Best Seller Authors

Book Marketing, Publishing, Author Resources

“They Give You $25” How An Author Got Traffic and Got Paid. It Pays To Read This Post


Refer A Friend using Revolution Money Exchange
I don’t usually go in for networking schemes where you get paid to tell friends to join with a pitch that they will get paid to tell friends.

I’m usually looking for a lot more substance.

But two things are different about RevolutionMoneyExchange.com

  1. I remember getting paid by PayPal to open an account and that worked out well
  2. Best selling author Ben Mack called and told me how he got traffic from this

So I suppose you know by know how I used social marketing tagging and Twitter.com to spread the word. Most of the readers of this post will get here from the networking sites I belong to.

I joined by clicking on the Green Button. In about two minutes I had my $25 credit.

Then I got the code and made this blog post. Why? Because telling you about my blog site is even more valuable to me. I love having a readers comment and tell others about the innovative online marketing we do for authors, and I hope that you will come back after you get your $25 bounty and share your experience.

When you place a comment below, I’ll get a note with your site’s URL and pay a visit. Building the relationship further and hopefully adding some value with my comments.

Together we grow, have more fun.. and this time get paid $25 each in the process

Ben Mack is a brilliant marketing strategist. His best selling book “Think Two Products Ahead” went straight to the top of the best seller list last year when we used a promotion similar to the Green Button. We didn’t have the budget of a bank to pay people to sign up. What we did was assemble thousands of dollars of info-products for readers who bought the book. This resulted in 28,427 new subsribers to Ben’s mailing list, thousands of books sold and many thousands of dollars in new income for Ben’s consulting practice.

These promotions are based on the Law of Reciprocity. In today’s marketing environment, we know that it could take hundreds of millions in advertising to reach the mass audience. People do not want to be interrupted. Instead, we structure the promotion to pay the reader for his attention.

Is there a catch with the $25 Green Button offer? You do have to have an account to put collect the money, and I suppose there is a chance that you’ll not find a way to spend it.

Just like toasters at banks and the sign up bonuses other have used. It’s simple math. If enough people sign up, the new service is valuable. People will send and receive money to each other and their business will prosper.

While you are signing up to collect your $25, think about the promotion and how you could use it to sell books, get more leads, new readers or increased business from your book. I look forward to reading your comment.

What if Electricity Was Free?

Free electricity.

When you think about it, you can imagine a much different world. Would we be fighting over oil? Could we invent a machine that pulls pollution out of the enviroment and changes the climate to wherever it should be?

Atomic energy proponents (before it was ‘nuclear’) assured us that energy would be much cheaper.. and who knows, that may still happen.

But today, I hope you’ll think beyond the energy example and apply what we’ve learned from other commodities. Internet access, long distance phone service, hard drive storage and computing power would are all nearly free if you compare prices to just a few year back.

Best selling author Chris Anderson has a new book on FREE coming out soon. He’s the guy that made the phrase “long tail” popular. You can hear him talk about what’s coming next at this site

In our book marketing and promotion programs, we often give away books.. and even when we sell them for retail prices, a book is an incredable bargain, with most of the profits taken out before the author sees a royaties.

Yet every year, more and more successful people decide to write a book

We do it becuase we have found a model that works. We know that the relationship with the reader will be far more profitable than the few dollars we could make on a book.

Some authors do make royalties from their book, but the most successfull authors who sell a lot of books,make the best seller lists and create an information empire tell me that the royalties are just a drop in the bucket compared to the income they receive because of your status as a best selling author.

How does this apply to your business? Are you prepared to turn you biggest selling product into a giveaway? Can you adapt your marketing to take advantage of the nearly free products coming taking over the world?

I recently talked to an author who gave away 11,312 copies of his book in one year. Many times the readership of the average author. These readers usually paid for shipping and handling, so we aren’t talking about just handing the book out on the street. His result was millions of dollars in increase revenue for his company.

I’d say that was worth it.

We don’t advocate that you start giving away your book. We do advcate looking at the business you are in, the lifetime value of a new procpect. Once you understand the numbers, you will find that each new reader (on average) is worth much more than the retil price of the book to you.

THe arithmatic to determine that value is simple.

Life Time Value = revenue divided by # of readers

And when you know that number,  you’ll know how to budget for marketing and promotion.

 

Does Your Book Get the Attention the Author Deserves?

We live in an attention economy today. There is no doubt about it.. so much information, you’ll never keep up.

For your book to stand out, you need to do something more than YELL THE LOUDEST.. no, yelling usually doesn’t work and is annoying.

The secret is.. we all really want more information. There are readers out there that want what your book offers, if only they knew about you and how the book fulfills their perception of needs and want.

Many author come to us hoping that our blast to millions of readers will click, and in fact, a few million emails sent to opt in readers of other newsletters and blog will get you to the best seller lists. However, the vast majority of reader will not get that day’s email blast.. they don’t subscribe or don’t resonate with the message.

But they do want to read, learn, grow, solve problems or enjoy your book.

So how do you reach them?

Go where they are looking for information. Hundreds of thousands a day are joining social networks, millions are sending text messages (to each other.. please don’t spam us) and having conversations on Twitter.com, Utterz.com and many others.

“But I looked at Twitter and just don’t get it”

Joining a online community is not like buying an ad. You can’t just place a message and hope that the phone rings. (and today, who has time for more phone calls<g>)

Think of these communities like a party. If you go to the event, stand in the corner and wonder why you aren’t invited to dance, you probablly won’t due as well as the people that get involved in the conversations already going on.

Here’s how to get involved quickly and find out if the conversation is right for you…

First off, accept the fact that not every party (social network) will work for you. But you won’t know until  you try.

I’m going to use Twitter.com as an example here because it’s so easy to join, use, and extend through technology. If you have a cell phone, laptop or public terminal handy, you can send a “tweet” (that’s a 140 character or less.. 10 to 15 words) that tells your followers what’s up.

  1. Join the network http://Twitter.com
  2. Find some people to interact with.. Use http://Twitter.com/warrenwhitlock to follow me. All you do is look for that box under my photo that says FOLLOW and click it.
  3. Likely many people in your address book use Twitter.

How Can An Author Find Time To Build A Netork of Authors and Readers Online

By now, you have seen the power of social media marketing for authors to attract new readers, sell your books and build a launch promotion to make you a best seller online

There are many networks you need to join, accounts you need to create and update and then the myriad of relationships to keep track of

How will you get to them all? How can you take advantage of the power of social marketing in a reasonable amount of time.

My friend Adam DesAutels is a powerful networker using the social media sites and Web 2.0. He has been testing a service call Ping.FM and has this review.