After you learn how to create a sales campaign for your published book, you can use the same strategies for selling your online and offline seminars, workshops and other special events.
By adding audios and videos, testimonials from satisfied customers and other enhancements, you now have your own online marketing machine. Every time you add a new product, service or event, you will be adding another opportunity for increasing your revenues.
Your email subscriber list is your gold.
This data, called your subscriber list, is considered the most important part of an emailing campaign.
Squeeze Pages
A highly targeted list of email subscribers allows you to market your product and service with a fairly high probability of success.
To ease consumer concerns about spam, experienced online businesses create "squeeze pages" that detail what the subscriber will be receiving. They also present the company's privacy standards.
Following is an excellent description of a squeeze page that Pamela Jacobs of Artista Design quoted in her blog, from an article she’d archived:
“Regardless of what you're trying to sell, you really can't sell it without ‘talking’ with your prospective buyer. In attempting to sell anything on the Internet, the sales letter (squeeze page) you send out is when and how you talk to your prospect.
“All winning sales letters (squeeze pages) ‘talk’ to the prospect by creating an image in the mind of the reader. They set ‘the scene’ by appealing to a desire or need; and then they flow smoothly into the ‘visionary’ part of the sales pitch by describing in detail how ‘wonderful’ life will be and, how ‘good’ the prospect is going to feel after the product or service is purchased. This is the ‘body or guts’ of a sales letter (squeeze page).
“Overall, a winning sales letter (squeeze page) follows a time-tested and proven formula:
This is called the ‘AIDA’ formula (Attention, Interest, Desire and Action)--it works.
“Another thing--have customers’ testimonials tucked in--with pictures. I am sure you have seen that as well…
“The ‘inside secret’ is to make your squeeze page/landing page so interesting, and ‘visionary’ with the benefits you're offering to the reader, that they can't resist reading it all the way through. You break up the ‘work’ of reading by using short, punchy sentences, underlining important points you're trying to make, with the use of sub-headlines, indentations and even the use of a second color, and leaving lots of white space around it.
“Once the product is paid for if it is a digital product--eBook or software--it should be instantly downloadable.”
More squeeze page tips
Use a headline, bullets, teaser copy, deadlines, testimonials, scarcity, etc.
Present visitors with multiple incentives in exchange for their contact information.
Keep the content on the squeeze pages to a minimum.
The goal of the page is to obtain the visitor's email address. Additional information could distract the user or cause them to "click-away" to a different website.
Navigation and hyperlinks are almost always absent from typical squeeze pages.
The absence of links is used to focus visitors' attention on one choice: register for the email list or leave the site.
Savvy internet marketers have discovered that convincing a visitor to sign up for an email list provides an opportunity to present that visitor with multiple sales messages over time, develop a relationship, and even cross-sell other related products.
Autoresponders
Squeeze pages are often used in conjunction with an email autoresponder to begin delivering information as soon as the visitor confirms their email address.
The autoresponder may be utilized to send a series of follow-up emails or to provide an immediate download link to get information.
Promising information upon completion of confirming their email address has proven to be an effective method of increasing optins using squeeze pages.
New technology has also led to adding voice or video to squeeze pages in an effort to capture the visitor's attention.
Affiliate Programs
We mentioned affiliate programs briefly in previous articles when talking about joining Amazon.com, alibris.com and other book retailers’ affiliate (often called "associate") programs. This allows you to collect revenues as well as a commission from your book sales when your hyperlink leads to the sales transaction on the retailer’s page.
Reversing the procedure, you can create an affiliate program yourself and offer affiliates a commission for selling your books. Often you can exchange affiliate links with other business owners.
Some home business owners focus solely on selling other people's products. This has proven to be a highly successful home business model.
In my next article, I’ll discuss joint ventures, which is another popular sales campaign technique. I’ll also discuss private or paying membership sites versus free or open ones.
Carol Adler, MFA’s first ghost-written book listing her name as co-editor, Why Am I Still Addicted? A Holistic Approach to Recovery, was endorsed by Deepak Chopra, M.D., and published by McGraw-Hill. Other publications include three novels, four books of poetry, and well over 200 poems in literary journals. She has ghostwritten over 40 non-fiction and fiction works for a number of professionals in the education, health care and human potential industries.
Carol is President of Dandelion Books, LLC of Tempe, Arizona; a full service publishing company. She is also President and CEO of Dandelion Enterprises, Inc., Write to Publish for Profit and President of the International Arts & Media Foundation, a non-profit subsidiary of Dandelion Enterprises, Inc.
Her business experience includes co-ownership of a Palm Beach, FL public relations company and executive management positions in two U.S. rejuvenation and mind/body wellness corporations, for which she founded publishing divisions.
Carol has served as editor of several poetry and literary magazines. Her career experience includes extensive teaching of college-level creative and business writing, and conducting of writing workshops in prisons, libraries, elementary, junior and high schools, and senior citizen centers.
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