Going For It - New Years Book Marketing Resolutions.

Depending on the source you believe, somewhere around 500,000 new books hit the shelves this year.

What does this mean?

* If each book were but an inch thick, and all the books were placed on a single shelf, that shelf would be over 7.8 MILES long. You book is but one of them. This does not take into consideration all the books out there already. That's just this past year.

If you walked into a bookstore and asked for your own title and the clerk pointed and said '7.8 miles down, on the left,' how would you feel?

* Walk outside tonight. Count every star you can see in the sky. Write down the total number of stars you can see, then take that number times a factor of 200,000. The resulting number is the number of sites competing for your potential buyer's attention. This number varies widely depending on the source and nobody knows for certain, but it's somewhere around 400,000,000 sites. That's 400 million. (again there is a lot of argument on this point)

* We must remember that many of the competing books out there have big money and big marketing and publicity machines backing them up, while many of the competing sites have SEO experts at the helm with huge budgets and years of education, knowledge and experience. Such is your competition.

Sadly, authors who initially hoped they would become more famous are more likely simply becoming more invisible.

This year, if you are serious about your book, you should perhaps get really serious about marketing.

Putting up a nice website, writing a blog, twittering and facebooking, doing a book trailer or a press release and the like, while commendable, are not really going to set you apart, as nearly every single one of those 500,000 authors and companies and 400 million owners of those sites are doing this also. Everybody is doing this. So, what will work?

Developing a laser sharp marketing strategy and marketing plan that will set you apart and create real awareness for you and your book will work. If you are but playing at marketing, you must begin to really work at marketing your book. It is perhaps not necessary to work harder. It is always advisable to work smarter.

What does developing a real book marketing strategic plan involve?

* Developing tightly focused buyer profiles
* Formulating laser sharp branding strategies
* Developing traditional and non-traditional publicity strategies
* Writing keyword optimized, profile specific marketing copy
* Developing an effective media strategy
* Developing a keyword strategy specific to your niche profiles
* Implementing a website optimization strategy for the visitor
* Search engine optimization for the search engines
* Developing effective targeted optimized blogging strategies
* Developing effective social media marketing strategies
* Learning to develop inbound marketing strategies with outbound strategies

Some of these are Internet strategies. Over 70% of your potential buyers now consider the Internet to be not just A choice, but THE FIRST choice when making purchasing decisions. And the points above are but starting points. The strategy must be implemented and you must work that strategy every day. You will need to adjust that strategy as market conditions change, new opportunities are presented and ideas once good become not so good.

Nobody writes a book to become a marketer. People write books because they want to be an author.

However, the term 'author' now encompasses the term 'marketer'. If you do not get serious about marketing, you will be an unknown author. Free articles and ebooks regarding marketing are available at the Free Publicity Focus Group article section here. Free video training is also available here. A free, no obligation consultation is available here.

It is the year 2010. The marketing methods used in the past decade will not work well in this environment.

The market is not a thing - the market is an event and it is an event that changes and morphs and moves and becomes something different every single day. You must not only keep up with these changes, you must stay ahead of them or be left in the dust. Owning a business and saying 'I hate marketing,' is like owning a car and saying 'I hate buying gasoline'. People do not actually hate marketing. People actually hate selling. But selling is just a subset, a component of the marketing model.

Are you ready to go for it? Make a resolution in 2010 to get really serious about marketing.

Feel free to contact me at don@freepublicitygroup.com

Leia Mais…

The Single Key That Leads To Internet Marketing Success Or Failure - Part Two

This is Part Two of the series on trust. You might wish to begin by reading Part One found elsewhere on this site.

One of the biggest mistakes businesses make in regards to marketing is attempting to market a product or service to those who do not need that product or service. Playing the numbers is a 1950's mentality approach to marketing that holds little value in today's environment.

In this environment, presenting people with a message that holds no interest at all for them, with no prequalification whatsoever, will not create trust - it most likely will instead destroy any trust they might have previously held in you.

You cannot sell anything to someone who does not want to buy it. Effective marketing today demands that you first qualify your potential buyers before being so bold as to jam their inboxes or mailboxes with your message.

We need only to look at all the commercial skipping technologies available today to see the value in this statement. TIVO, popup blockers, spam filters - the list goes on and on. Over 90% of those who can skip sales messages DO skip sales messages. John Q. Public is slammed with hundreds of unwanted sales messages every day, from all directions, and John Q is simply fed up.

You do not want your business to be lumped in with spammers and purveyors of such vulgar communications. This does nothing to create credibility or trust in the minds of your potential clients. Frankly it creates nothing more than resentment and mistrust.

Trying to force an unwanted or unsolicited sales message on a potential client is like is like trying to force a hook into a fish’s mouth and then expecting it to bite. This will not work. You must instead offer something the fish wants to bite. The fish will only bite when the fish wants to bite.

Spammers are not the only parties guilty of these archaic marketing methods. Inexperienced Internet marketers (established businesses or not) form a large majority of those marketing in this environment. These newbies are especially prone to fishing by force. Remember: it takes but one unsolicited sales message these days to result in your business being quickly blacklisted and sent to the spam box for eternity

True professionals understand the value of opt-in marketing in both the electronic and the real world. Though much more research is required up front, opt-in marketing actually results in less work and less wasted effort and resources than simply throwing a lot of something against the proverbial wall and praying that some of it sticks. Though hurling stuff at the wall may not cause failure immediately, approaching marketing from this perspective creates an ugly downward spiral - a vortex that grows exponentially and constantly demands more and more resources to yield less and less results.

Sending your message to only those who have previously demonstrated an interest in your product or service will always produce far better results. This is day one, Class One, Chapter One in the modern marketing textbook.

It is also the final test in Trust Building 101.

Posted by Don at Free Publicity Focus Group

Leia Mais…

The Single Key That Leads To Internet Marketing Success Or Failure

There is a single factor, unrecognized by many, that can mean the difference between success and failure in Internet marketing. Even if everything is done right, this factor can singlehandedly destroy any business. Conversely, even if everything else is lacking, this factor can still cause a business to succeed.

Surprisingly, as important as this factor may be, it is so basic that most businesses simply fail take it into consideration at all. The failure to consider this when presenting a business to the world could be said to be the very base upon which all success rests. What is this all important component of a successful Internet marketing strategy?

Trust.

People will only buy from a business if they really trust that business.

If people do not trust you, they will never buy anything, regardless of the price asked or the quality of the product. If they do really trust you, they will do business with you even if everything else is not up to par.

Trust is formed as the result of many seemingly unconnected factors. Building trust is an intuitive and perhaps a subconscious process. We often cannot verbalize why we trust a particular business or individual. We cannot say why we do - we only somehow know that we do, or we do not. We know it the minute we walk through the door. On the Internet, we know it the second the web site flashes on to the screen. We never actually decide to trust or not to trust. We instead feel trust.

As buyers we can begin to experience trust as the result of a handshake, in the eye contact – in hundreds of ways. We sense feelings of mistrust in the same way. However, as business owners in an Internet marketing environment, we are not given the opportunity to develop that trust through a firm handshake or a steady gaze. We must instead build trust through words, images, initial impressions and site design.

Intuitive processes are quite hard to define. While our fathers may have trusted banks and presidents, many of us today do not. Is this due to a greater awareness, better communication or media influence? Or is it the result of something else now present that was not present in years past?

The subject of building trust could span an entire book, or perhaps many books. It cannot be given a full treatment in a single article and so I shall attempt to cover the subject over a number of concurrent articles.

That being said, here is one easy takeaway idea. Understand that there are basically two broad categories of businesses. There are takers and there are givers.

Takers take. They take your money. They take your name. They take your email address.

Givers give. They give free advice. Free articles. Free gifts.

If a business is a ‘taker’, people will most likely not trust that business.

If a business is a ‘giver’, people will often trust that business, even if everything else is messed up completely.

If a business is a ‘giver’ but has strings attached to the gift, people will know that business is just a taker trying to appear to be a giver. Don't do this. This old-school tactic is number one on the list of things that can immediately destroy trust.

In the next article I will continue with the subject of trust and how to begin to build it.

Posted by Don at Free Publicity Focus Group

Leia Mais…

Using Social Media As A Marketing Tool

One of the hottest topics in marketing today is the subject of using social media tools for marketing. It appears to be quite difficult for some to get their heads around what this means for businesses that market products and services through the traditional model.

It is often quite difficult to say what social media marketing is. However it is quite easy to say what it is not. Social media marketing is not a 'thing', nor is it an event. Social media marketing is a process. This process is now an integral part of the ever evolving successful marketing model.

All vehicles are more than the sum of the individual parts. Likewise the entire marketing model always becomes something more than the sum of its perceived parts.

Let’s use the analogy of an automobile as an example. To function, all the parts of the car must be in place for the car to function properly. However, once we arrive at our goal, we cannot say that the gas pedal got us to the destination; nor was the engine or the steering wheel responsible for the distance traveled. Instead, all these ‘parts’ worked together as one unit to get us to the destination. Each of these parts is made from the base material known as metal.

Likewise communication encompasses and umbrellas the entire marketing model. Communication cannot be split out from the model as it is an integral component of each and every ‘part’ of the process. Communication could be said to be the base metal of the ‘parts’ of the marketing model - the vehicle – that gets us to our marketing destination.

Like the term social media, social media marketing is a just another buzzword. In fact, social marketing is the oldest form of marketing in existence. It existed before radio, before TV, before newspapers, magazines, billboards, flyers and direct mail. It is merely one person telling another about a product or service. In years past this has been called many names. In the decade just past, it was termed referral marketing. All those in marketing know the value of a qualified referral. A referral is the holy grail of marketing for myriad reasons.

This is why social media, when used as a marketing tool, produces results on a scale and of a quality that no form of old school, intrusive advertising will ever touch. These social media conversations can produce referrals on a massive scale.

Communication is simply one person speaking to other people. That person might be the president of the company, the PR department, customer service or, perhaps more importantly, the customer. The plethora of social media tools out there merely enable conversations between all the people involved – good, bad and ugly.

What does all this mean? Social media tools are another set of ‘parts’ formed from the base metal of communication, which have been added to enhance the overall performance of the vehicle known as the marketing process. Granted, the vehicle will still move and will function without this ‘part’, but those who do not incorporate this into their own marketing vehicle may soon find themselves lagging far behind the rest of the field.

Posted by Don at Free Publicity Focus Group

Leia Mais…

Creating Awareness In A Global Marketing Environment

In the 'old days', creating awareness of a product or service in the marketplace required a simple and very straightforward approach. Most of us just advertised in the media available at the time. These outlets included newspaper, radio, television and magazines. Frankly, it was a no-brainer. We decided on an ad budget, determined the appropriate percentage of the budget to be allocated to a particular vehicle, created and placed the advertising and tracked the results.

All of that has changed.

In this environment, an effective marketing strategy must be concentrated in four distinct, key areas:

Search Engine Presence and Optimization

A very large percentage of the buying public now looks at the Internet as not just a choice, but rather as the first choice when making purchasing decisions.

Traditional Outlets (Newspaper, radio, TV, magazines, etc)

These are still important if the product or service is offered locally versus globally. However, many people will choose the Internet first even when making local purchasing decisions.

Social Sites

Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social sites are also being used by a very large percentage of the buying public. If a business is not there, it runs the risk of being invisible to a large segment of its potential new client base.

The 'Blogosphere'

Bloggers are fast becoming the new media. It is urgent that any business create awareness of products or services here or risk losing those who look to blog reviews and opinions when making purchasing decisions.

It is a much bigger game, and tracking ROI has become very difficult.

In addition business owners must be aware of the shift that has occurred from outbound strategies to inbound strategies. In years past, creating awareness was primarily an outbound strategy. We found potential customers and clients and delivered a message using the tools of the times. This outbound strategy was a 'yell in the client's ear' approach that was based primarily on advertising in the vehicles available at the time. Commercials, billboards, direct mail and like vehicles formed the basis of the marketing toolkit.

In today’s environment, businesses must marry that outbound strategy with a laser sharp inbound strategy. The inbound strategy allows the potential client to easily find the product or service they seek. Search engine optimization and Internet publicity strategies are the primary components of this inbound strategy.

It is a much bigger game and the learning curve is very long. However, though there is much more that must be dealt with in this environment, the ability to take the little mom and pop corner store to the global marketplace brings something to the table that was perhaps not there before.

It is really fun.

Posted by Don at Free Publicity Focus Group

Leia Mais…