A key component to all of my publishing and marketing strategies is a high-performing, search-engine-optimized website to serve as a hub for your marketing efforts.
A website is also a great way to share stories, multimedia productions, and special offers.
I will create a website for you, optimized for what you are doing.
For Authors
Here is what an Author Website can do for writers:
Provide information about you and your books.
Offer your books and related products for sale.
Get invitations to speak on podcasts and stages.
Publish excerpts to attract people to you and your books.
For Speakers
A Speaker Website is designed to get speaking gigs for you.
Most will like an Author Website plus the following elements:
Speaker Sizzle Reel.
Key Speaker Topics.
Speaker Booking Forms.
For Storytellers
A website is a great platform for sharing personal, family, and business stories.
For Artists
One of the first websites I created in the 1990’s was the Shared Visions Gallery, which let me to create websites for artists and galleries.
Here are the key parts of an Artist Website:
You artist bio.
Beautiful presentations of your art.
Lists of galleries where your art can be seen.
Ways to buy your art.
Attract invitations to exhibit to exhibit your art.
Invitations to do commissions.
Special Offer
Here is my special offer to create a branded website designed for what you want to accomplish with the site.
Here is the process:
We meet to discuss your goals.
I register a domain and create a WordPress website branded to match your style and goals.
I register the website with Google Search Console to get your site found in searches,
My Golden Publishing Sales Machine encourages authors to create an online course or digital experience edition along with a print book. This post explains the benefits of the multimedia approach to publishing your book.
It will also work the other way for coaches with a coaching practice, online courses, or a membership program.
A print book plus a Digital Experience Edition can vastly expand your audience and lead people to your high-level offers.
What a Print Book Can Do For You
Here are some of the benefits of publishing a book:
Share your special gifts and knowledge with an infinite number of people.
Establish your authority and influence.
Can open doors as a speaker and expert.
Generate sales income.
The process of writing and creation can be rewarding in itself.
What is a Digital Experience Edition?
I use Kartra Memberships to create a Digital Experience Edition of books. The platform provides a secure multimedia portal that can include the book’s content, audio, video, images, exercises, downloads, and more. Other course platforms would work.
Benefits include:
The multimedia enhances the content of the book.
The Digital Experience Edition can grow and be edited as a living product.
You can use the Digital Experience Edition to get feedback that can make the print book better.
Readers get instant access while waiting for the printed book.
Why Publish a Print Book AND a Digital Experience Edition
Serve the audience with rich content.
Give instant access to the content.
Get feedback during final editing stages to create a better book for your audience.
Make sales early.
Make direct sales. You can receive the money immediately and use author pricing to send the print book from Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing.
Collaboration and Validation
You can include your audience in the refinement process by having them access a presale version of the Digital Experience Edition. That will validate that your content is of value to your tribe, and the printed book will be better for the feedback.
Presale and Marketing Strategy
As soon as you have a working title for your book, you can create a landing page with an opt-in form for people to receive launch notices.
With a presale and access to an early version of the book in a Digital Experience Edition, you can start marketing and making sales very early in the development process. You can also ask for feedback through comments within the portal.
You can also grant free access to anyone you want to review the content and provide editing suggestions.
The main reason to do this is to create a buzz about your book launch and build your list.
Posting and Publicity Strategy
Once you have a landing page that at least collects contact information from interested people, you can use the chapter content to drive traffic to the landing page.
Here are some places to promote:
Blog Posts
Social Media Posts
YouTube Clips
Broadcasts and Podcasts
Interviews
Press Releases
…
Publishing Sales Machine
My Publishing Sales Machine combines book and multimedia publishing with marketing at an affordable rate.
The Kartra All-In-One business platform combined with WordPress sites hosted on the Cloudways cloud hosting program.
This article explains why I use this combination for many of our publishing and marketing clients and why you would consider these platforms for your projects.
What Kartra Brings to the Table
I was part of the Kartra Beta Test program and customer since 2018.
It was good from the start and keeps getting better.
Similar programs that I have looked at include ClickFunnels, Keap (InfusionSoft), New Zenler, SamCart, Kajabi, and others. Each has its strengths, though my clients who try them usually come back to Kartra.
I can help clients who use other platforms, though I will always recommend Kartra first. I am likely one of the top Kartra experts in the world and call myself The Kartra Whisperer.
While Kartra is relatively easy to manage for individual steps, it is like a cargo container load of Lego parts that can be combined in many ways.
Kartra also has a rich set of design options for a tremendous range of branding possibilities.
Typical Uses For Kartra
Here are the things I use Kartra for:
Sales Pages. A simple sales page with some text, image, video or audio, and a buy button is all that is needed for things like concert tickets, theatre tickets, or goods and services people want.
Payments. I joke that ‘Kartra’ is an exotic Asian goddess of commerce. There are tons of options for flexible and creative payment options and also self-management for your clients.
Funnel Campaigns. The simplest funnel is a landing page with an opt-in form, thank-you page that subscribes the person to one or more email.
Marketing Automation. Kartra can chain together a lot of things to happen automatically to generate sales, including evergreen webinars.
Email Marketing. Send broadcasts or sequences to people selected by lists, tags, or behaviours.
Video and Other Media. Video, audio, images, and files can be used in Kartra assets or shared on their own.
Membership Sites. One of the reasons I chose Kartra in the first place was to host courses and memberships in a multimedia portal that can contain almost anything and connect with other Kartra tools. This is the Digital Experience Edition included with my Golden Publishing Sales Machine.
Calendar. Kartra provides a good and very sophisticated Calendar system.
Quizzes and Surveys. The quiz and survey tool took years to release and was worth the wait. Good for marketing and courses.
Integrations. Kartra has native implementations for many services like payment processors, SMS, Google Calendar, and more. It also integrates with Zapier, which can connect Kartra to almost anything.
Affiliate Program. Much of marketing success is based on referrals and affiliate promotions.
Kartra provides embed codes to use on websites and other places for flexibility.
I am a prolific writer and something of a Zen Master for getting things in searches.
WordPress is by far the best platform for writing and blogging a lot of content.
Also easy to have the clients and team members collaborate on creating and publishing content.
While WordPress can integrate almost anything through plugins and use different themes for different looks, I stick to the fast and attractive Hemingway theme with a lot of emphasis on blogging.
Most of the many hosting platforms I have used in the past were good until they were not anymore. And many were slow and expensive.
Cloudways allows me to register a name in Namecheap and have a fast, secure, and managed WordPress website up in a few hours.
I have not needed to call customer support yet.
As an Agency, Cloadways allows me to add new sites for little more than the cost of registering the domain.
Namecheap has enough options for domain management and email formatting to provide the necessary services.
I am only hosting WordPress sites on Cloudways at the moment. The platform also supports:
WordPress provides the fastest and easiest way to get an online presence with fabulous support for blogging and Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
Embedding landing pages and other Kartra assets on the WordPress website takes advantage of all Kartra has to offer from the client’s Kartra account or from my Kartra account.
Over the years people have asked me to help them sell a lot of different things, in concerts, theatre productions, products, services, books, courses, memberships, and events.
I have acquired many skills, strategies, and tools for promotions and sales and combine them for your benefit.
I will explore some of the many elements and strategies for success.
By the way, I am available to review where you at and make recommendations.
I can also help you implement everything suggested in this article.
What I mean by this is you need to offer something that people want in a way that makes it easy for you to purchase from you.
This could be an effective website, landing page, or ticket purchase page.
Without a great offer and a smooth sales system, your marketing strategies will not be as effective as they could be.
Comprehensive Marketing Framework
Whether you are a brick-and-mortar operation or sell products and services online, here are the fundamental components for your online effectiveness:
A fast, search engine-friendly (SEO) website focused on selling your products and services.
A blogging component to feature your services and create an online presence in searches.
Mailing List. A mailing list is by far your best marketing tool and a concerted effort to build and use your list will pay dividends.
Google and Apple business profiles for physical stores to appear on maps with features of your business.
A social media presence with LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, TicToc, and others. Pick the ones where your ideal clients hang out.
Create a LinkedIn Newsletter.
YouTube Channel. Video is a great tool for building expertise and selling products. Videos are posted to your YouTube channel, blog posts, and social media channels.
Coherent Messaging
Things change. We evolve. Our business focus changes.
Clarify your messaging for what you are offering today and make sure that your website, social media platforms, blog posts, and YouTube channel all effectively communicate a consistent and coherent message.
Make sure all of your oars are rowing in the same direction.
Content Marketing
Now it is time to leverage your marketing framework.
Here is an approach that is very effective at establishing your authority and boosting your online presence for searches and people connected with you.
Create a piece of content such as this blog post.
Optimize for searches with an effective splash image, title, and meta description so that your post is compelling on search listings and when posted on social media.
Submit the post for indexing to Google Search Console.
Consider posting the entire article for your LinkedIn Newsletter.
Use the splash image to post out a description and link to the post on your social media channels. Meet Edgar and Hootsuite are good for this.
Create a video for your YouTube channel and social media platforms. StreamYard is fabulous for this.
Publicity and Networking
Book launches, course launches, product launches, and the like are all great for getting publicity.
Press releases to all local and appropriate media outlets can be a very cost-effective way of getting the word out.
I can help you write a press release and find places to send it. There are also soon good paid press release services if you have things for a wide audience.
Other places to spread the word are networking groups, podcasts, and speaking engagements.
Landing Page and Sales Funnels
This can be as simple as creating an effective landing page and driving traffic to the page with your content marketing.
Or it could involve webinars, a series of videos, an email sequence, and other sales strategies.
For some, it is booking an appointment for a sales call.
In many cases, the webinar is an online version of a speak-to-sell presentation that is delivered in person.
An effective sales webinar will also share features with a good long-form sales letter, where the goal is to make the offer attractive and answer all points of objection so that the person can make a buying decision on the spot.
The main difference is that the landing page for a webinar prompts the visitor to sign up for the webinar rather than go directly to a sale on the sales page.
Here are the main steps in creating a simple webinar funnel:
Create a compelling landing page with a button to sign up for the webinar.
Drive traffic to the landing page using every media at your disposal.
Present the webinar (more on that below).
Send a thanks for attending note.
Send a link to a page with the replay, transcript, sales copy, and purchase button.
Send a series of emails that provide more information or answer questions the person may have before making a purchase.
Offer a call to discuss.
Greg Dixon is available to help you create and launch all the steps.
