One of the best ways to sell more books and get more public speaking gigs is to become an authority in your niche. Easier said than done, right.
I’m not here to tell you it’s easy, but I will tell you that it’s not rocket science. These 5 techniques I describe below, combined with a little confidence, consistency, and patience, are all you need to become one of the go to authorities for your target audience.
The most overlooked form of digital marketing today is without a doubt influencer marketing. If you are like most, you’re currently making a huge mistake by not tapping into this widely underutilized marketing strategy. Surveys show that blogs are the #1 place for influencers to engage with their audience. In addition, blogs influence almost 1/3 of all internet purchasing decisions, beating every single social network including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Pinterest.
Word of mouth is the holy grail of viral marketing because its hard to come by, right? Wrong.
Word of mouth is the easiest form of marketing available. Everyday your prospective customers are talking to each other about brands, products, and services.
The problem is that they aren’t talking about yours. Well today’s your lucky day. I’m going to provide you a surefire shortcut to solve this problem using one simple (yet overlooked) digital marketing technique.
When it comes to a successful word-of-mouth advertising campaign, one of the key ingredients is expertise. If you are not viewed as an expert in what you do, nobody will trust to recommend you to their friends and family. I spent some time talking about expertise as well as 4 other ingredients in a previous post titled 5 warning signs that your word-of-mouth strategy will never go viral.
Let’s be real with each other. The only reason you write a book is so that other people read it. Sure, there are a handful of people in the world who dream of writing a book so it can collect dust on some bookshelf. Those folks are few and far between.
The vast majority of all of us want to write a book that actually becomes noteworthy within our niche.
How well is your word-of-mouth strategy doing these days? How many new customers, unique visitors, retweets, likes, or comments did you get last week as a result of a conversation between two or more people? Did you get more word-of-mouth referrals this month or last month? Will you be able to meet your revenue growth goals using word-of-mouth advertising alone?
Let me take a guess, you have no clue.
So you think word-of-mouth is free? So did I until yesterday. That’s when I came across a tweet that got my brain juices flowing.
The tweet was on the topic of what marketing professionals call earned media. Earned media is more or less pitted as the antithesis to paid media, thus it is often used synonymously with free media.
For those not familiar with this marketing jargon, types of earned media include press coverage and word-of-mouth. Earned media also represents the idea of something going viral. The term paid media typically just means advertising.
As an entrepreneur bootstrapping your business with a small or no advertising budget, you are left with no choice but to depend on word-of-mouth advertising to grow your customer base. For some types of businesses, such as clothing companies and tech gadgets, this serves as an opportunity for them to do something remarkable with their design and/or packaging. For other types of businesses, such as service providers and digital sellers, generating word-of-mouth buzz is a more complex problem to solve.
Alert: This is a post from my Daddy blog series
This weekend was a typical weekend for the Mance family. My boys waking me up at the crack dawn requesting cereal, an hour of Phineas and Ferb on Disney, finger painting at the arts center, then a ride on the birthday party bus. And just like the wheels on the bus, the list of parties to attend goes round and round predictably year after year. What’s not so predictable is what’s going to happen at the establishment that host the 10 to 20 little boys and girls as they devour pizza and cake.
The ability to make something go viral is both an art and a science. On the one hand, the art of going viral is synonymous with luck. While on the other hand, the science of going viral is typically attributed to skill.
When you are bootstrapping your business, you just don’t have the luxury to spend money on advertising that requires luck for success. This is why the vast majority of bootstrapping entrepreneurs default to word-of-mouth advertising as their only strategy to grow virally.
