Who is This About?

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As you create your content and your promotions, you must keep this central question in your mind at all times:

Who is this about?

The fact is readers do NOT care about you–at least at first.  What they care about is themselves. So telling them to buy your book or visit your site will not work.  You must, must, MUST answer their question:

What’s in it for me?

For example, let’s say you’re on Twitter and you post this about your book every day:

I’d love more readers!  Please check out my book and retweet this to all your followers. (URL link)

Now I’m going to ask you, what are you going to do with that message?  Will you click to buy this person’s book?  Will you even retweet that?

The answer for 99.9% of us is “NO!”  Why not?

First of all, why would I?  I have no clue what the book is about or if I would be interested in it, and I’m certainly not going to recommend this person to my followers as they will probably feel the same way about it.

The problem here is this person is talking only about themselves.

This problem gets magnified many times over on the Internet if you are doing your promotions wrong.  Because maybe you are a member of six groups and I’m a member of 3 of them with you.  Let’s say that your marketing “strategy” is to post one link to your book every day on those six groups.  How quickly will I learn to tune you out?  VERY!

You’re wasting my time.  I’ve read this before, and I’ve already decided 62 times that I’m not interested!

So what happens?  I stop reading your posts altogether.

Now your book might be great, but if all you do is try to get me to buy it, I’m showing you the virtual door as quickly as possible.

Stop talking about you!

Think about what the READER needs, answer their questions, solve their problem, and most of all make them feel important and visible.  Develop relationships, have conversations, make friends.

I’m not talking devoting hours and hours a day.  Pop in, join a conversation, offer something helpful.

Is someone looking for writing tips?  Post an article you read on someone else’s site.  Or post your own if you have one.

Is someone frustrated with a social media outlet you know well?  Help them out.

This could even be as basic as tweeting and retweeting great content you gleaned from elsewhere.  Did a great quote come to you?  Retweet it.  Did you read a great post somewhere?  Tweet about it or post it on your FB wall.

Become a RESOURCE for people to know when they read anything from you, it’s going to lift their day, educate them, and make them better.

When you do that, you will both attract new viewers and maintain current ones.  And when you do post something about your book, NOW they will listen because they trust you as a great resource in their lives… or maybe even as a friend.