To sell anything you need to build visibility with your target audience. There’s a great quote in the marketing world that is attributed to John Wanamaker, the founder of Wanamaker’s department store in Philadelphia back in the 1860s.
“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”
Well, in the 2020s we can pretty much measure every ad dollar spent via digital marketing and analytics. That’s a great thing IF you are an expert on social media, know how to build the funnels, track the analytics and spend days trialling and testing your ads as well as tens of thousands of dollars. I should know.
Over 20 years I’ve spend thousands on programs, courses and ad campaigns as I wanted to learn how it all worked…until I realised that I didn’t. At best I was an average student, at worst I blew lots of money and time trying and quite frankly, there are experts at doing this I should have paid IF I wanted to go down the advertising route.
What I have learned is that for business book authors going narrow and developing organic content, rather than wide is a way better strategy to build visibility for your book (and you) and that you don’t need to spend thousands on advertising on the big platforms to do this.
For most self publishing business book writers marketing their book – what I call creating visibility – is almost more challenging than writing their book. With writing their book they know their subject matter inside out, with marketing, most are starting with no experience in digital ad campaigns and a limited budget. So what’s the solution?
Here are my top 5 ways to build visibility for your book over time WITHOUT paying for ads. But before you look through these you need to make this commitment.
Commit to putting a planned, consistent effort into marketing your book for at least 12 months. Just like in the movies, there’s no such thing as an overnight success. Having a book launch is NOT a marketing plan. Sure it’s great to celebrate the completion of your book but it’s a one off event and won’t build sustainable visibility for your book on its own.
1. Build a database of ALL of your key contacts
Pretty much everyone has a database, you just might not know it. For starters, you no doubt have hundreds of people in your phone contacts. Granted a fair few of these might be family and friends, but there will be hundreds who are business contacts. Then, go and have a look at your emails – again hundreds if not thousands of contacts. Add these to your LinkedIn connections, Facebook friends, Insta followers and I am pretty sure you’ll have at least a couple of hundred if not thousands you can start building your database from.
Any why am I building a database you ask?
Because you can OWN that database and you can build visibility and a relationship with these people focused around your book/business.
The word ‘database’ might scare you off but at its simplist it’s a four-column Excel spreadsheet with the following information: first name, last name, email, phone number (the last one is not necessary but if you have it pop it in). From this you can then create a wide range of engagements to build visibility – email campaigns, a newsletter, special offers etc. Sure compiling this is a bit boring and takes a bit of time, but if you start early and work on it consistently it will build over time.
2. Revise your LinkedIn profile (and if you don’t have one, create one)
Most business people and consultants have a LinkedIn profile…if you don’t create one. But when was the last time you looked at your profile and updated it, including your book in your position description, background banner, About section, Publications section?
IF LinkedIn is a key audience group for you, you’re missing out on a significant opportunity to build visibility by not updating your profile.
This is one of the first things we look at for our clients. Done right (with the right keywords and phrases) this will build visibility on its own.
Followed up by a consistent plan of posting, writing articles and engaging on others’ posts you can build visibility on LinkedIn to your target audiences over time. Like many other aspects of building visibility, LinkedIn will only work if you are consistent with posting and engagement over time.
If you are a newbie to LinkedIn I suggest you follow Lynnaire Johnston the Founder of Linkability (who worked with us on her book Linkability).
3. Start building a book community as you’re finishing your final draft
This is usually 4-5 months BEFORE your book launch. Why do this? Because we all hate that person we haven’t heard from or seen on any of our feeds for ages until they send out messages and post saying ‘Buy my book’.
Just what is your book community? Well, it’s made up of people you know in your area of expertise, people you would like to know/meet, former, current and potential clients, media, industry and professional associations and networks and more.
Will it require you to get out and about and create new connections? Absolutely. That’s building visibility. Your book won’t sell itself, that’s your job.
The key thing here is to deeply understand who is your target audience and where they are currently engaging, that’s where you need to building relationships and networks so that your book can be visible to these key people and readers where they are.
4. Learn how to ‘do’ video better and if you don’t ‘do’ video start
In these days of scams, deep fakes, AI-generated rubbish content, it’s the human – you – that will cut through all this, not the perfectly manufactured deep fake.
We humans are looking for genuine humans to connect to and with. This is our need and our very super power, and the best way to that is through ‘real’ video.
I know it’s scary, but you just have to start and you’ll get better at it (and stop being so critical of yourself). I remember early on I did a series of videos with a friend holding my phone and taking them. I thought they were great until I realised my glasses were crooked. I decided to run them anyway… and no one, not one person, made any comment about my glasses.
More recently I decided that I needed to up my game on my video skills so I am in the middle of an 8-week video program. It’s fantastic and has changed the way I approach every aspect of my video work. I can recommend Mo MacRae’s program Video Mastery (note that I do not receive a referral fee for this recommendation).
So, where-ever you are with your video skills you can improve.
5. Engage the media
This is perhaps the most scary but most powerful way to create and maintain visibility for your book, and the most daunting.
When I mention media, most people thing about prime time television or the mainstream city newspapers. Sure, these are terrific media for one-off exposure, but there’s so much more to media than this.
As I mentioned in point 3, if you are clear on your target audience you can and should identify the key media linked to that audience. Who is Podcasting on your area/topic, what industry magazines (print and online) are available to secure an interview and/or book review with? What events and conferences are happening in your area over the next 12 months? Which companies can you identify (or may have even consulted with) that have newsletters, updates that they send to their employees? All these options and more are ‘media’ opportunities.
And, it’s important to have a 12-18 month plan to engage all the media available to you. There’s no point wasting it all on your book launch. Most media won’t run your book/story a second time, so pace your media engagement based on your availability (let’s face it you probably have a day job).
The other important part to media visibility is to understand that your book is not ‘news’. I mean its highly exciting and relevant to you, but media outlets are looking for stories and books that are relevant to the news cycle and their readership.
Whenever you pitch to any media, take the time to personalise your approach AND create a hook around a recent news item or opinion piece that the journalist has presented or written. YES you have to make the time to follow the journalists and editors of the media outlets you want to engage.
There’s a lot in these 5 points and you might be overwhelmed just reading them. The way to deal with this is to create a 12-18 month marketing plan that incorporates a content marketing component that you can manage. Alternatively, pay someone to create and manage this for you so you can concentrate on those elements of creating and building visibility, that only you can do.
We offer three book marketing packages and have built up a terrific network of specialists that cover all aspects of business book self publishing and marketing, and there’s not a paid ad campaign in sight.
I’d like to leave you with this thought.
Gaining visibility for your business book is not about pushing out more content using AI. It’s about creating and sharing good quality content that helps people with the problems and challenges that they have in their lives, and connecting meaningfully with people in the process.