Selling your books is a great way to build your brand, start an online business, and make money.
For many authors, promotion of their book can be daunting. Many solutions found online can be difficult or expensive. Every day that your book isn’t selling is a loss in revenue. This is especially true for most authors! The frustration builds when you spend a lot of time trying to sell your book without results.
We understand what you’re going through, so we’ve put together a list of 7 effective ways to sell your books online. Read on and let us know how you’re offering your books for sale!
1. Email Marketing
Email is definitely one of the easiest ways to sell products online. The catch is that it requires you have an email list already. This is not a problem for experienced authors and publishing houses. But, it can be a problem for new authors and small businesses. Once you grow your email list, make your life easy and use automated emails to promote your products. We advise you to find someone that has mastered this skill and has the results to prove it to help you with your email campaigns.
2. Content Marketing via Book Summaries
Content marketing is an important, and effective, marketing strategy. The main goal under this strategy is to share relevant, useful content with customers. Book summaries are a type of content marketing. They are useful and flexible to your needs. Your book summary could include a simple sales pitch outlining the book and what they can expect to get. It’s also a great way to boost your Search Engine Optimization. You’ll get more eyes on your books by value summaries that are useful to customers. This improves trust in your work and increases conversion rates.
3. Referral Marketing with Advocates, Ambassadors, and Affiliates
Social media sharing is great and all, but what if you don’t have a large audience? We recommend that you offer incentives to your current customers to become brand advocates for your business. When they refer your book to friends they can send a link to your book summary so they can learn high level information about your book. This can potentially increase sales, grow your audience and encourage customers to share your profile aslo.
A brand ambassador is someone who absolutely loves your product and is willing to rave about it to their network. These don’t have to be social media stars, but they should have a large enough audience to be worth it.
Affiliate marketing is when you offer a commission to brand advocates and ambassadors to sell your books for you. Set up an affiliate program with your most popular products and look for affiliates to sell them. There are even affiliate networks designed to make it easy for you to get in touch with affiliates. The downside is that this method will take a cut from your bottom line, but it’s worth it by getting your products in front of people that have never experienced your products.
4. Write a Press Release
Another great way to spread the message about your product is through press releases. Having a press release published on your behalf raises awareness of your brand, your book(s), and gives you a platform to promote products or services. Placing your press releases on news, radio, TV, and/or on industry-specific blog websites will help you gain a reputation as an authority in your industry. The best way to publish press releases is to simultaneously post a release to your own website and send it to one of the press release publishers.
5. Build a YouTube Channel
One really good reason to have a YouTube channel is to give the audience more content for them to consume. When people get a lot of good content that is solving their problems, they stay longer and like to come back and visit more often. The tricky part is to not make your YouTube channel all about selling a product. Share a video summary about your book instead. You could share how-to videos, leverage product reviews and tell your story. Youtube helps to build a following because video allows you to create a personal connection with its users and you can get as creative as you possibly want to.
6. Advertising
Advertising is the first thing most people think of when it comes to selling online. There’s a good reason for that, it works! With the advent of social media advertising your products or services wherever your customers are has become so much easier. By having the right advertisements, in search engine results, social media feeds, and in the sidebars of websites around the world, you’ll increase your ability to sell your books online. Dial into your target audience, publish ads where that audience is, and take advantage of this interest in your books by giving them direct access to your book summaries.
7. Create with Informational Products
An information product can come in all sorts of formats, but at its heart, a product like this must pass on useful advice to the consumer. Despite the name, people don’t want simple information, they want to learn how to do something to add value to their life or career. In 2021, people crave tips and strategies for making their life better and they want guidance from those that have written books about it. A course, webinar, worksop, or video summary is also a really great tool to help you teach your future prospects how to buy from you and what to look out for when purchasing specific types of services in your industry.
What you need depends on what product or services you’re selling. Regardless of your product, you’ll need some sort of website, and if you’re just getting started in 2021, there are many platforms that allow you to design and build book promotion websites for free.
The great thing about MyEliteMastermind.app is that you can place the direct link to your online store(s) or books all in one place.
If you’re creating an online course, you’ll need a membership site, which is of course another website or portal. Then you’ll need to promote all of this, using a blog, video traffic from Youtube, Vimeo, or ads on social media. You are able to embed these videos or links to your author profile on MyEliteMastermind.app
