***How to Create a Sales Campaign for Your Published Book

After you learn how to create a sales campaign for your published book, you can use the same strategies for selling your online and offline seminars, workshops and other special events. By adding audios and videos, testimonials from satisfied customers and other enhancements, you now have your own online marketing machine. Every time you add a new product, service or event, you will be adding another opportunity for increasing your revenues. nnYour email subscriber list is your gold. This data, called your subscriber list, is considered the most important part of an emailing campaign. nnSqueeze Pages A highly targeted list of email subscribers allows you to market your product and service with a fairly high probability of success. To ease consumer concerns about spam, experienced online businesses create "squeeze pages" that detail what the subscriber will be receiving. They also present the company's privacy standards. Following is an excellent description of a squeeze page that Pamela Jacobs of Artista Design quoted in her blog, from an article she’d archived: “Regardless of what you're trying to sell, you really can't sell it without ‘talking’ with your prospective buyer. In attempting to sell anything on the Internet, the sales letter (squeeze page) you send out is when and how you talk to your prospect. “All winning sales letters (squeeze pages) ‘talk’ to the prospect by creating an image in the mind of the reader. They set ‘the scene’ by appealing to a desire or need; and then they flow smoothly into the ‘visionary’ part of the sales pitch by describing in detail how ‘wonderful’ life will be and, how ‘good’ the prospect is going to feel after the product or service is purchased. This is the ‘body or guts’ of a sales letter (squeeze page). “Overall, a winning sales letter (squeeze page) follows a time-tested and proven formula:nn

Get your visitors’ attention

n

Get your visitor interested in what you can do for them

n

Make them desire the benefits of your products

n

Create Urgency--an action step--tell him to click the right button or send for whatever it is

you're selling without delay--any procrastination on there part might cause him to lose out

n This is called the ‘AIDA’ formula (Attention, Interest, Desire and Action)--it works. “Another thing--have customers’ testimonials tucked in--with pictures. I am sure you have seen that as well… “The ‘inside secret’ is to make your squeeze page/landing page so interesting, and ‘visionary’ with the benefits you're offering to the reader, that they can't resist reading it all the way through. You break up the ‘work’ of reading by using short, punchy sentences, underlining important points you're trying to make, with the use of sub-headlines, indentations and even the use of a second color, and leaving lots of white space around it. “Once the product is paid for if it is a digital product--eBook or software--it should be instantly downloadable.”nnMore squeeze page tips Use a headline, bullets, teaser copy, deadlines, testimonials, scarcity, etc. Present visitors with multiple incentives in exchange for their contact information. Keep the content on the squeeze pages to a minimum. The goal of the page is to obtain the visitor's email address. Additional information could distract the user or cause them to "click-away" to a different website. Navigation and hyperlinks are almost always absent from typical squeeze pages. The absence of links is used to focus visitors' attention on one choice: register for the email list or leave the site. Savvy internet marketers have discovered that convincing a visitor to sign up for an email list provides an opportunity to present that visitor with multiple sales messages over time, develop a relationship, and even cross-sell other related products.nnAutoresponders Squeeze pages are often used in conjunction with an email autoresponder to begin delivering information as soon as the visitor confirms their email address. The autoresponder may be utilized to send a series of follow-up emails or to provide an immediate download link to get information. Promising information upon completion of confirming their email address has proven to be an effective method of increasing optins using squeeze pages. New technology has also led to adding voice or video to squeeze pages in an effort to capture the visitor's attention.nnAffiliate Programs We mentioned affiliate programs briefly in previous articles when talking about joining Amazon.com, alibris.com and other book retailers’ affiliate (often called "associate") programs. This allows you to collect revenues as well as a commission from your book sales when your hyperlink leads to the sales transaction on the retailer’s page. Reversing the procedure, you can create an affiliate program yourself and offer affiliates a commission for selling your books. Often you can exchange affiliate links with other business owners. Some home business owners focus solely on selling other people's products. This has proven to be a highly successful home business model. In my next article, I’ll discuss joint ventures, which is another popular sales campaign technique. I’ll also discuss private or paying membership sites versus free or open ones.