By just putting your books onto the market, it won't make you any sales. You must be able to do some marketing strategies to see the sales you want. Let me tell you the answers as to how can content marketing help me sell books?
Today's question has three answers and you're going to want to stick around for the third answer. It is a secret as to how content marketing and why it will rocket your sales on your books.
So let's get into it. The question we're going to answer today is how can content marketing help me sell books? Now, most authors when you first get started, you're familiar that just putting your book onto the market isn't going to sell the book.
You're going to need to do some marketing. We're bringing people in to see the sales page that you have for the book. To help them consider whether or not they wish to purchase the book.
There are a lot of ways of doing this and one of them is using paid ads which I highly would recommend. The other is less common, it is using content marketing. Many authors heard about the success that content marketing can contribute to the sales of your books or any products for that matter.
But you're just not sure what exactly it's all about. What is content marketing and how can it specifically be used to help you? This is what we're going to answer in today's article.
But before we get into that, grab a copy of my absolutely free Self-Publishing Checklist. It will help you make sure that you are not skipping any of the important steps necessary to win self-publishing.
Now, let's get into it. This is a very interesting one because we're going to exactly explore content marketing. Well, the thing is that several years ago, I started trying to sell courses and services without having an audience first.
I tried running ads to courses. I wanted to help as many people as possible with self-publishing. Since I had learned a lot of skills that were necessary to put the books together and get them selling onto the market.
But I didn't completely understand that the marketing of even these services would be something that I would need to do. I was following a very popular Youtuber at the time who started to explore and teach me a lot about content marketing. When we say content marketing, the idea is that we're creating pieces of content on the internet.
It can be like a video, a podcast, or a blog on your website for which you're contributing value that your target customers will be attracted. Now those who aren't interested, for example in self-publishing, they're simply not going to be watching a video that is telling them how to succeed at self-publishing.
But for somebody who's interested in let's say "puppy training" or in fiction like horror novels, then clearly they're going to be interested in reading more content that is along those lines and on those very same subjects. And as they start to hear your voice or read your text, it could draw them in.
So that was the thing that I began to understand when it comes to self-publishing. I started bit by bit creating videos. Sharing everything I know and was learning regarding self-publishing. Resulting in pushing these exact same videos into podcasts and blogs as I do this every day.
Build Up That Skill Set
It makes it possible to reach as many people as possible with this message which is that self-publishing doesn't have to be hard. That it can be very very easy that any author is capable, fully capable of getting their books onto the market and seeing some sales in those books.
That message is repeated in different ways. Teaching the different tactics that are necessary to get that done starts to build an audience. And the result of it is much greater growth in terms of the products and the number of people that I'm able to help.
As a result to just starting with courses for which I don't have an audience. And then we're attempting to do cold-selling courses where nobody really doesn't resonate with what I'm saying.
Maybe it's even the wrong audience, I'm serving it up to the wrong people and I would never even know that. So I'm trying to help you with regards to how to get content marketing up and going. And that would be the case also with regards to books.
So whether we have a topic by talking about that topic and continually giving samples of what exactly we're talking about, giving the full value out there on to the market, simply draws in an audience. In fact, that's one of the reasons you're reading this article right now.
How can content marketing help me sell books? Well, the first thing is you need to start creating content and that's the most important thing. When we first start, the quality of what we're putting out there is going to be a lot lower.
Check out this related article: Self-Publishing Marketing Plan?
And over time, we will build up that skill set. Just like with self-publishing, marketing itself is a skill that has to be learned. We try to make it as easy as possible as well by taking the content that we have and we figure it out.
So think about for a second, what your book is if it's non-fiction then that's the easiest one. Because you can create videos on it. Maybe it's "finance", "cryptocurrency", or maybe
something else.
But one of these topics that you're writing about you're able to help people by creating content where you talk about it. The best way is through video but if you don't feel comfortable with that, maybe the audio with the podcast would be great for you.
Or maybe going with a blog, it is perhaps the most successful of all. Because it brings in Google traffic towards your blog as you continue to put out more and more content. Sometimes, people find by doing a 99-day challenge where you're putting out content for 90 days straight.
And in the beginning, it will be low quality but it will go up with time. You'll slowly find the people who are in your audience and those people will begin to know, like, and trust you. As a result, we're going to see our book sales start to go up.
It is an amazing aspect of doing content marketing. The other thing is you can share your content that you're creating across social media and get people onto your email list. Most people don't understand that email is not dead on the marketing front.
We use our content marketing, it drives people to our blog and other places like that. We get them on our email list so we can continue to help those people.
At the same time when we come out with new books, we're able to push those across to our audience and courses. Or whatever other things that might be associated with your business. We're then able to see those sales start to come in.
The ATM Model
Those people are not having to take a risk because they're already familiar with it. They know you're going to deliver, they've been listening to you. They hear your voice and they've read your writings.
If it's like fiction, maybe you have samples that you're putting out regularly. You're talking about the books you're doing, you're getting into the minds of the readers themselves. Making sure that what your contributing is something that they also will want to read and get more of.
So when your new book comes out, they're going to buy that book. This also is fantastic when needing reviews for your books. You can ask your readers for help with that with an advanced reviewing team that you can set up very easily.
There's a whole series of benefits. But those people will not trust you in the first place if you don't get your voice out onto the market. You're investing a lot of time in doing content marketing.
But in terms of the long-term payoff, you're going to get a much bigger return than you would with your paid ads. The secret answer of the day which is the third answer is that you need to focus on this ATM model.
The first is we need to build an audience that's what the "A" stands for the "T" stands for trust. And how do we do that? Well, the answer is we just keep on putting out content.
Over some time, some people will love you and some people will hate you. This concept of resonance is one that I didn't quite understand when I first got started. It is that for anyone out there the voice that you bring to the market is something that will resonate with other people.
Most likely, a lot of other people, regardless of what voice you have, there are just people who will like it and some people who will hate it. We will draw in the people who like it. And if the content we're giving is good and contributes value, then they'll consider maybe purchasing our books.
They might consider our courses or even coaching if that's something that is of interest. So the final thing is with the content marketing we're putting out evergreen content. Something that will be out there in Google forever or Youtube almost forever.
People will continue be consuming that content including even your very first pieces of content. So this is something that a lot of people make a mistake. They don't understand when they get started that we're not just producing something for a day.
We're producing something that will be giving us value to people 10 years from now. So these are a couple of the key issues that you're going to want to keep in mind when you're first getting started on content marketing. I hope I answered your question, how can content marketing help me sell books?
Have you tried content marketing for your books? If you have, write the word "Yes" below in the comments and if you have not tried at all, write "No" below in the comments.
That will help me know if this is useful information to you and know where you're coming from. Check out my other blogs and videos for more answers to your self-publishing questions.