Do your book sales come in spurts? A client complained, "I get so frustrated with my book sales trickling through week after week. The truth is many book authors and publishers experience the ebb and flow of book sales when they first start out. Some never break out of this daunting cycle. They don't experience the flow of good sales for they never learn to grow their sales with consistent marketing.
A mentor friend advised me, "To create daily sales, you must market daily." Here are some easy online marketing tips to include in your marketing plan. Include these, break the ebb and flow cycle for good and start a perpetual boost in book sales:
1. Create a book marketing plan or revise your old one to include Internet Marketing. Your book marketing plan is what I often describe as your map. It describes your book, what you will do after the book is completed and published. It also describes who you hope to sell your book to or your target audience.
2. Develop an easy author's website to jumpstart your Internet Marketing plan. If you don't have one that focuses on your book or you as an individual, create one. Your website is now one of the first places clients will look to find out more about you. The better quality it is, the more it will pre-sell you and your book itself. First impressions are important. Make your website a good one that accurately reflects your book and you as an individual.
3. Write a sales letter for each book you want to sell. Optimize the sales web page for the search engines. One of your highest goals is your prospective book customer types in a keyword most related to your book, your book's web page comes up high in the list and they click through to visit your book's web site. Like a mini-salesman, your sales letter will sell your book 24/7 and make you money even while you sleep.
4. Put valuable free content on your website. Seek to educate your audience. Help them make more money, cut costs or solve their problems. Examples include: online assessments, how to tips, short reports, resource lists, how-to tutorials, dictionary of terms in your field, etc.
5. Create systematic ways to attract traffic to your website. Setup a marketing system that will attract visitors to your website. Write articles that create a link back to your site. Develop a newsletter to stay in regular contact with your prospects and customers. Offer free information to educate, entice and motivate your audience. Include your website url with a special offer to attract visitors systematically.
6. Automate keeping in touch with prospects and clients. Put a subscription form on your website. Make a special offer or free gift to entice your prospects to sign-up. After building a list of prospects, you must follow-up with them on a regular basis to build credibility and relationship. You could create a message and put it on an auto responder. Send a message for every week with an offer for something valuable that will cost your audience little or nothing.
7. Outsource Marketing services. Leverage your time. Use your skills at the highest level; delegate or outsource the task your skills are lowest in. Or if your budget permits, outsource all your periodic mailings, article submissions, telemarketing to set appointments, reminder notes, etc.
So how did your marketing plan rate on a scale of 1-10? Seasoned authors most likely already have their plan in place. Even so, no matter where your experience level is, you can gain a boost in book sales by including: valuable content on your site, a systematic way to drive traffic, automatically keeping in touch with prospects and clients, soliciting existing customer base, outsourcing marketing services, expanding marketing collateral, habitual marketing.
Sound overwhelming? Don't worry. Even starting with 2 or 3 of these tasks will help stabilize your book sales flow. Start now. Put these tips into practice one by one and break the ebb and flow cycle for good. Give your book a perpetual sales boost with consistent marketing. Go ahead. Market daily and prosper daily in book sales.