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Grow Your Captive Audience With Your Own Published Book

Publishing a book can send your reputation soaring faster than you can imagine. Having a book published in your name gives you credibility that can take a long time to develop by other means. Plus, publishing a book can be your platform for attracting and growing a captive audience.

Choose your Audience & Niche

The first thing you must do is determine who your audience is. Then once you’ve conducted research and done your due diligence, make a list of their pain points. Match the pain points with your expertise, so that you can write a book that solves one of their pain points in a way that is understandable to them.

Targeting an audience is imperative if you want to succeed. You must niche down so that you can truly identify exactly who is your audience member and likely reader. Not only that, you need to be able to get into their minds and empathize with their feelings. When you do that, you’ll be able to help them solve their problems better.

Build an Awesome Website

When you know exactly what you’re going to write about, start building your website if you don’t have one already. You don’t need to name it the same as your book. It depends on how you plan to market yourself in the future, too. You might consider having a website with your own name, or the name of your business, and then you can have different pages on that site to sell and / or promote your book.

The best builder to use for your website is self-hosted WordPress. It’s free, but you can and should purchase professional themes and plugins for your site. You can start with a lot of free stuff, but remember that some free things have restrictions on business use, so read everything before you get started. Be sure to build a blog for your website and use it to educate your readers. A blog is great for SEO and great for communicating with your audience. You can find high quality content at trusted private label rights and slightly tweak it and post it to your blog. This will help you establish yourself as an authority for your audience.

Remember to fill your site with content that your audience will enjoy and that adds value to their lives. Use good on and off page SEO rules such as adding alt image tags on images, and giving blog posts compelling keyword-rich titles, and using a plugin like Yoast SEO to help you get that part right. If you’re in the fitness niche, you can grab some premium articles PLR content packs from a reputable PLR directory, and rewrite it in your own words and post to your website. This can save you thousands in copywriting fees.

Write Your Book

Once you identify your audience and learn about the different problems they have, you’ll want to match them to your expertise. When you develop your book,it should solve a major problem that your audience has. This will help enormously, because it’s always easier to sell something to your audience that they already want and need than to convince them that they need something they never even considered.

Writing your book can be done by yourself or you can hire someone to ghostwrite your book and even help you come up with a good outline. Plus, you can hire an editor, someone to format your manuscript based on how you plan to publish, or a contractor for any part of the development. Each way needs different types of formatting and potentially different types of book covers, graphics and images.

Publish Your Book

Once you’ve finished your manuscript, then you’ll need to figure out the different ways you plan to publish your book. You can publish your manuscript in multiple ways. You can publish digitally or you can put it in print. Plus, you can do all this via self-publishing or traditional publishing. Self-publishing is a lot faster, but if you already have a huge following that you know will buy your book in large quantities, and you want to publish traditionally, it won’t hurt to give it a try.

  • PDF / Digital– You can make a PDF book easily using Adobe Pro, Pages (MAC), or MS Word. If the book will be downloaded from your own website and you’ll be handling distribution or using Clickbank.net or JVZOO.com or one of these systems, then you’re in charge of how your book looks and is formatted. The trick here is to make an attractive, readable, organized book with plenty of whitespace and images so that it’s a pleasure to read and it all makes sense. You can also find PLR ebooks that already has good graphics, add your branding and have a product in no time.
  • Kindle – This is also a fast and free way to get published. But, you do have to follow the terms of service and the rules of formatting to ensure that your book looks good. You can turn your edited manuscript over to someone else to format your Kindle book. Pay special attention to how to format images if your book has any.
  • Print – Using Amazon’s Create Space you can self-publish your manuscript. Like Kindle, you’ll need to follow very specific formatting rules to ensure that your book looks good. Or you can turn your finished manuscript over to an expert to help you format it and get it ready for publishing.

No matter how you publish, it’s very important to have a professional cover created for your book. Look at other books to find out the type of things they put inside the book, too. You want your book to look completely professional and for no one to be able to pick it out of the crowd as done by anamateur. You can accomplish that by yourself or you can hire help.

Self-Publishing vs. Traditional Publishing

Let’s talk a moment about self-publishing vs. traditional publishing. There are a lot of misconceptions about both. First, people assume that with traditional publishing you’ll get a ton of help with marketing your book. But, you won’t. This only happens if you’re super famous already. So, put it out of your mind that you won’t have to work as hard if you find a traditional publisher.

Secondly, the idea of growing a captive audience with your own published book doesn’t require that you find a traditional publisher. It will work with self-publishing and it will be many times faster and frankly, a sure thing. If you write good plr articles, self-publishing is going to be a great choice. If you don’t write a great book you wouldn’t be able to publish traditionally anyway.  So remember, a good book is more important than how you publish.

Thirdly, when you self-publish, if you market and promote your book properly after having built up an audience for your book, you’re going to earn more money in the long run. When you publish traditionally, you will usually make less per book. Often, the money is not even made in the sale of the book, but rather in the connections you make due to the book with your audience and others who then buy your other products and services based on how much they trust you.

Promote & Market Your Book

Once you’ve published your book, the most important thing you can do now is to promote and market your book. There are numerous ways to promote and market your book. You should use as many of them as you can, based on what you think your audience will be interested in.

  • Create a Book Trailer–Once your book is finished and ready to publish one of the things you can do is make a book trailer to share with everyone prior to the publish date. If you sell on Amazon, you can pre-sell your book during pre-launch, which is a great time to release your book trailer.  A book trailer is just like a movie trailer. You can use fancy software to make it, but MS PowerPoint will work very well, too. You can take images, and then do a voice over talking about some of the points in the book without giving it all away.
  • Leverage Communities – Any communities that you own and others that consist of your audience can be leveraged to help promote your book. In your own community, such as a Facebook Group you’ve created or an Online Forum on your Membership Site, give hints about the book, and the projects you’re working on. Seed their excitement and even ask them questions to help you get the book just right. In other people’s communities, follow their terms of service. Comment with intelligence and thought and ask leading questions to help spur the conversation so that you can increase the perception of your expertise.
  • Join & Participate in Industry Associations– There are always numerous associations that you can join for your industry. It doesn’t matter if you’re a life coach, a virtual assistant, or an online marketer, you can find a group that will help you stay abreast of the most important aspects of your industry. Hint: Join your audience’s groups, too, so that you can be around them.
  • Seek Out Opportunities to Collaborate–Find industry leaders who aren’t necessarily your competition and then find some way to work together. Make a list of potential partners, follow them, download their plr reports, read their books and promote them if you like them. If you promote them, when they become aware of your products and book they’ll likely return the favor.
  • Host Webinars / Podcasts Based Topics in Your Book — Effective forms of marketing,webinars, and podcasts can do wonders for any business and are a great way to promote your book and your business. Use the book as the lure, teach them something that will help them right now, and then either promote the book or give it away, depending on your goals.
  • Teach a Course–Another great way to market yourself and build up a captive audience is to use your book as the basis of a course. You’ll have your book, but then you’ll also have a lot of other material of the course such as extra checklists, step-by-step help and more. You can even offer one-on-one help if you charge more. All of this, just because you published a book that solves problems and adds value to your audience’s lives.
  • Get on The Speaking Circuit– Another way to market yourself and build a captive audience with your book is to use the book to get your foot in the door of speaking gigs. You can even get paid speaking gigs, which will boost your income exponentially. Usually, the way it works is you speak, and then you’re allowed to promote something either on stage or at a table before and after the event.
  • Be a Guest– There are many people who are looking for people to interview on online radio shows, blogs, online magazines, local TV shows, local magazines and even local newspapers. You can find leads to these types of promotional opportunities by visiting the websites of the places you’d like to be a guest or by signing up to HARO (Help a Reporter Out). This service can provide leads for you to help you promote and be an expert.
  • Build Your Email List–As you’re doing these things simultaneously, hopefully with the help of a VA, you should be focused on building your email list, too.  If you include a CTA with each of the ideas above and a link to sign up for your email list, you’ll start getting more subscribers, and more subscribers always mean more sales if you promote to your list.
  • Host a Book Signing Party– If you choose to have some print books, you can host book signing parties all over the country. Some authors even sell tickets to their book signings due to the interest. The tickets often include the book, a speech or talk, pictures with the author, even snacks, and treats. Try to think outside the box so that you can offer something extra that makes your audience remember.
  • Go to Live Events– Another great way to market your book and build your audience using the book as the hook is to go to live events. Whether as a guest or a speaker you can network with like-minded people who can help promote you or with your audience and make sales and get new customers at the live events.
  • Give It Away –If you have a digital book, consider giving it away free. If you base your offerings on your book in the form of consulting, coaching, similar products and services – giving your book to them can help the get to know you better so that they want to spend more money with you. Plus, it’ll get them on your email list. If you don’t have content to give away, there’s a solution for you and it’s called: free plr articles. Go download some and use them as freebies that you give away to build your loyal list of raving fans.
  • Email Lists – When you get people on your email list, use that to send them valuable information and market to them your other products and services. Plus, you can recommend complementary products and services as an affiliate. The greateryour products and the information you tell your audience about, the more they will trust you.
  • Social Media – You don’t have to use all the social networks. When you know your audience well, you will also know which networks they use the most. Focus on those, and become an expert with them. You can also outsource to a social media marketing company. You can use the amazon store for ideas for content to post on social media to educate your audience and establish yourself as an authority in your niche.
  • Paid Advertising – It’s very important to consider using paid ads. It’s easy to do now with Facebook Ads. The truth is, if you can’t find your audience on Facebook using their targeting methods, then you don’t have an audience. Plus, you can set your budget down to the day and get started with just five bucks.
  • Inside Your Book –Don’t forget to add something in your book in various spots, the front, the middle, and the back at least that functions as a call to action. Give them a link to your website to download free plr ebooks to help them with the book. Get their address in exchange.
  • Blogging – Blogging is a good way to keep the information coming to your audience. Remember that your book is your core system in a nutshell. This book can lead to big things. Put posts about your topic on your blog first, then share it with social networks and promote it. Don’t just promote a blog post one time. Promote it over several times. Encourage comments by asking for them. Encourage buying by having a CTA.

Finally, as soon as you can swing it, get some help. There is no reason to do everything when you don’t have to. You will earn more money when you have help. Try to remember that a CEO of a Million Dollar business has smart people helping them. Hire the smartest and brightest and pay them well and you will reap the rewards.

Examples

Let’s look at a few examples of some of what we’ve been talking about.

  • Book Trailer: Debra Slover from Leadership Garden Legacy created this book trailer to promote her book. You can view it on YouTube. Notice that this is just some images with music behind it. A book trailer doesn’t have to be difficult.
  • Book:The Bacon System: Sizzlin’ Hot Recipes That Grow Your Business Brian Basilico used his book to create a great business building system, which he paired with a podcast to market more. His book, while for sale, is also used as a giveaway during live events he attends and speaks at. The same can be done with make money online plr content if you’re looking to build your list. Giveaways are very powerful for building a list and getting awareness for your brand and business.
  • YouTube: High Carb Hannah or Hannah has several wonderful books. She doesn’t even mention them much in her YouTube channel but she and her husband live solely off their books and YouTube channel, mostly their books.

Get Started Now

Publishing a book might seem difficult. You may even feel super overwhelmed. But this is something you can do. If you can write a blog post, you can write a book, create Digital PLR Products. Just get started with a goal and reach for it one day at a time. Write your book. Publish your book. Promote your book and watch your list increase with a captive audience that can’t get enough. All because of your own published book.