Let's start with one thing. You do not need to apply all of these strategies to the promotion and marketing of your book. In fact, you don't even want to apply ten to 15 of them. Each of the strategies that I've walked you through in this course, they are time-consuming. They're time-consuming to learn, their time consuming to implement their time-consuming to do well. So what I'm saying is, yes, these are, these are strategies that you can do for free, that you can absolutely implement and that will work. However, the goal is not to implement all of the strategies at once, or even all of the strategies for each and every one of the books that you write. The goal is to have a toolbox of book marketing and promotional strategies that you can draw from for any given book at any given time. And here's what I want you to do. Get down to the three strategies that you feel are going to be best for your book, your niche, whatever it is you're trying to promote at this moment, what are the three strategies that are going to work best for you? And focus all of your time and energy on those three strategies. Not ten, not 15 or 213. Now how do you get to the three strategies? Well, start to look at the pros and cons of doing certain strategies. I definitely think as we've gone through this course, there are certain strategies that super appeal to you. And certain strategies they go, Oh, I only want to touch that. That's a great place to start. So create in your journal or your notebook a list of all the strategies you absolutely don't like. And you absolutely don't want to do. Cut them out immediately and then create a list of the strategies that you're like. Yeah, I could see myself doing that and then create a third list. You're like, I really want to try those strategies like you feel excitement and passion about it. And then all the ones that were like the total no, cut them out. Stick with the ones that are sort of like Isaac, I kinda like the strategy or the strategies and I really love these strategies. Now, with those two lists, what are the three if you could only do three, what are they? And then create a pros and cons list for each of those three to make sure that you really do want to go through those strategies. But again, at the end of the day, it's about looking at costs versus benefits of each of the strategies. How much time would you have to invest? Do you have that kind of time on a daily or weekly basis? And then picking through strategies that both resonate with you, but also strategies where you're like, I would enjoy doing that. And even if I don't enjoy doing it every single day, I could commit to consistently implementing this strategy over a long period of time and talk in like six months, nine months, a year or more. So that is how we start to get to what strategies based on what you've learned in this course do you really want to implement? Now, let's go to the next video. 31. Build Your Book Marketing Skills: Alright, so let's talk about building your book marketing skills. So once again, I'm saying this a lot because I want to really hit home this point. It's so easy to go through a course like this. And you loved seven of the 21 strategies. And so you're like, okay, I'm going to find a way to implement all seven. Book Marketing. Mastery means focusing on your top three book marketing strategies, not five, not seven, Maximum your top three. And then what I would highly recommend you do is take online courses that dive into each of those strategies. So I've done my best in this course to give you both the understanding of each of the strategies and to show you some of the backend work of implementing the strategy. But I mean, I would literally have to create a, a, a 25 hour course to show you the end-to-end from a to Z how to do each of these strategies in full. So what I would suggest is you now have 21 strategies in your toolbox. Decide what your top three are, and then go search out online courses that will teach you everything you need to know about your top three strategies from a to Z, from step one all the way to implementation. So take online courses that dive into each of your top three strategies. Do not focus on learning everything about each of the three strategies. So, okay, let me take a step back. I would really love it if you choose one to two strategies, one preferably, then you can learn everything about that one strategy by taking another online course. Then you can implement that one strategy, build a to mastery, and then add your second strategy. Lot of people don't want to do that. They want to do their top three at once. If you're gonna do three strategies at once, then you're going to spend way too long trying to figure out every nitty-gritty detail of each of those three strategies. If you're gonna do three strategies at the same time, meaning learning how to use them, using them, implementing them. Do not focus on getting everything perfect, everything right, figuring everything out. Focus on MVP learning so you can execute, implement faster and VP, meaning Minimum Viable Product, learn the least. You need to learn about each of those three strategies so you can jump into what I like to call DMA daily massive action. Dma planning means nothing if you don't execute. Let me say that again. Planning means nothing if you don't execute. So if you're going to insist upon doing three strategies at once, learning three strategies at once learned the minimum viable product, meaning amount of things you need to learn to implement the strategy and get straight to execution. You will learn as you do it. All right, i'm, I'm gonna get off my pedestal now. Next, let's talk about how to schedule a realistic timeline to implement these strategies. All right, let's get to the next module. 32. Schedule a Realistic Timeline: All right, so let's talk about scheduling a realistic timeline to implement these strategies. You've heard me throughout the whole course, tell you just how long each of these strategies take. So I was saying it again. Each of these strategies takes a lot of time, a lot of time, and quite a bit of setup to implement. So give yourself six to nine months and a lot of people going like, why can't I just figure this out if it's working in four weeks. Nope. You need vigilant consistency for six to nine months. Give yourself six to nine months of consistent action before you evaluate your results. Okay. Let me just say a couple of things. You should be evaluating the results from each strategy on a weekly basis because they're going to be tweaks that you need to make to your top three marketing strategies. So on a weekly basis, you should be sitting down for 15 and 30 minutes and looking at your Google Analytics, looking at your traffic, looking at your views, looking at your book sales, and you should be tweaking your three strategies every single week. When I say give yourself six to nine months of consistent action before you evaluate your results. What I mean is do not shelf or give up on the particular strategy until you've done it with vigilant consistency for six to nine months. After six months. If it's not producing anything, diddly squat, then you can say, okay, that's not working. Let me try and do strategy, but do not get into shiny object syndrome. You try one strategy for two weeks, then you jumped to another one, then you jump to another one. Note, tweak every single week, but give it six to nine months of consistent action before you evaluate results and decide that you want to not use that strategy any longer. Devote a minimum of ten hours a week on your three book marketing strategies you've chosen? Yes, I said ten hours a week. And I think 10 hours a week is not enough. I'll just say that notice I put minimum in all caps, ten hours a week, minimum on your bookmark. It I would love to see you closer to 20 hours a week because typically, writers who do really well, who are full-time writers are spending 20 hours a week marketing, and then 20 plus hours a week writing. Now, if you have a full-time day job, you can't necessarily do that. Which is why I'm saying devote a minimum of ten hours a week on three book marketing strategies. I'm also going to say this 10 hours a week on a super intense one marketing strategy like the Virtual Conference, which you need even more than that for the virtual conference. But if you could put 10 hours each week on one strategy as opposed to three, you will get farther, faster on that one strategy. But if you feel the need to do three book marketing strategies at once, that makes sure that for those three, you're giving at least 10 hours a week. If you're choosing only do one strategy, please still give ten hours a week. My bottom line is this, ten hours a week to book marketing of your time. Whether using one strategy to strategies are three strategies, minimum ten hours a week. All right, next, let's talk about how to develop an approach to data collection and analysis. And those of you who don't like data collection analysis, the key to your money is going to live in the data. I'm just saying. All right, let's get to the next module. 33. Develop an Approach to Data Collection: All, let's talk about developing an approach to data collection and analysis. So let, let's talk facts because some writers feel like they don't want to be data analysts, they don't want to do numbers crunching. A lot of writers will say, I'm a writer, I don't want to do any of this scientific data analysis thing. Here's the truth. What you don't measure, you can assess. And let me say that again to affect what you don't measure, you cannot assess. Which means if you're not making the kind of money you want to be making as a writer, if you're not keeping track of your data, then you can't assess why you're not making the money you should be making. So what you don't measure, you can't assess. You'll need a method as a writer by which to regularly collect and review your data. You want to visually see progress. You've noticed throughout this whole class I've used spreadsheets. Infinitum. I think that's the way that you say, I love spreadsheets because I can visually lay out the spreadsheet, ECT, and color-coded. It can show me the things at a glance that I need to see. And also it's not super data analytics. It's very simple. And I make them simple because I don't want to dive into full data analysis mode if you're techie that way and if you like data that way, you can certainly do that with Google Analytics. It gives you reports and reports and reports. But again, you want to visually see progress spreadsheets or off awesome for that. So what are the data points that you want to be reviewing as a writer? You want to keep track of things like your release dates. You want to keep track of views before something releases. So views on your author website, use on your YouTube channel. How many people have actually clicked on your opt-in pages? How many people have signed up to a particular email list that is going to be connected to your book. So views before something releases, views to your Facebook business page or writers page, views to your blog. So views before something releases and then views a week after a book releases, a month after book releases, and also 36 months after that book releases. Book sales is a major data point. What were your book sells on day 16 months later after implementing those top three strategies, what what are your book sales? Where's your traffic coming from? Is it coming from any of these marketing strategies that you've been working on consistently for the last six to nine months, your email subscriber list, how has that list grown as a result of releasing your book and implementing those three marketing strategies for six to nine months. What is the growth in the email less what is the growth in your social media followers? And of course, not only book sales, but what is the growth in your overall revenue? Because you may be writing books as a means to get people to work more deeply with you, not simply the purchase of a book, but coaching, consulting contracts, Federal bids. So how has the release of this book and the use of those top three book marketing strategies lead to increase overall business revenue and sales. So those are some of the key data points that you want to be keeping track of over the next six to nine months following the release of your book. So that just gives you a crash course in the kinda things you want to print a spreadsheet, keep track of. Next, let's talk about how to evaluate your results often and consistently. Let's get to it. 34. Evaluate Your Results Often and Consistently: All right, Let's talk about evaluating your results often and consistently. So most of these strategies that we've talked about, the 21 strategies in this course. They do have built-in analytics, but you still need to set aside enough time every single week to review the analytics, to see what's working, to see what's not working, and to change strategy as necessary. So the first thing I would say is in general, if you're using three of the book marketing strategies that we talked about in this course. You're going to need anywhere from 15 minutes to an hour calendar appointment on your calendar same day in time every single week. Preferably to review the analytics during that 15 minutes to one hour meeting with yourself every single week, you need to ask yourself, okay, what about my use of these strategies this week has worked. What about my use of these strategies this week has not worked for anything that has not worked. You have to then say to yourself, What am I going to do differently next week? How am I going to change the way that I'm implementing the strategy, not the strategy itself. Let me go back for a minute. Six to nine months of consistent action implementing the strategies before you do. Strategy doesn't work. I'm throwing it out. Tweaking is what we're talking about when we say change strategies necessary. So what work this week about the strategies that I used, what didn't work about the strategies that I use is sweet. And what can I change about the way that I'm implementing the strategies so that I can get a better result next week. And keep notes of what you're saying in these review sessions to yourself. So you know, every single week you've got a journal, what worked, what didn't, and what you've committed to trying to do differently next week. So all of those things are really important in your weekly reviews. Now, next, let's talk about some final thoughts and then we will get to the class project. 35. Final Thoughts: Alright, so let's go over some final thoughts. I hope in going through this course, you can now see that there are many, many, many ways to market and promote your book for free. I hope you see the possibilities. I hope you are not totally overwhelmed by all the responsibilities associated with the possibilities. First and foremost, I hope you see, even if you don't have thousands of dollars to put it into marketing or advertising, or Facebook ads. That there is a way for you to reach your audience, that there is a way for you to get more readers, that there is a way for you to, over time get more book sales. I hope you've also learned in this course that this is not being about a jack of all trades and master of none. This is really having these toolbox of strategies that you can pick and choose from, but really honing in. Because again, these are very time-consuming because they're free. Honing in on the three to five strategies that are gonna make the biggest difference for you as a writer. I also hope secretly, you've learned that marketing can actually be fun. I'm an introvert, I'm an author. There is nothing I wanna do more than not have makeup and hair fully done, put my do rag on, sit at a laptop and write 10000 or 20000 words in a city, there's nothing I love more than being able to do that. But I also know the realities of being a writer. And if I want to have my writing impact the world, I've gotta reach those potential readers. And so marketing isn't just some drudgery tasks that you've gotta do. It's not just something that you're like, oh, I hate to sell it. What you write, whether it's fiction or nonfiction, what you're creating is going to transform the readers who grabbed your book. So to reach them, to get to them. Marketing and sales is the vehicle you're driving into, get to them. And so even if you don't love marketing, even if you don't love sales, even if you're saying, oh, this is going to be so much work, why can't I just write all the time? Remember that you're writing isn't just for you. It's for every person who's meant to read those words and you've got to find a way to reach them. Now we are so blessed. We live in a digital world, a global economy where we don't have to travel across from one continent to another to reach people. We can reach them on YouTube and we can reach them at the blog, and we can reach them with emails. There are so many ways for us to reach people. So knowing that, knowing the gift of that, knowing if you'd been born 50 years ago, you wouldn't be able to do any of this. Rest assured him that and feel gratitude for the opportunities that you do have. And then pick those three to five strategies and freely I'm saying three marketing strategies and go to town on them and give them your all and do it for a minimum of a year, minimum. And then trust that these strategies work. Trust that you'll know when to change certain things about them, and trust that you are a great writer. And there are many, many readers who want to be raving fans of your work. Thank you for joining me for the course. Thank you for being here. Thank you for going through all of these modules. Remember that you can come back to any of them at anytime and go over exactly how I do certain things and walk you through certain things. You do not have to learn this all overnight. You can do this step by step by step. Thank you for being in this course. And now let's talk about the class project. 36. Class Project: All right, Let's talk about the class project. So what you will see here is a book marketing worksheet. You've heard me say the other class. Yes, choose your top three strategies. But please, if you can, just focus on one strategy, maximum two strategies. So what I'm asking you to do using this book marketing worksheet as your class project is. I want you to take this worksheet and I want you to identify the two because I didn't include three. If you're going to include three, just print this out, prints you pieces of this out, two pages of this out so you can record the third. But I'd really love you to focus on the top to book marketing strategies you're going to use to promote your book for free. And I want you to identify the hours that you will work on each of these strategies. So put in book marketing strategy number one. And what are the days and times that you have scheduled on your calendar to work that particular strategy and then do the same for book marketing strategy number 2, identify right in the sparks that you will download this PDF, print it out, write with a pen. The first, second strategy you're going to use and then for each of those days, hours, so six to 09:00 PM, eight to noon. Each of the days of the week, you don't have to work on it seven days a week, but whatever days you're committing to for that strategy, indicate the hours and then you can always scan and upload it and share this particular completed worksheet with me. But this is your class project. Again, this is a way for you to commit to two of the 21 marketing strategies, but also to schedule the times on the days that you're going to work on this consistently for the next six to nine months. So this is your class project and I look forward to seeing the completed worksheet.