- you don’t know where that person lives.
- you don’t know how to contact them.
- you can’t follow up with other things they might be interested in
- you can’t ask them for feedback on the book
- you can’t ask for a testimonial that they might want to give you that you can use in your marketing
You need to build in a mechanism, a process, to capture reader details to give a reason to reach out to people or give a reason for them to reach out to you. With this process you can start building your customer database. A way to do this is to ask people to register for downloads. A great little tip here is, if you’ve written a book and it’s got some exercises where people need to write something down, a lot of people don’t like writing on the pages of a book. They feel like it’s “defacing it”… it’s not as “pristine” as it was when it first came off the shelf. This means they don’t want to write in their book, but they do need to complete those written sections to master the topic. What you can do is say, “Please come on to my website and you can give me your email address and I will send you a set of printed forms so you can do this lots of times until you’ve got it exactly how you want it and then complete your final set of templates, whatever it is. That’s a great thing to do, encourage people to register for downloads. They could be
- checklists to follow
- forms to fill out
- crib sheets to save time with
you name it. There’s lots of different strategies you could chose fom Perhaps there are some audio files you can share or perhaps it’s a training video that demonstratess to the viewer how you do a particular thing that was difficult to explain in words, whatever it happens to be. Make sure people need to come to your website to register to get access to those beneficial resources. You could ask people to email their success stories to you. That’s another great way of getting people to contact you. You don’t really want them emailing you with questions because then you could slip into the free advice route and we don’t really want to be doing that as experts in our field, do we? There’s nothing to stop them sending you testimonials or success stories, “Hey I followed your dieting tips and I lost two stones in six months and I’m really pleased…” whatever it is. Those are great testimonials you can use in your marketing. Encourage people to let you know how well they’ve done and how much they’ve enjoyed following your advice. Finally, you could do something like newsletter sign-ups. So, if you’d written a book say on the history of interior design, then you may invite people to sign up for you free newsletter or a paid newsletter. Your newsletter would cover topical information, such as this season’s hot colours and styles. Anything where there’s the potential for incremental updates, particularly things like fashion or science, or art. There’s always going to be something new coming along that you could put in a newsletter. You might want to consider that. It might be appropriate for your niche.
