Sandra Beckwith, publicity expert on building book buzz for authors is my guest this week. Sandy considers herself to be a recovering publicist with more than 25 years of award-winning publicity experience.  She is the winner of the coveted national Silver Anvil award from the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) for her shoestring publicity program and the author of two publicity books – Streetwise Complete Publicity Plans: How to Create Publicity That Will Spark Media Exposure and Excitement, a how-to guide for small business owners like freelance writers, and Publicity for Nonprofits: Generating Media Exposure That Leads to Awareness, Growth, and Contributions, a step-by-step manual for nonprofit organizations.

We first connected while we were both guests on a telesummit last year, and I’ve been following her and learning new strategies ever since.

On this call we discussed the importance of getting the word out about your book, information product, speaking event, or other newsworthy event through the strategic use of press releases. Even though I have been sending press releases regularly for my business for more than five years now, Sandy shared ideas I was not familiar with, such as creating a ‘Tips Sheet’ to share your ideas with your target audience. She gives us a concrete example of how this can be achieved. She also discussed free versus paid press release services and how each can be of value to us.

We also talked about the value of book signings, becoming a local celebrity and going to the places (both physically and virtually) where your audience is already frequenting for optimal results.

What Sandra Beckwith is doing for authors is my definition of true success; where preparation meets opportunity is where you will have the greatest success. Please take advantage of her knowledge, expertise, and understanding of business and publicity by signing up to receive her Build Book Buzz newsletter and her free Special Report, Beyond the Press Release: 10 Exciting Book Buzz Ideas That Will Take You to the Top. I know you will enjoy this podcast interview.

After a brief hiatus my Podcast Series is continuing for the second half of 2013 – Subscribe Today!

Viral Marketing Tips

Viral marketing may be a new concept for you, and you need to know that it is one of the biggest keys to attracting new prospects and clients to your online business. Most businesses don’t take advantage of this like they should, and you can set yourself apart if you take some time to learn about it.

So, what exactly does ‘viral’ mean?

It’s essentially the process of having other people and websites recommend you and your product to others. It’s another word for referral advertising. It’s different from affiliate marketing in that no commission changes hands. This is quite common in the offline, brick and mortar world and is now catching on in the online world as well.

The great thing about it is that it doesn’t require any additional expenses on your part. And if your prospects or customers provide word of mouth advertising, this will give you more credibility. This is because what others say about you matters more than what you say. When you visit a site that has many testimonials you automatically assume they are more credible, right?

So how do you make your marketing viral? Here are six of the best ways:

1. Offer A Compelling Free Giveaway

Also referred to as an ‘ethical bribe’ your free giveaway must be irresistible to your target market. One way you can instantly get more opt-ins for your newsletter is to spend the time to put together the exact information your prospects are looking for. Then encourage those who opt in to share it with others. Try this – it works!

2. Freebies

Another excellent strategy is to give away your own and other people’s products (with their permission and preferably through an affiliate link) to your community. I do this regularly with both the NAMS weekly trainings with David Perdew and an eBook about the Earn 1K a Day event with Dennis Becker.

3. Provide Excellent Resources

The best way to generate referrals is to give away a lot of valuable free information. A lot of times marketers don’t give good content with the free eBooks, because they are trying to save the best information for the product.

The problem is, if your free content isn’t good, people are going to assume your paid content isn’t going to be worth it either. The free information is supposed to wet their appetite. This gets them thinking, ‘if the free information is this good, just imagine how good the paid stuff will be.’

4. Write A Book For Kindle And Give It Away

I’ve written nine books, and every few weeks I am able to give one of them away for free through Kindle’s KDP Select program. This is a way to connect with your community and set yourself apart from others in your niche. Take a look at my books on Amazon to see what I am referring to.

5. Create Excellent Content For Your Website

Probably the best way to go viral is to simply have excellent and relevant content on your blog and other sites. Use a plugin like the one I have here to allow visitors to easily share your content, and encourage them to do so regularly. In many instances, other sites will pick up your content and post it on their sites.  This will give you additional traffic without having to do any more work. However, you have to stand out from other sites for this to happen.

How do you stand out to increase your viral marketing?

Storytelling remains the best way to stand out from the crowd. Incorporating your story into the body of your writing and relating it to your topic can be crucial to your success. I’ve shared stories related to hosting young people from eight different countries in my home over the past seven years, stories about my involvement with Rotary and other charities, and even stories about being a multiple cancer survivor. Storytelling fleshes us out as three dimensional beings to those who only know us online.

6. Use Channels To Share Your Information

Putting videos on YouTube and other popular video directories will encourage people to pass them around. Again, just make sure the content is good. Record your teleseminars and add them to iTunes as podcasts (my podcast is available here). Create pages on Facebook to get the conversation going.

The bottom line is, making your marketing viral is how to skyrocket your efforts. The best way to do this is to create and then give away lots of great free information. Get started with this marketing strategy today and watch your business grow.

This month I am hosting a Japanese student through my Rotary Club’s involvement in the Rotary International Student Exchange Program. Over the past seven years, since I’ve been working exclusively online as an entrepreneur I’ve had the pleasure of hosting young people from eight different countries, including Norway, Mexico, Sweden, Nepal, the Netherlands, Peru, Sweden, and now Japan. They range in age from fifteen to twenty-two, and it’s lots of fun to be a part of someone’s life as they get to know you, your family, and our country and vice versa.

My Japanese student is a seventeen year old boy named Ryosuke (ree-OS-kay). During the first few days my family and I got know him better. His English is not very good, so we had fun with Google Translate and a pocket dictionary to better communicate back and forth. We wanted to learn which foods he liked (loves eggs, hates tomatoes, allergic to peanuts), if he was into sports (plays tennis on a team, plays baseball for fun, and is not involved with any others), what he most wanted to see in southern California (Disneyland and as many beaches as possible), and more about his family (he’s the youngest of four, lives in a city of almost a million, loves astronomy, has never had a pet).

Based on this information we offered him eggs every morning in the form of scrambled, poached, hard-boiled, and French toast; got rid of the peanuts and peanut butter in our home; took him to play tennis twice; spent two days at Disneyland; visited several beaches; dug out our telescope and set it up in the back yard; and made sure he had time to get to know all of our little dogs.

As the days went on I saw that what we were doing was very similar to what we do when we are trying to reach our target market online. We get to know them over time by offering them more about what they came to us for in the first place, never offering them anything they have not asked for, and asking them questions to learn more about them and their dreams for success. If you are doing this every day you are probably already seeing your business grow. It’s when we get off course and start marketing to our community in a way that does not resonate with them that our business begins to stagnate.

One Saturday we took Ryosuke to a field day event hosted by our city. I was hoping he’d get a chance to participate in a tennis clinic or throw a few pitches, but both of those activities were set up for much younger kids. Then we saw the volleyball nets and encouraged him to give it a try.

Ryosuke was a natural! Because of his years of playing baseball and tennis he had many ‘crossover’ skills that served him well in this sport. The high school kids added him to their team and we watched in admiration for almost an hour while they played. It was only afterwards that they learned he had never played volleyball even once in his life.

As you are exploring how to reach your target market, think about the crossover skills you have from your previous job, career, or educational training. Most likely you also have skills that could be helpful to those you are now coming to you for advice. I had been a classroom teacher for twenty years, as well as working as a residential appraiser and broker and used that as a basis for teaching adults how to write and market their content and to build a profitable online business.

Having an exchange student in your home also allows you to spoil them. This is an interesting process as you find yourself doing things for them that you might not have done for your own family members for many years, including preparing special foods, listening to every word they say, and taking them to places they have expressed a desire to know more about. If you do this in your business you will see how quickly people respond, as we all like to be made to feel special by those we are interacting with.

I love how real life situations can be beneficial to us in our businesses. When you learn how to reach your target market, whether it’s people you are connected to within your family or those you are doing business with, everyone wins.

Online Marketing Tips Podcast

Do you need help with your online marketing? In this episode of the Online Marketing Tips Podcast With Connie Ragen Green, my newest podcast series, I discuss the importance of attending live events. The events included in this podcast call were NAMS (Novice to Advanced Marketing Systems) where I have been on the faculty since 2011; Dennis Becker’s Earn 1K a Day seminar where I have spoken the past two years; and my own upcoming event, the Weekend Marketer Live workshop in Las Vegas October 11-13.

My calls are interactive so that you may be heard. During this call I am joined my many of my students who share their questions, concerns, and accomplishments with their online business in regards to attending live marketing events, seminars, and workshops. This time we discussed how to add audio to presentations, tools for taking screenshots, article marketing and content creation, WordPress themes, hosting your own teleseminars, choosing the best events to attend, and much more.

These are the reasons you’ll want to attend live events:

• Learn new strategies by continuing to be a student
• Connect with prospects, clients, and friends
• Move out of your comfort zone
• Find people to Mastermind with after it’s over
• Make JV (joint venture) connections

This podcast and these online marketing tips are intended to teach you how you can take your business to the next level quickly and effectively, and as a way for me to share my very Case Studies, secrets, and advice on creating a profitable and lucrative online business using the ‘multiple income streams’ approach. Each session is first recorded live as a teleseminar, and then repurposed into a podcast to extend my reach to the world. Please join my list to be included on these calls, and be sure to introduce yourself and share your site for optimal exposure for years to come!

If you’re looking for the Study Guide for this podcast, go to this page and choose ‘August 14, 2013‘. These are intended to help you to get the most out of my training and resources as you build your online business.

Also, you can now pick up my popular training on winning affiliate contests and other online marketing tips for only seven dollars at Affiliate Contest Secrets. Use the discount code CONTEST to bring the price down to $7. This training has been updated for 2013 with the latest information, strategies, and Case Studies for you to use in your own business.

List Building Tips

As a business owner you have many assets, including your land and buildings, your inventory, your staff, and your intellectual property. But have you ever stopped to think about your list? The list, or database of your clients is the most profitable asset your business will ever have. Hopefully you’ve been adding email addresses to the names, physical addresses, and phone numbers so that you can reach out to your prospects and clients with just a moment’s notice. Here are some list building tips that will be helpful to you as your business grows.

Building your email list will ensure that your business grows steadily over time. But there is much more to it than that. Your list will also provide feedback as to what you have to offer, saving you a tremendous amount of time and money. Additionally, an email list allows you to reach out to new prospects and existing clients without having to see them in person or send them a costly direct mail piece.

Danielle wrote to ask me about how she could start building a list for her brand new business. She has started a company that works directly with people who have retired and are in need of additional income. In order to reach these people she has started a blog, has written a book that’s available on Amazon as both a Kindle version and in paperback, and is starting to visit local groups to share her message.

This is an excellent start, but I would also encourage her to start building an email list from the very beginning. You can get started with a reputable and accepted autoresponder service called Aweber for only one dollar. This service creates the html code you need to easily add an optin box to your blog or website. When visitors come to your site you can offer them a short report on exactly how you intend to serve them in return for their name and email address. Over time you will stay in contact with these people and move them from visitors to prospects to clients.

One point I should make here is that by using an autoresponder service you are providing a way for people to join your email list that fully complies with federal law and the CANN-SPAM Act. A permission based list is the only way to do business in a legal and straightforward manner that protects your reputation.

If you have written a book, even a short one to be used as a lead generator, be sure to include a page at the end where your readers can go to your site and opt in to your list. Otherwise you will have missed a great opportunity to further engage the people who purchase your book.

When you create, or have created for you a website for your business, you will also add an optin box there. Anywhere your name and/or your company name appears online or in print should include this form so that list building becomes the way you generate more business on a daily basis.

Other ways to build your database list include posting videos on a YouTube channel, hosting an audio that can be turned into a podcast series on iTunes, and paying to run an advertisement in local print publications – such as this one – and in magazines and on Facebook. All of these methods work well to get your name out to the world with the message of how you are serving others.

You may also want to partner with complimentary service providers to spread the word about what each of you is doing in the community. I have seen this work extremely well in the trades, with plumbers sharing information on a local handyman and carpenters sharing painters they recommend. It becomes a type of ‘coopetition’, with everyone cooperatively competing to bring in more business for everyone over time.

I hope you can now see the importance of building an email list for your business and that you will begin using some of these proven strategies right away. Years from now you will be glad you took this step when you see how much your bottom line has increased. No matter what happens in your industry or with the economy, your list will continue to be your most valuable asset. There is an excellent training, of which I was a part of, through NAMS called the 30 Day List Building Challenge that I highly recommend.

List Building Tips

List building is an activity you must engage in on a regular basis in order to build your online business, so you might as well do it in an effective way. I’ll be sharing several of my best list building tips with you here.

There are many ways to go about building a responsive list, and I would like to focus on the importance of building your list with your blog, a separate opt in page, and a teleseminar page. Let’s take a closer look at each one of these marketing strategies.

It is my strong belief that you absolutely must have a blog to get started online. By this I do not mean a free blog on one of the free blogging platforms, but a blog that you own and control on WordPress. You’ll need to get hosting first, and a good c-panel hosting account will allow you to set up as many sites as you would like to without any additional fees or cost. My preference is BlueHost or Hostgator for this purpose. You will then be able to install WordPress on your new blog in about five minutes and without any other expense. If you get stuck while doing this, Google for help or go to YouTube to search for videos showing you how to do it.

The next step is to add an optin box to this blog site where people can type in their name and email address in return for a report or something else you will be giving away for free. It must be enticing for your prospects to be willing to exchange their name and email address in order to receive it. Take a look at other sites where you have opted in and see what they offered that compelled you to join their list. You’ll need an autoresponder service for this, and I highly recommend that you get started with Aweber for only one dollar and then nineteen dollars a month after that.

Now that you have a WordPress blog site where you can post about your niche topic and have people opt in to join your list, you have done the very minimum to start your online business. It’s time to take it a step further by giving people more opportunities to find you and join your online community via your list.

This is accomplished by setting up a page that is devoted to only one thing – offering a different free giveaway when someone joins your list. This is known as a  squeeze page or optin page and it is a stand alone page on its own domain. I recommend doing this to attract different segments of people within your niche by age, gender, specific interests, and so forth. For example, in my business I have stand alone opt in pages that are directed at women, moms, men under thirty-five, and so on. The idea is to relate to the people who may benefit from what you have to offer.

The next way to build your list is to offer free teleseminars where you will discuss a topic and answer questions. This can also be on its own page, allowing visitors to sign up for your call and then access it right away. i did this for eighteen months straight, offering a free teleseminar every single week back in 2007 and 2008. I now do it twice a month and repurpose the call into a podcast (take a look here). This continues to build my list, but that’s an altogether different strategy.

Set up a dedicated page where you will be able to make the changes yourself. Describe in some detail what you call will be about, and ask people to opt in to receive the call details. Use some bullet points to explain what you will be sharing and why it will be a benefit for your prospects to sign up. When they opt in and join your list, take them to a page where you give the details of how they can join the live teleseminar you are hosting.

These strategies work extremely well in building your list while you are serving others by sharing your knowledge and expertise in your niche.