Top Ten Reasons Why Your Book Isn't Selling

Do you believe you are doing everything right, but feel you are still not getting the results you hope for? Marketing a book requires a laser sharp, targeted approach. Listed below are 10 reasons why your book marketing plan may fail.

1. YOU (AND YOUR BOOK) MAY BE INVISIBLE
Recent studies show that an extremely high percentage of buyers state that the Internet is not just a choice - it is instead the ONLY choice. Even those who intend to buy in the 'real' world often do their research on the Internet before venturing out into that real world to purchase products and services.

Buyers must be able to find you. But they will NOT search by your name or your book's title. They will instead search using a very generic phrase like 'children's book' or 'thriller' or 'spy novel'.

Studies show that hardly anyone goes beyond page three of search engine results. So, you must be on one of the first three pages for the GENERIC SEARCH TERM (like 'children's book) that describes your book. Go to a search engine and check this. Type in the generic phrase that describes your book and see if you are on the first three pages of search engine results. If you are not there, you are virtually invisible. If you are invisible, nothing else you do will matter much at all.

2. YOU MAY BE USING THE WRONG APPROACH
Marketing in the Internet environment requires a completely different approach. If you are using methods and strategies proven to work in the real world in the past, these old school strategies will most likely not work much at all in an Internet marketing environment. Even if you are using that old marketing model perfectly, you can still fail miserably in the Internet environment.

The old saying 'Build it and they will come' has been changed to 'Build it and they will likely ignore you'. To achieve sales success, you must have interested traffic, and you must have a lot of it. You must know how to convert that traffic into sales. All the traffic in the world will not matter if it does not convert to sales. Converting traffic to sales is no small task.

3. YOU MIGHT HAVE NEGLECTED YOUR SEO STRATEGY
In the 'old days' (just a few years ago), the strategy was to tell as many people as possible about a product and hope that a percentage of people responded by buying the product (this is called an outbound strategy). But the Internet is search engine driven (requiring a laser sharp INBOUND strategy).

Today the potential buyer begins by typing a generic phrase into a search engine, in essence saying 'Here is what I'm looking for'. Your book site is then indexed by the engines based upon how important it appears to be in regards to the generic phrase entered and in regards to how you stack up against the competition for that generic phrase. This is 180 degrees from the old school, real world model.

Search engines rule this environment. THEY decide who is important and are the equivalent of the traditional Yellow Pages. However you will only be listed in THIS one-of-a-kind gigantic online yellow page directory if you understand and follow the SEO rules given you by the engines. If you don't know and understand the rules, you will be at the end of the listings. And, if you are at the end of the listings, no one is going to find you, as they will likely look at just the first three pages.

Imagine having your business banned from the yellow pages in the real world. Not having a great SEO strategy is the same thing. As far as the searcher – the book buyer - is concerned, you will not exist. This is especially true if the Internet is the only tool the buyer will use.

4. YOU MIGHT NOT BE COMMUNICATING SAYING WHAT YOUR BUYERS WANT TO HEAR
Let us suppose that the buyer does find your website. Now what?

Understandably, many authors like to talk about themselves - but the buyer is not really interested in your history, how you came to write the book, what lead you to write it, how you struggled. They want to know what your book will do for THEM. You must speak to THEIR NEEDS SPECIFICALLY. If you do not do this and do it well, you will have a visitor, but not a buyer.

You must get that desired message to them in under 30 seconds. You must know what THEY really want, and you must provide it more effectively than the competition. If you are not saying what the buyer wants to hear, they will likely never buy your book.

5. YOU MIGHT NOT BE COMMUNICATING A STRONG BRAND
Remember - to the Internet searcher, you are but one of millions. You may look like everyone else. Your book may be 'just another book' to that shopper. What are you telling the visitor that NO ONE ELSE is saying? Without a sharply researched brand, you will appear to be just like everyone else.

6. YOU MIGHT NOT BE POSITIONED PROPERLY
Type the phrase 'children's book' into the Google engine today (May 1, 2011) and you will get over 30,900,000 hits. That is your competition. Every one of those pages is presented to that shopper. Your book is just one of them. You know your book is not like all the rest, but they do not. What have you done to take a strong position in regards to the competition you face?

7. YOU MIGHT NOT BE USING A STRONG CALL TO ACTION
All marketing sites are websites, but not all websites are marketing sites. Your site must be sharp, clean, clear and it must brand you and position you better than the competition. You must provide a logical, step-by-step map for the visitor to follow and you must have compelling calls to action in all the right places. If you do not do this, you will end up with visitors. Remember: a visitor is not a buyer and won't become a buyer without a sharp brand, proper positioning and a strong call to action.

A website is a website is a website. Anyone can build a website. A book marketing website, on the other hand, should be a results-producing machine.

8. YOU MIGHT BE BORING THE BUYER
No, you are not a boring person. But do remember always that the attention span of the searcher is very, very short. There are millions of competitors, just one click away. You have 30 seconds to present the brand, the position and the primary reason why someone should buy YOUR book.

9. YOUR APPROACH MAY BE SELLING, RATHER THAN TELLING
When fishing, no one jumps into the water, jams the hook into the fish's mouth and tries to force it to bite the hook. This is what many selling strategies are like.

If you yell in people's ears, attempting to jam your really great hook in their mouths, don't be surprised when they run away. (Think about how you feel about spam, pop up ads, Twitter-blab and commercials). No one likes to be sold.

Instead, in this environment, you must (much like fishing) offer irresistible bait instead. The fish will then come running, they will tell all their friends and they will bite willingly.

10. YOUR EXPECTATIONS MAY BE SET TOO HIGH
Don't put up a website and believe people will magically just show up. They will not.
Don't put up a website and expect people to buy, (if and when they visit). They will not.
Don't put up a website and believe you are finished. You are not.

In the real world, building a successful business takes years and a great deal of effort. In the Internet environment, building your online store will take just as long - perhaps longer. It will require just as much work to make it succeed - perhaps more. The Internet is not a magic bullet. It is a different style of business. A real world business may have a few competitors just down the street. Your Internet business has millions of competitors, all right next door, just one click away.

In this environment the whole world is your potential buyer base. But this will not matter if you don't learn how marketing really works in this environment. If you are not getting good results, don't complain - instead, get some help.

Looking for some real help? Click here

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Book Marketing - Selling Your Work In An Internet Marketing Environment

If we can believe the numbers, somewhere around 800,000 self published books hit the market last year. Imagine this:

You walk into a library. The library contains over 300 million books.

'Show me everything you have in the way of children's books,' you say to the librarian.

The librarian hands you 38 million index cards.

'Oh, wait a moment,' you exclaim, 'I only have time to look at 20 or 30.'

Now the librarian, whose name happens to be Ms. Searchengine, decides which 20 or 30 of the 38,000,000 cards she believes to be important and hands them to you. The rest simply disappear from your vision. The other 37 million plus books become invisible to you.

This example seems extreme, but the numbers are close to being correct. There are over 300 million sites on the Internet. People, not knowing an author's name or title, will search using a generic phrase such as 'children's book'. Some search engines will return over 38 million hits for such a phrase. And most searchers will only look through the first 20 or 30 search engine results before stopping.

If you are the author of a children's book, this is very close to what you will face when attempting to get some notice for that new book you have slaved over. How does one overcome this mind-numbingly difficult situation?

Niche marketing.

Yes, I know - the very phrase 'niche marketing' has become a cliche. It's been overused. It has never been overdone.

In the past, marketing was primarily a game of numbers. As marketing professionals we came to expect about 1/2 of 1% rate of return. If we sent 1000 postcards bulk mail to a list, we could expect that about 5 people would respond to that mailing (assuming they had shown no prior interest in the subject of the mailing). If we instead used a targeted list (for which people had previously shown an interest in the product being presented), the numbers went up.

Many people panic when they first hear about a rate of return of just 1/2 of 1%. 'Oh,' they say, 'that means I will need to get 1000 visitors to my site to sell just five books! I only get about 20 or 30 visitors a day! It will take forever to be successful."

While on the surface this may seem to be a depressing situation, the inbound nature of Internet marketing actually makes it much easier to enjoy larger conversion percentages. Why is this so?

If an Internet surfer types 'children's book' into the search engine, what are they interested in?

Children's books.

If your site is optimized for that phrase, they will find you - maybe.

This actually means that not some, but rather every person who that author's site is interested in what that author is offering. All of them. Every single one.

However the real key in inbound marketing is to be found by those who are looking for you - to be one of the first 20 or 30 presented by the search engine for that very generic search phrase. They do not yet know the author's name. They do not yet know the title of your book. That is an extremely difficult task for some.

This is precisely why strategic search engine optimization is so important to anyone marketing anything on the Internet. This is especially true for marketing books. Try to imagine what might happen if 800,000 new hardware stores opened in the US every year. Year after year after year. Yet this is what is happening in the field of book marketing. And that is why you will want to get serious about SEO if you intend to market your book in an Internet marketing environment and this is also why you want to learn as much as possible about the search habits of your niche market.

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Social Media Versus Paid Advertising - The Writing On The Wall

In the news yesterday I read about yet another local North Carolina magazine going out of business. 'Changes in the publishing business' was the reason given by the owners. These closings follow the track of larger magazines and newspapers across the country.

Magazines and newspapers are having a tough time these days it seems. Why is this occurring? Frankly it is because magazines and newspapers need ad revenue to survive and, for many, it is just not there at the levels required anymore.

Many blame the Internet for this turn of events. However, it is most likely not the Internet itself that has caused the problem. It is, rather, the fact that people have simply begun to say 'Enough is enough'. The mindset of the modern-day consumer is a far cry from that of the Silent Generation, the Veteran Generation and the Boomer Generation. These folks would sit still for those blatant, yell in the ear tactics. Not so today. Things have changed and they have changed permanently.

As a society, we have advertised ad nauseam. Though it used to work well, advertising no longer works like it used to. A recent study showed that a very high percentage of people who can skip advertising DO skip advertising. Advertising must produce results or it is money wasted. If nobody is listening or watching, it will not produce those results.

People simply do not like ads. Think about this. When you pick up a newspaper, do you prefer to read the ads or the stories? When you watch television, do you jump up to make a sandwich when the show comes on so that you can get back in time for the commercials? TIVO, spam blockers, popup blockers, paid radio - the list goes on and on. The success of commercial skipping technologies is a testament to the simple fact that people dislike advertising. As a marketer, the very last thing you want is to have people fast forwarding past your message. People do not like to read ads, but they do like to read about subjects they find to be interesting. This is why content is king and why publicity works.

This is also why social media marketing is quickly taking the front seat in regards to producing results for business in the Internet marketing environment. There is one form of message that people love more than any other form - hearing from their own friends. That message is read. That message is not ignored. That message can and will produce results.

Social media messages, sent via Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or any social media delivery system, from one person to another, represent the modern-day equivalent of referral marketing, generally considered to be the most effective form of delivery for any marketing message ever devised by mankind. It is always been the most effective, is still the most effective form today and will always be the most effective form of creating awareness for any business.

Magazines, radio, tv and newspapers will never disappear, but they will be forced to develop different operating models and the Internet takes more and more of the revenue share. Those who can manage to incorporate social media marketing into their revenue generation model will survive, while those who do not or cannot most likely will not survive.

Posted by Don at Free Publicity Focus Group

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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

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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

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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

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