Final Engagement Considerations
Episode #10 of the course How to market your book online by John Robin
Welcome to our last day! I hope you’re now well into creating an effective platform and engagement system, so to finish up, I’m going to give you a few final tools to make the most of your platform and engagement strategies.
Blogging Strategies: Why Every Author Should Blog
As we consider engagement beyond social media, I can’t stress enough the importance of blogging. If you’re not sure what to blog about, don’t worry. Your blog is like a journal, and just like social media, over time, your old posts will be buried. Give yourself time to experiment and grow your blogging voice.
Here’s a great article from an author who inspired me to get into blogging on why you should blog and how to get into it.
But the reason to blog isn’t just so you’ll have a blog link on your website and an extra place to share your thoughts.
Blogging opens the door to cross-promotion because you can enter the realm of guest blogging. Reach out to other authors in your genre who also blog and ask if they want to be a guest, and don’t hesitate to ask if you can be a guest too! When their post goes live, their readers will come to check it out and will discover you. When your post goes live on their site, that’s a new extension of your platform, as it will stay up as an open channel for that author’s fans to find you.
Newsletters
Having a newsletter is also a good idea because it allows you to deliver a custom email directly to the inbox of those who sign up. Here’s how you can create and set up a free newsletter using Mailchimp.
Your newsletter sign-up page will be a page on your website. It should have a clear call to action and list the benefits of signing up. Don’t just say “sign up for updates,” tell your readers what specific value they will get. For example, I tend not to blog a lot about my writing so I can point people curious about my writing to my newsletter. When someone signs up for my newsletter, I know it’s because they want to hear specifically about my writing and follow my progress.
Launch Teams
Beyond just sharing with your fans to keep them up to date, you can also leverage your newsletter fans by selecting from them a smaller group of willing participants who will help you spread the word about your writing. You might have 100 fans, but within that group, you will have die-hard fans, perhaps three or four. These are the people who will show up to every event you go to and even wear a shirt with your book cover on it.
Put these people to work by asking them to share on social media or with their friends. You can give them a simple task in every newsletter you send by including share links at the end of every email, especially effective if you put a call-to-action button like, “Share this with your friends.”
I’m barely scratching the surface on what you can do with launch teams, so I recommend you consult today’s recommended book to double down on it.
Wrapping It All Up
Having a blog allows you to cross-promote with other authors, while having a newsletter opens the door to launch teams and fan help with promotion.
Over the last 10 days, you’ve followed the steps to building a solid author marketing plan. Now you’re ready to go. Connect to your readers, one at a time, using a carefully crafted platform and an effective engagement system, and build relationships that, over time, will lead to a fan base that grows out of the momentum.
Good luck!
John
Follow John’s blog for more tips relating to promotion, publishing, editing, and pushing your edge as a writer.
Recommended book
Book Launch Blueprint: The Step-by-Step Guide to a Bestselling Launch by Tim Grahl
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