About four years ago I listened into a teleseminar promoting book marketing programs. It sounded like the thing to do so I signed up for the $3,000 course and listened in while printing out volumes of worksheets and guides every week.
Finally after week six, the course completed and I began to launch my own book marketing campaign. I was so excited to think I could have all of these people who would obviously want to help me sell my brand new book to their database, just because it is a great book!
Well, did I have a rude awakening waiting for me!
Yes, I had great success in having authors and industry leaders volunteer to be a part of the program, but less than one in ten actually did what they agreed to do. So, even though I conducted an amazing group of sixteen participants, I only sold 212 books.
Not that there is anything wrong with selling 212 books, believe me, I will do that any day I can! Yet, the potential was at least ten times greater than that number.
And what is amazing was every time I talked to a radio producer to get booked on their program, they would check to make sure I hadn’t conducted one of those “Amazon marketing campaigns.”
Fortunately it didn’t look like I had because of what I learned to do, without even knowing what I was doing! Isn’t it funny how sometimes we just stumble into the most perfect thing without knowing that’s what we’re doing?
I had called an author I had met while he was speaking inArizonaand ask if I could interview him. He agreed and then I asked if he would like his followers to be able to listen into the interview at no charge. Again he agreed.
We set up the time and he provided me with about twelve questions I could ask him. He sent his database to a page I had created a week ahead of time and I had about 200 people sign up to listen into the interview. I even allowed them to ask specific questions of the author. I boiled all the questions down into about six additional points of interests and even mentioned a few of the names the questions came from!
In case you missed the magic of this concept, I ended up with 200 more people in my database from the author I interviewed and was able to sell about 20 of my books to them while increasing the size of my database.
Every week I interviewed at least one more author and every week I would add between a hundred and 300 new names to my database. I also sold an average of 100 books each month to people I would never have met otherwise!
Innovation doesn’t always occur out of brilliance, sometimes it simply unfolds.
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