Cross Promotions & Joint Ventures

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August 7, 2012 | 4 Comments

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We are now slowly winding our way to the end of marketing course.

After you’ve set up your landing pages, gotten your promo chain going on Twitter (and Facebook, etc.), you are now ready to do some out-of-the-box thinking.

Setting up cross promotions and joint ventures for big marketing pushes takes time but mostly a good group of authors willing to participate–and by participate, I mean doing something other than saying, “I’ll do a guest blog” and then getting it to you the day before.

Ideally for a cross promotion or joint venture you want somewhere upward of ten authors, some newbies but not all.  You will need to map out the strategy and get everyone going in the right direction.  You may need to offer advice on how to use Twitter and FB, etc. (feel free to direct them here for the basics).

The idea is that instead of you promoting your book, you get 10 people promoting the venture.

I’ve seen several of these now, and they can all work if you are willing to put in the time and effort.

** 99 cent sale (or just a sale) ** in which all ten books go on sale at the same time and are promoted for say 3 days or so.

** Book launch ** Several authors get together to promote the launch book while promoting their own work as well.

** Blog Events ** Such as Penny Zeller’s Christmas Memories Event.  Many authors participate and direct traffic to the blog for that time period.

** 30 Days: 30 Books ** This is one I participated in during January.  The blog offered a different book for a giveaway every day for a month.

 

The problem I’ve seen with book giveaways is that it gives no one an incentive to go buy your book.  If you’re looking for increased visibility, this can work.  If you’re looking to increase sales, not so much.

In each of these ventures, the participating authors created landing pages via guest blogs and blogs on their own sites.  They did interviews and tweeted and posted like crazy about the event.  They got their friends involved in helping them cross-promote.

So setting these up and running them can be a very good way to raise your visibility.  Participating in several throughout the year can also help if you get into the right ones.

Some of the links in the post above are “affiliate links.” This means if you click on the link and purchase the item, we will receive an affiliate commission. Regardless, we only recommend products or services we believe will add value to our readers.

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Twitter: A Spreadsheet Strategy

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August 2, 2012 | No comments yet

Before we leave the topic of Twitter, I want to touch on two things. The first is how often to tweet.  When I first hit Twitter, this was not a problem because there are only so many hours in the day.  Then I realized with Hootsuite that I could schedule tweets rapidly over…

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Twitter: Tools to Use It

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July 31, 2012 | No comments yet

Now that we’ve learned to write tweets for Twitter, it’s time to take it to the next level. Obviously if you have a life, the last thing you want to do is sit for hours sending out tweets.  Worse, I think as an intermediate effort, I don’t think Twitter is very effective.  You…

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Twitter: @’s, More hidden gold!

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July 26, 2012 | No comments yet

Last time we talked about hashtags.  This time I’ve got more Twitter Gold for you.  I call these the @’s. The idea of the @’s is that these are people on Twitter who will graciously distribute your information to their lists if you send them the information. I discovered one such angel quite…

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Twitter: Hashtags, What They Are, How to Use Them

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July 24, 2012 | 5 Comments

We have now come to one of the most well-kept “secrets” of really leveraging Twitter.  They are called hashtags, and they look like this: #greatbooks #money #hope Basically anything you put a # before until the next space is a hashtag, and they are endless. #MakingMoneyFromHome #TakeYourKidtoWorkDay #TreesAreLovely Some hashtags are shortened to…

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Twitter Posts: How to Write Them

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July 19, 2012 | No comments yet

Let’s talk a little about the “language barrier” on Twitter. The idea of Twitter is that you can follow a TON of information from different sources if it’s all comprised in 140-characters or less.  So you can read the latest about the big fire that’s in the news and something about the temperature…

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