Taking the Book Marketing Challenge May 2014 was, by and large, a very encouraging daily part of my activities. The first week was largely confirmation of everything I’ve already been doing to build my author platform, with a few tidbits of information I’ve added to my marketing calendar. Week two was all about building your list, with one of the topics relating to repurposing your content into other forms you can offer either as a freebie or at a discount to build your list. The third week built on this concept of repurposed content by talking about building multiple income streams for your book. The fourth week dealt more with marketing strategies, some of which I could grasp and some I wasn’t that keen on. This last week of the challenge has been all about virtual book tours.
Prior to taking this challenge, I’d been looking at ways to take a tiny e-book I’d written, “Practical Thoughts on Becoming an Author”, (paid link)and turn it into a workshop or e-course. I wasn’t sure at first which way to go with this and had already attempted to put on a workshop locally that only one person signed up for! Another author couldn’t afford the $25 registration fee, so I sent them the ebook for free. I was in the process of breaking down the content of the workshop into daily sessions when we got to the week on list-building. By the time we got to the week on multiple income streams, my ebook was undergoing review by another author, but it wouldn’t be till the fourth week that the e-course would actually go live.
I view this 19-day $15 e-course as another income stream for the e-book, “Practical Thoughts on Becoming an Author”. It costs more than the e-book, but the reviewer told me that I’ve given it a bargain price-tag already and that I could have charged more!
At the same time I was starting to think about a book tour for my next book, “A Year in Prayer With Jesus”. Some aspects of the challenge talked about creating buzz for your book before it comes out. I am hoping for 30 bloggers for this pre-launch book tour, and have 6 bloggers on board so far, representing 9 blogs that I have been invited to utilize for this tour. One of the give-aways on this tour will be my $15 e-course when people sign up for my monthly newsletter. I actually have one student who came into the course via the newsletter sign-up link already and they are half-way through the course now. When this blog tour is over, I’ll be removing the e-course as a freebie and putting the e-book in it’s place. The reason for this, is that as far as income streams go, at only $15 per registration, if I was to get just 5 sign-ups a day, every single day, I could earn just over $2k per month!!! That would go a long way to easing up on my current financial struggles!
I’ve created a permanent page here on my blog for this course, simply titled, “$15 e-course”. A slideshare presentation has been added, and in case that doesn’t work for someone for some reason, the content of the presentation is given further down the page. I am using gumroad.com to manage the purchase of the e-course, and their purchase system lets you buy it as a gift for others as well.
I have created a 1/3rd off discount offer just for any BMC members who would be interested in this course. The code is currently shared over at the BMC fan page on Facebook. As this blog hop is public, I will send that code to any BMC members who contact me stating they took The Book Marketing Challenge May 2014. If you choose to gift this course to another author, please do so at full rate.
For those considering offering an e-course, I am using a self-hosted installation of WordPress, with the mailpoet newsletter plugin. Mailpoet has regular newsletters and autoresponders that you can use. You can have more than one list as well. So now that I know how to set this up for one book, I may see about ways of doing this for either other books, or simply other courses that I may be able to offer.
Thank you D’Vorah for hosting this course, and thank you Shelley Hitz for sharing this course with your mailing list! I took the BMC as a silver member because finances are beyond tight right now, but what I gleaned from the challenge has been both encouraging and empowering.
Hope everyone is enjoying the blog hop.
Welcome to the Book Marketing Challenge Community Blog HopJune 6, 2014 at 11:42 am
[…] Hop 13: Marilynn Dawson: Blog Hop Stop Wrapping up The Book Marketing Challenge […]