In march 2008 I visited a friend in Rome and over dinner we were talking about how we’d both had panic attacks and anxiety at various times in our lives. I hadn’t experienced these in years though and as a health professional I’d been thinking about writing a book on anxiety – what it is and what the best treatments are.
You know when you’ve been thinking about doing something, and then you actually decide to do it? Well I can remember that moment clearly – sitting in a restaurant near the Tiber River in Rome, I made the decision to write a book.
When I arrived home from that trip, I ‘white-boarded’ the plan of the book. I wrote down the chapter headings and the sub-headings and then over the next few weeks, whenever I had an idea about the book, I would add it to the white-board. Soon enough, the structure of the book took shape.
The Book: Anxious but Happy
I wrote the book the old-fashioned way. No ghost writers. I take a laptop with me virtually everywhere, and so I made use of all those ’spare’ moments we have in a day. The book was written in coffee shops, between patients, on the bus to and from work and late at night after the kids were in bed (writing a book beats watching TV). I used a virtual assistant to retrieve research articles for me – which made a big difference and saved a lot of time.
With the book finished, I entered a period of extreme busy-ness and found it hard to find time to market the book – so it sat on my desktop for about 6 months (or more). So, given there’s been hardly any marketing, how do you think sales of the book are going? Slow right? Writing a book is one thing, but unless you want to be the only one to read it, you have to market it.
Marketing
So, what am I doing to market my book? I’m implementing 4 major strategies right now:
- Joint venture
- Website
- Advertising
- Press Release
Joint Venture
Joint venture (JV) is one of the quickest ways to build a list and market your product or service. You come to a profit share arrangement with someone who already has a list of people and then they promote your product or service to their database using email, or physical mail. The way I found my JV partners was to contact people in my network who had similar or complementary products.
Website
First, I purchased a domain name and was able to get the name of the book www.anxiousbuthappy.com
Second, I set up hosting and created the website – which included having to write sales copy. Now, I’m no copywriter but I had a go at it. It’s better to have something up there, instead of nothing at all. Of course, I could outsource the copy writing and this is something I’m looking into.
Third, I set up a shopping cart button and installed this on the website so that people could purchase the book. I’m using paypal as my payment gateway because I haven’t gone through the process of setting up my own online merchant account – and paypal works just fine.
The most important issue with websites is whether or not they’ll be found by the people who are looking for the product. For the joint ventures I’m doing, the website will be included in the promotional material (emails). But what about getting the website in front of people who are searching for a book on anxiety? Unless the website is on the first page of Google for a given keyword, I wont be getting much traffic to the site. So, I have to optimize the website (or rather, webpage) to appear high in the Google rankings.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is ‘easy’ when you know how, and ‘complicated’ to keep up with – it is a dynamic field. I’ve been studying SEO in detail for the last 12 months and traveled to the US twice this year to learn basic and advanced strategies from some of the leading experts in the world. So, fortunately for me, I know how to get web pages ranked on Google. If you don’t have this knowledge or skill set, then it’s important to outsource and get someone else to do it for you. The simple fact is, you have to be where people are searching for you. If you can’t be found, you wont sell a thing.
I’m also promoting the book on my personal website, niclucas.com. People who search for me by name will find my website and can navigate to the page I have about ‘books’. In addition, I’ve also written about the book on my personal blog, and this is where most of my sales have been coming from. I want to give you a link to see the blog post I wrote about this book, but I want to show you something about SEO at the same time.
When you create a link to another page, the words you use to make the link are important to Google. So, if I want Google to know that the blog post I’m linking to is about a book on anxiety, then I should use the words ‘book about anxiety’ as the link text. Many people, however, will make a link out of the words ‘click here’ or ‘read more’, which isn’t that useful when you think about it. For instance, why would I want to tell Google that my blog post was about ‘click here’, when I could use the words ‘book about anxiety’ instead.
So, here goes – I’m going to link to my blog post using the words book about anxiety, which tells both you and Google exactly what the blog post is about.
Advertising
By advertising, I’m primarily referring to Google adwords or pay per click marketing. These are the ads that appear on the right hand side or very top of the Google search results page. This type of advertising can be highly targeted if you know what you’re doing – and you only get charged if people actually click on your ad. I haven’t started this campaign yet, but it’s coming.
Press Release
News services scan press release websites to get the latest news. So, if you want to get a message out about a new book it is essential to create a press release. I’ve got a couple of things in the pipeline but the first service I’m using is PRWeb. They’re inexpensive and effective and come highly recommended from people in my network who use it all the time. Of course, there are other press release sites and these can be easily found by searching in Google.
Summary
Many people know that they’ve ‘got a book inside them’. Self publishing is a great option and allows people to ‘get it done and out there’. I’ve briefly touched on some of the internet marketing strategies I’m currently using to promote my book Anxious but Happy. I’m also doing something with Amazon at the moment and I’ll let you know more about that later.
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