Category: marketing

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Best Ways to Market Self Published Books

Whenever you self-publish a book, and you do not have the benefit of a traditional publisher’s marketing, you need to find other ways to help you spread the word. Word-of-mouth is the most powerful and successful way to sell books.

Here are some affordable but highly effective ways to market self-published books.

1. You must make sure the book is available through all major channels. For print books, this includes online shopping websites.

2. Establish a presence on sites where readers congregate, like social cataloging websites for books. Set up an author page, do promotions, engage with your readers, and do not argue with people who post negative reviews. Bite your tongue and move on.

3. Create a website with information about you (people are curious about authors) and your books. Include book signing schedules, links to articles and blog posts about you, pictures, excerpts from the book, and other goodies that may get people engaged and interested so that they’ll buy the book.

4. Anchor a strong presence on social media, and check it regularly. When people ask questions, answer them promptly.

5. Market to the bookstores if you think your book has potential. The bookseller associations have many ways to market for their members. If there is a bookstore in your town, introduce yourself to the owner, give them a review copy of the book, and ask if they would be willing to have you do a book signing in their store. Contact any bookstore in an area you are willing to visit and ask them, too.

6. Give away some free copies. Get your book into the hands of bloggers, book reviewers, magazines, and anyone that will agree to review it. Prepare yourself for the fact that some of those reviews won’t be good.

7. Contact any appropriate regional booksellers association and try to get yourself on their signer list. This often requires paying a fee or giving them a stack of free books, but it gets you in front of many people that spend their whole day selling books to others.

8. Talk to magazines and newspapers to see if they’d be interested in running an excerpt from the book as an article, or perhaps doing a story about you, the book, or something in the book.

9. Send out press releases to radio, TV, blogs, newspapers, magazines, trade journals, and businesses that may have an interest in the book.

10. Once stores are carrying your books, stop by every so often and offer to sign their stock. Buy a roll of “Autographed Copy” stickers to put on the books after you sign them. It helps in selling more books, hence lucrative for both the bookstore and yourself.

11. Look for other places to talk about your book. For example, if it is a children’s book, offer to talk about it in schools. If it is nonfiction, offer to speak at conferences, museums, and colleges.

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Importance of Branding Your Business

Every business has a brand, and branding defines how your customers perceive you. Your business’s ability to serve products or services to your customers by fulfilling their satisfaction determines how strong or weak your brand is. If you want to grow and if you plan to remain in your business for long, you will want something between your product or service and your audience, which will resonate with your offerings and also have a lasting impression in their minds.

Branding helps differentiate

In today’s time, when you can easily find a “me-too” product, it is branding that helps differentiate. And even if you do have a unique or innovative offering, it is through branding that you could gain credibility and respect for your product.

Branding is a process

Once you have gone through the process of choosing the right name for your product. You will want it to be remembered. So branding is the process through which your product communicates with your consumer.

Branding creates an experience

Branding helps create a story around your product or service. Branding is everything that goes around the product. It is the experience your customer has with your product. Branding is what connects with your customers through various touchpoints, even before your customer actually gets to see the product. Branding is what can and needs to appeal to the senses of your customer for them to even notice your product.

Branding is a mind game

Well-thought branding is not just about logos, colors, and packaging. It is more of a strategic decision about the image you want to create. It is positioning your product in your customer’s mind.

Branding is an internal commitment

It is the belief the creators & promoters of the product dearly hold. Working towards a shared vision, you build the brand’s essence and value. With this foundation, the brand’s identity is created. Logos, fonts & colors, tag line, message tone, visuals, and packaging are all a means to personify the brand and give it a distinct personality, style, and a voice of its own.

Branding creates an opportunity

Branding further gives the opportunity of extensions for a new product or even a new product category. Thus the scope of branding is vast, and so are its benefits.

Branding builds loyalty and can be measured

Measures like brand equity and brand value help estimate how much worth a brand is. Brand equity is the premium value a company generates from a product when compared to its generic competitor. While brand value is the financial worth and market value of the brand.

The more powerful your brand stands, the stronger the connection with your audience. Strong branding delivers the values to the customer, getting the latter attracted to your product and service.

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How to Go About Building A Social Media Presence for Your Business

Creating a social media presence does not mean posting every day about anything. Far from it. It would be an impossible task for someone who’s running a shop alone and who has no social media manager. Below are 18 suggestions to help you stay on top of your game:

1. Set your goals

Setting goals is key to achieving any measure of success. However, if these goals are unattainable from the get-go and not time-bound, you are not only setting yourself up for failure but also increase the chances of you giving up on the whole project.

2. Create a Great Profile

You’ll want to complete your profile with all the required information when you first join a social media platform. A complete bio will help in the growth of your social media presence.

3. Choose the Right Networks

From Instagram to Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr, there are a lot of options out there. You’ll want to research those social networks and choose one that’s more appropriate for your target audience.

4. Make Your Presence Known

Once you’ve created our page, it’s important to start let the world know. You can try cross-promotion or try to get traffic to your page through other social channels to increase your number of followers.

5. Your business plan should include your social media pages

Find ways to promote visits to your platforms as this is the best way to grow and maintain your online presence. Whenever you are reassessing your business goals and marketing plan, include a strategy for your social media pages.

6. Have a consistent voice

This is a big one. Although you have to make sure that every post reflects your brand and image, you don’t want to be just a faceless corporation to your followers. That’s why it would be best to avoid having several people responsible for posting. You may even consider hiring a social media management company to do it for you.

7. Stay Active

Because inactive social feeds don’t look good for companies, you need to stay active by prioritizing your pages based on where most of your audience is. You could also try to spend some time each day to answer questions.

8. Create a schedule

Posting regularly will maximize engagement on your page. Not posting consistently and in a timely manner will most definitely affect visibility. That’s why you should try to make use of an editorial calendar to help you in this pursuit.

9. Know your audience

It is impossible to please everyone and if you set out on that path, you might end up alienating potential or already existing customers. Instead, learn to know your audience and create your content around their challenges and what they need or expect from you.

10. Build a relationship with your followers

This point is a continuation of the previous one. You want followers who engage with your content rather than thousands who do not even view your posts. For that to happen, interact with your audience by participating in conversations, addressing complaints and answering questions.

11. Help your followers 

Unless you are an eCommerce, you might want to steer clear of hard-selling your products or services. Instead, help them find a solution to their problems. This will help establish your company as an authority in the specific industry.

12. Automation

While automation does facilitate the management of your page, it most definitely cannot be applied across the board. If you automate customer response, for example, your answers will be generic and come off as insincere. Instead, try to automate other processes such as certain pre-written posts going live on certain days or at certain times.

13. Optimization

Optimization on social media isn’t the same as SEO (search engine optimization). What it means is that you should make use of images, keywords, and links that promote or advertise your services and/or products.

14. Use visuals

Live videos are now getting way more engagement than any other type of content. So, try to include graphics and imagery such as photos of events, quote photos, behind-the-scenes videos to your page. But try to keep it consistent so that you are easily recognizable. 

15. Know what’s trending

From trending hashtags to the latest meme and breaking news, as a brand, you must be able to make use of these in your content. This ensures that your audience naturally gravitates towards your content.

16. Monitor your progress

Using analytics tools to track your progress will help you develop a better strategy for your content because you’ll be able to identify which of your content performs well. Hence, you will no longer be taking a shot in the dark with your content.

17. Create content people actually want to see

Using the previous step, you can now create original content that will help you stand out from the websites out there. This will help foster a longer and more loyal relationship with your clients.

18. Consider paying for certain things

While you can organically bring traffic to your page, constantly changing the algorithm of social networks may sometimes make it more challenging. You should plan a budget for the times you may need to buy advertisements to grow your following.

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