brandvines

brandversations that engage your customers and build your brand

Marketing is Like Gardening

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Gardening and Marketing Have a Lot in Common

Prepare, Plant, Nurture, Harvest, Repeat

These are the same steps you must take to grow your business, sell your book, and build your brand.

As every successful gardener knows, you can’t just stick seeds in the ground and hope for the best if you want a lush, productive garden. A little bit of time and attention is required on most days.

How to you grow your marketing garden?

I’d love to hear your stories of what is working to stimulate your business. I’m collecting stories for a book I’m developing. Share your story below. With your permission, it may go into the book. Include how to reach you if I have any questions.

9 Tips to Build Your Email List

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Free Book Marketing Tip #9: Build Your Email List

9 Tips to Build Your Email List: Free Book Marketing Tip #9

Whether you are starting from scratch or you are building from an existing list, these tips can help you grow your email list.

You may wonder why growing you list is so important. You might be saying “I don’t have the time.” Did you know that for every dollar you invest in email marketing, you will get a $44 return on your investment according to a 2015 study by the DMA (Direct Marketing Association).

 1. Make Them An Offer They Can’t Refuse

An Irresistible Offer is Your Lead Magnet

How many of you want to get another email newsletter in your inbox? Stop inviting people to sign up for your newsletter. You will get more subscribers by offering something of value. something they want, like a pdf of the “9 Tips to Building Your Email List.”

Which one do you want: another newsletter or a free Tip Sheet?

2. Give Them What They Want

Offer something that helps your target audience. It could save them time. It might be a free guide. Or a sample chapter from your book, and it doesn’t have to take you a lot of time or effort to make it. It must be something that they see as valuable. Your offer is an incentive (something of value) you give to a subscriber in exchange for their real email address and permission to email them.

Types of Incentives you can offer

  • Resource list
  • Checklist
  • Tool tips
  • Mistakes to Avoid
  • A PDF of a popular article
  • A sample
  • Discount
  • A Recipe
  • A link to an informative blog post
  • E-book
  • Cheat Sheet
  • How to Guide
  • Free Gift
  • Introductory Offer

3. Automated Email Campaigns

Connect your Irresistible Offer Sign up to your email provider. Many quality email services like Constant Contact allow you to set up automated campaigns. This is also known as a autoresponder campaign.

You set up the triggers. Each email in the campaign will go out a pre-determined interval. These emails are sent out to an individual subscriber or to all of the members of a group, it just depends on what you choose.

Thinking through an automated campaign may take some time when you set it up. The time savings come in when you get subscribers to your list and they automatically start receiving the emails you created, without you having to do this manually, over and over again.

Ideas for an Automated Campaign

  • Answer FAQs
  • Provide instructions
  • Share Additional information
  • Up sell your related products/services
  • Ask for referrals
  • Sell refills / replacements
  • Collect feedback about what your audience likes and wants
  • Gather testimonials
  • Collect user-created content. Hold a contest and ask readers to enter the contest by sending you content they create. This is a great way to get testimonials and content you can use in marketing pieces.

4. Focus on Building Your List

Set a goal  for how many new emails you will add in the next 30, 60, 90 days. Then, spend time every day doing something to grow your list.

5. Invite everybody you know to join your list

Start with your friends and family. I heard one story about how a guy’s mom told all of her friends and he added 250 new subscribers in one day! You never know who your friends and family know until you ask them to help you grow your list.

6. Ask subscribers to invite to invite people to join your list to get your Irresistible Offer

Give them the exact language and the link they can share with their friends. You can give them the text for a shareable tweet or a post to their Facebook page.

7. Ask subscribers where to send their free gift

You only need two things from new subscribers, their first name and email address.

8. Set up a “Thank You Page”

Confirm and thank your subscribers. This is a step in building your relationship. Send them an automated email thank you too. Expressing your appreciation has been proven to increase subscriber retention.

9. Add a Call to Action

Get your subscribers accustomed to taking action. You can ask them to like you on Facebook, or follow you on Twitter. Include a call to action in every email.

My Free Offer to You

Get started with one or all of the above actions. To help you get started, I’d like you to try Constant Contact for free for the next 60 days and there are some very special extras when you sign up during November. Click the link below to get your free, fully functioning account. Please share this with your friends. They will thank you. Email marketing has a crazy return on investment. For every $1 you spend on email marketing, you will see a return of $44. That’s money in  your pocket. Give it a try today. Just click on this the link below.

http://bit.ly/ccjudyb

 

Take action every day to gain traction

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Take Action Every Day to Gain TractionTake Action Every Day to Gain Traction

A Wake-up Call to Action

Once upon a time, there was a 37-year old woman who had a wake up call when her mother had a heart attack. For the past three-years she had not taken care of herself. She walked about 5 to 10 miles every day when she lived in San Francisco. After she moved to Sonoma, she learned to her disappointment that much of the town was not a walking friendly place. She couldn’t walk everywhere as she had in the city. So her fitness suffered.

She made up her mind to get in shape. Her work schedule and commute meant that she was away from home about 12-hours every day. So she came up with a strategy to do something small every day. She started by buying one piece of equipment, a stair stepping machine. She began her road back to fitness with a commitment of five minutes the first day. She added one minute every day until she reached one-hour on the stair-stepper.

In time she added other exercises and increased her fitness level. She continues to exercise intelligently, making adjustments as need. Her results are easy to see.

Flash Forward 25 years

The woman in the story is me.  I am now 61 years old. Since I began working out at 37 (after 3-years of being a coach potato after I moved from San Francisco to Sonoma), I have rarely missed a day of doing some form of exercise. In fact, I exercised regularly during the year I had cancer and even when I was undergoing chemotherapy. Because of my commitment to myself, my body is strong. I made some adjustments to my workout during my chemotherapy.  Sticking with my fitness routine helped me get through those hard days. I am not a gym-rat. I pay attention to how I feel and I take time off when my body lets me know I need to rest.

For me, maintaining a regular schedule is important in everything I do.  I do take time off when I need it. In fact, I have been working with physical therapist to help me regain my core strength. I find that when I take the time to honor myself by doing some form of exercise each day, it pays off big dividends.

Taking action every day to gain traction really does work. Practicing this method of taking small actions every day is easy to apply to almost any project.  I am guessing none of you wrote your book in a single day. I’m also guessing that none of you learned everything you know in a single day.

Start by making a plan

If you like working on computers there are many ways you can create a plan of action. You might put all your ideas on a spreadsheet. Another way to get your ideas on paper if you will is to use a mind map. A yellow pad and a pencil will also do the trick it doesn’t really matter how you get the information in one place you can see it. What matters is that you create a plan. Having a plan means you can identify what you want to have happen and you can measure whether or not you have succeeded in reaching your goal.

You can doing anything for 10-minutes

I’m a strong advocate of getting unstuck by using a timer. In fact I used my timer this morning to help me with a project. I set the timer for 10-minutes and when the timer goes off I’m done. The important thing about this: for that 10-minutes I focus on the task at hand and I don’t allow any interruptions or distractions. I’ve used the 10-minute method successfully for writing projects, filing, packing and unpacking, and yes, even for exercising when I’m not in the mood to do it. Try the 10-minute method for marketing.

10 Things You Can Do in 10-minutes

1. Google yourself

2. Outline a blog post

3. Make a phone call

4. Create a mind map

5. Post to Facebook

6. Find an image for your post

7. Record a short video

8. Start a spreadsheet for your blog posts

9. Look up your favorite author and visit their website

10. Put 10-minute marketing appointments into your schedule

This method gives you a win every day. Try this for 30 days and see what changes. Share your stories by posting a comment.

Free Book Marketing Tip #7 – Make an Irresistible Offer

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Make an irresistible offer

Irresistible Offer – How to Sell More Books

I was talking to one of my clients today. Distressed by her failure to keep the deer out of her enticing garden, she asked me for suggestions that might be more successful than what she has tried so far. She has been losing the battle to keep deer out of her luscious garden. Despite her efforts to discourage them, deer are jumping over her fence, running across the deck, even going down stairs to get to  her garden, where they are eating all of her vegetables.

Why are the deer so persistent?

O.K. You are probably asking “What does this have to do with book marketing?” The deer keep coming to her garden because they are hungry! They want what she has in her garden and are willing to come back, again and again to get it. When you make an irresistible offer to your fans, you can have them as eager as the deer, only this time, you will have fans who are willing to stand in line, to buy your book just so they can get your book and the bonus(es).

It is a spectacularly successful strategy for building anticipation when you tell your fans about the launch day bonuses for weeks in advance of your publication day. Offer a pre-order bonus to your fans when they buy your book on a specific day. They will be hungry for your book and the bonus or bundle of extra goodies you are offering. By sweetening the deal, you can convert more shoppers into customers than you would ever be able to do without your “irresistible offer.”

Find Partners

Look for affiliate partners who are willing to offer a bonus for your book launch. It  gives them exposure to your fans, and vice a versa. The power of two is exponentially greater than the power of you alone. Ask your partners to promote your launch day to their email list and social followers. Everybody wins. You sell more books.

What you can add as a bonus

Non-fiction authors can include a pdf tip sheet, a case study, access to a video, something you have already created and are willing to share as an incentive to your audience to buy your book. Fiction authors could offer a special short story or a book club guide. Be creative.

People are funny

Do you know that there are authors who are selling their books by offering them for free or for a penny on Facebook or LinkedIn or to their email list? Yes, it is true. Brendan Burchard did it with his latest book. They only ask you to pay for shipping. It may sound like a crazy way to sell books and you may wonder if they are making any money that way. They are, because they are reaching more fans and getting known as a best-selling author.

Share your irresistible offer

Share your irresistible offer and how it helped you sell more books in the comments area below this post.