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.
Don McCauley is a marketing strategist with over 30 years of experience. He helps individuals, small businesses and professionals create low cost publicity and marketing campaigns to increase sales. He demonstrates how anyone can develop a massive marketing and publicity campaign for little or no money by utilizing cutting edge strategic marketing and publicity resources. The goal is always to produce bottom line results
Don serves as facilitator of the Free Publicity Focus Group. He is an author and currently writes for regional and national print and electronic publications. He serves as host of The Authors Show radio program, a production of eBroadcastMedia.com. He is an Inbound Marketing Certified Professional and is Web CEO University Certified. He is co-founder of Book Marketing - The Authors Marketing Powerhouse.
Prior to establishing his marketing and publicity consulting business, Don spent many years as a marketing manager and trainer for several large US corporations. He has also personally built three highly successful service businesses from scratch across three different industries.
He spent 8 years as marketing director of a regional corporation. During this time he was responsible for developing, implementing and managing marketing and publicity campaigns.
After a period of time serving as Director of Sales for a regional newspaper, he eventually moved on to start a highly successful regional magazine, serving as editor.
It was here, during his time in print media, that he began to realize the enormous potential for building publicity and marketing campaigns using free publicity resources in both traditional and electronic media.
Based on this he started the Free Publicity Focus Group. He brings a unique perspective to any situation, as he has sat on both sides of the table. He now shares his successful, real world experience, his strategies for gaining free publicity and his methods for building campaigns for little or no money with hundreds of companies and individual clients.
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