The New Rules of Marketing and PR came together around the ideas forming in his head: Success on Web 2.0 is about content, about blogging, and about a great content-driven website.
Platform: As an author, David has successfully created his fantastic author platform covering all 14 steps outlined in this book, including:
Getting reciprocal links on other websites
Giving free info in the form of PDFs
Maintaining his blog
Making videos available on his site
Using social networks
Speaking, and much more
David went on to share another important finding: that his blog posts increased in popularity when he included things beyond his book topic, including links to related posts. In fact, David maintains, “That’s when my sales doubled.” He also placed his insightful articles on Huffington Post, which gained even more visibility for him and his books.
Every day, David said, he thought about how he could sell ten books with these questions in his mind: Where? How? And when? And never stopping. David believes that every single blog post he creates is another opportunity that can (and does) compel ten more people to buy his book.
David was sought after as a paid speaker before his book came out; he shared in our interview that later, when his book was out, he asked people to buy the book rather than taking a speaking fee. David continues to speak and teach seminars on marketing, and he constantly keeps his eye on how he can find opportunities to sell more copies of his books through these venues.
David’s advice to authors: Have a vision/idea and articulate it; talk about things related to what you do, not just the book itself; and, most importantly, get out there and don’t stop promoting!
David Meerman Scott’s final word on author platform building: Now anybody can earn attention by publishing their way, using the tools of social media such as blogs, podcasts, online news releases, online video, viral marketing, and online media.
Blog to Build Your Readership Community
“A blog is only as interesting as the interest shown in others.”
—Lee Odden, author of Optimize: How to Attract and Engage More Customers by Integrating SEO, Social Media, and Content Marketing
IT WAS IN 2006 that we really began to feel the change in the publishing industry brought on by individual empowerment in the digital age. First the music business radically changed, starting with music downloads; and then the movie industry, starting with streaming video; and then publishing, starting with ebooks. Global business was shifting on its axis. It was in 2006 that Time magazine awarded the Person of the Year Award to “YOU” instead of to a single person as in the past. Lev Grossman’s article in Time on December 25, 2006, said, “The new Web is a very different thing. It’s a tool for bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making them matter…. Silicon Valley consultants call it Web 2.0, as if it were a new version of some old software. But it’s really a revolution.”
The world has become sufficiently tech-connected to enable us to interact, collaborate with, and create a community around our interest with a global crowd. Marketing specialists consistently encourage bloggers to rise above this noise level, but what a discouraging concept! Imagine moving into the midst of a huge crowd and being told you must rise above it. How can you create a blog with sufficient pull among the 156 million+ blogs published on the web today?
Tumblr has more than 101.7 million blogs with 44.6 billion blog posts
WordPress.com has more than 63 million blogs
LiveJournal reports having 62.6 million blogs
Weebly states it has more than 12 million blogs
Blogster has more than 582,754 blogs
Since the rise of blogging in the late 1990s, bloggers have discovered time and again that certain elements enable their blogs to successfully stand out from the crowd, and we share those elements with you here. This chapter shows how to draw your audience into your specialization in your genre, your unique value, and your subject matter expertise through blogging and outlines efficient strategies and best practices that will get you to your online community quickly and efficiently.
Your Blog Is About More Than Content
A blog is by definition a web log or web journal, but it’s much more than that. A blog is your own instant publishing platform; your blog entries accumulate to form a body of journalism. When you attract and form an online community, they begin to interact with you and each other, which grows your book audience. Use blogging wisely to publish well, and you will find an audience ready and waiting for your book.
Your blog is your self-published online magazine, where you are the editor, writer, and publisher. Your blog’s built-in powerful tool is comment-enabled social networking. Your blog showcases you, displaying your subject matter expertise, personal interests, and thoughts behind the scenes of your book(s). And here’s the most powerful part: Once your blog readership numbers increase, it begins to exert an invisible pull of its own that attracts those who you didn’t contact or expect to contact, but who are out there searching for you and the help, advice, and value add that you offer. The more effort you put into your blog up front, the stronger your blog’s momentum will be and the less effort you’ll have to put into it later on.
Your blog’s drawing power contributes not only to your book’s success but also to your overall success as an author. Authors can’t see their whole readership, but they need to remember that a good-sized segment of the audience reading an online web journal includes media talent scouts in search of content, speakers, and more.
To mobilize the crowded web to work for you and to increase your book audience, first and foremost, direct your blog to the interests of your readers. Once readers see their needs and interests met, they feel a connection and take interest in you and then the best possible next step takes place: sharing this interest with their friends. This expands your readers’ networks to add to your own. In addition, as journalists, radio and television talent scouts, literary agents, and publishing editors all hunt for subject matter experts with a large audience, we add our networks to yours. Start tapping into the networks of each individual who finds and likes your blog. What grows your blogging audience is not so much a special cleverness, an ability to sell yourself, or having special marketing tricks; it’s how you maximize connections with others, showing authenticity, sincerely caring for and responding to your audience, and delivering to their needs.
At our literary agency, we scour the web daily to find authors who are subject matter experts and have a large following. Is that you? Can we find you? The same questions apply to fiction authors: if you are not findable, you will not be contacted by media scouts. As agents, we’re hit with
