1. Identify Your Target Audience
You need to think about the best way to market your ebook. In order to do this, you have to identify who you are marketing it to.
This is known as identifying your target audience. It is important to focus your marketing efforts on a group that will actually convert into sales. Focusing on a specific target audience will allow you to create a strategy that works best for them and your ebook.
Trying to reach everyone is unfortunately a losing game.
2. Connect With The Reader
This is the first step in creating an effective marketing strategy for your book. Telling your readers how they will benefit from reading your book is the most powerful way to encourage them to buy it.
The most effective way to find out what your audience wants is to list the benefits they will experience when reading your book. Focus on what people stand to gain from buying and reading your book. That way, you can create a list of features that support these benefits.
3. Be Specific
Specificity is the key! You may want to put your book into a general category but you should probably not. Target its distribution to people who you think will be genuinely interested in the topic of your book. They are more likely to leave reviews.
We also added the Top 10 competitive kindle categories on Amazon for you.
4. Do Not Forget About The Funnel
Conversion funnels are used to show the process of converting potential customers into paying customers.
You should focus your marketing strategy on guiding the customer through the purchase funnel. This will help to increase sales and revenue as well as decrease costs by having a more targeted approach to advertising.
5. Create a Blog
We are assuming that you already have a website, if you don’t have it by now, just start one. We already picked the 8 best website builders for you!
After you are done with your website, make sure your site has a blog on it. By creating a blog, you not only get a chance to display your writing skills, but also engage with potential readers and drive traffic to your landing page.
6. Build The Most Amazing Landing Page
A landing page is a page on your website that aims to convert visitors into leads. Therefore, the landing page is VERY important.
You should have a bomb landing page to have people click the link you shared. Otherwise, they will bounce right off it.
Basically, a landing page works like this:
- A visitor is presented with a call-to-action and clicks the button.
- They end up on a landing page with a form.
- They fill out the form, which is the desired action (converting them into a lead).
You need to research your prospective customers’ pain points, invest your time in your research since you don’t want them to bounce right off the page. You need an engaging landing page that will capture their attention.
In order to get a good conversion rate from your landing page, you need to make sure your landing page is well optimized.
- Make sure to indicate whether your eBook is free or paid. If it’s free, make sure you have a landing page linked to your payment gateway.
- You can also add the overview of your eBook by adding the chapter summaries, names , and etc.
You are not sure about how to do all of these? Use Popupsmart popup builder’s easy guide to build a landing page even if you have no technical skills.
Videos are also an important part of your marketing strategy. The below image shows % of people who believed video to be an important part of their marketing strategy. Now, as we enter 2021, that number has increased to 93%.
7. Promote It Locally First
You created a website and a landing page. Perfect! Now, before promoting an e-book, make sure to optimize your very own website first. , How? Here are some tips for you:
- Add a popup e-book ad for collecting email addresses.
It can either be a popup to get prospective customers’ email addresses, or you can offer them pre-launch offers.
You can put that popup to your top-performing page or post on your website. Do not add it where it may be irrelevant to the context. You can use your blog posts to add these popups.
- Ask for their opinion
You may want to engage your audience before launching your e-book. By asking for their input about your book characters if it’s fiction. (Offering them a choice of their abilities, outfit choices, etc.)
- Add a popup to offer incentives
- You can also offer discount codes for your eBook, or your next publication.
8. Pre-Launch Promotions
Pre-launch marketing is a great way to excite your prospective customers by sharing sneak peeks of your e-book. You can even show them the production phase of your eBook to increase the hype.
You already created the landing page, you can use that same page for your pre-launch activities too. Include mockups, list all the benefits and perks of buying your e-book beforehand.
Adding popups for gathering emails can also be used for pre-launch activities. It is the most effective way to keep in touch with your future buyers! You can also make people interested in your e-book before its launch.
You can gather email addresses by offering them to choose the book cover they prefer by using a pop-up. You would simply add a voting contest in the email and which cover got the highest vote will be your cover.
9. Supportive Content
You have your website, your landing page, and your blog. Now you have plenty of chances to promote your e-book by adding content to your blog which supports your book cause.
For instance, your e-book is about global warming and gives tips on how to act for your planet. You can write a blog post about the causes and effects of climate change.!
Ideally, you should write 2-3 blog posts related to the topic of your e-book. You can write these posts before or after you publish your book; it doesn’t matter. You can do both!
The gist is that once you have these posts published on your website/blog, they will be indexed by search engine spiders and will help establish you as an authority in the niche. Consequently, you will gain the trust of your readers.
You also want to make sure that you follow SEO actions.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) refers to actions that are used to make websites and their content appear in organic search engine rankings. How?
You can try keyword optimization to increase your website traffic. You can use online tools such as Semrush for choosing keywords, or you can simply go into Google Keyword Planner and follow the instructions.
This way, you will get more traffic to your website/blog. Even if the visitors are not directly clicking on your landing page, you will expose them to your supporting content.
10. Use The Power of Social Media
Social media is a powerful tool for any business. This technology allows you to connect with your customers on a more personal level.
It’s important to make yourself visible on social media and build credibility and trust with your prospective customers. Readers can contact you directly if they have questions or complaints about your e-book.
The main advantage of using social media is that it can be used 24/7, since Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites are available on any device at any time.
You can use social teasers. Social teasers should be used to generate awareness and interest in the book, as well as to provide an incentive for people to purchase it.
*The first social teaser you created can be used for the announcement of your upcoming book launch date and time.
- Remember, people won’t be too happy if they feel your posts/replies are spammy. In September of 2011, Twitter changed its policy to prevent people from sending out identical messages to multiple followers at once.
This was because most users felt that these tweets were annoying and similar to spam. Therefore, be careful while promoting your e-book.
‘Go and check out my new e-book!’ kind of messages are not the best type of engagement method for your visitors. Especially if you post them multiple times a day.
Promote Your E-Book on Facebook
- Link your landing page to your Facebook posts.
- Create an author page.
- Post about giveaways, sales, upcoming books.
- Promote your eBook using Facebook ads.
Promote Your E-Book on Twitter
- Search the relevant keywords of your e-book on Twitter to find out who is tweeting about them. If they’re interested in what you have to say, reach out to them via email.
- Tweets with images get 18 percent more clicks than tweets with just text, so be sure to include an image when possible.
Promote Your E-Book on Instagram
Instagram is a great platform for promoting your book. Using this app allows you to connect with other Instagram users who enjoy reading and create a community around your book.
- Add a call to action in your bio directing to your landing page.
- Post some of your favorite quotes and snapshots from the book.
- Create an Instagram Business Page.
- Post regularly.
- Interact with your target audience.
11. Email Marketing
Email marketing has been a standard in B2B and B2C industries. But with the success of social media and other digital channels, many marketers think that email marketing is dead.
According to a McKinsey & Co study, email marketing is still 40 times more effective at reaching your target consumer, than Twitter or Facebook.
It revealed that email marketing is still the most preferred method of communication among consumers despite the popularity of other forms.
- Use bullet points to make the content easier to read.
- Include a subject line that is attention-grabbing and informative.
- Be sure to have a call to action.
- Give away the first few chapters of a book. It’s called a lead magnet. You can create an email nurture sequence with these free pages as bait to get people interested in your book and willing to pay for the rest.
Extra Tips For Promoting Your E-Book:
- It should not be too long. People rarely read for extended amounts of time on the screen of a digital device. One reason for this is that they are more likely to go for shorter eBooks.
- It should not be too expensive. E-books should be reasonably priced in order to be competitive.
