12 Insider Secrets to Launch Your Book Like a Pro | Cameron Herold (Podcast 392)

I reached out to all these people that had YouTube channels interviewing thought leaders on their YouTube channels. And I offered to be on their YouTube channel as a thought leader and walk people through the new content in my book, the Second In Command. Again, they like to do it because it gave a sneak peek to all of their viewers. And that was really good brand building for my book. All right, so I'm asked quite often, how do I market my books? And I'm going to give you the tips on what I've done to market all of my six books. Most recently, the book that I launched a year ago was called the Second In Command. And I'm going to go through kind of the top. I don't know, there's about 10 or 12 points here that I use to really launch that book in the most effective way. And it's from lessons that I learned from launching Double Double and meeting Suck and Free PR Miracle Morning for Entrepreneurs. Vivid Vision. And then again, most recently, the Second in Command. So here it is, in no specific order. These are the things that I did to launch my book. And by the way, I did this all in house. I didn't go and spend, you know, 30, $40,000 to try to become on a New York Times bestsellers list. I just wanted a lot of people to read the book and really wanted to push it out. Kind of highlight and handsome. So here's what I did to make it happen. Number one, I wrote a really good book. And this isn't bragging, but I really wanted to make sure that people talked about and remarked about the book that they would leave Amazon reviews about the book. So I just wrote a really freaking good book. I also got a lot of my Second Command podcast guests. So this is point number two. I got a lot of my Second Command podcast guests, and I got a lot of our COO alliance members to be in the book. And because they were in the book, they were quoted in the book, their name was in the book. I was able to reach out to them, about 40 people in total, and ask them to push out the book to their audience. And that made a big deal because they were already raving fans. They told their audience about it clearly, they bought copies of the book and they left Amazon reviews. Number three, I created a list of about 200 people that I knew that were well connected, that I knew well enough to pull my political capital and ask them for a favor. And the favor being, can you go buy a copy of the book right now, like on launch day or launch week? And not to get number one Amazon, but so that I could get early reader reviews on Amazon. And then I asked them can you buy a copy of the book and, and can you leave an Amazon review a week or so later? And then I reached out to them two more times and tracked it until they said yes, that they'd done it. And then I started looking to see on Amazon if they'd done it or not. And I reached out to people that hadn't a third time to push them and I got about a hundred reviews that way really quickly. I actually pushed very, very quickly in the first week to get a hundred views. I asked all of our COO alliance referral partners to email their list about the book. So I refer digital marketing firms, fractional CFOs, fractional CMOs, executive search firms, M and A firms, all kinds of really great companies that I refer my clients to and our CEO alliance members to. So I asked all of those co alliance partners to email their lists about my book and because I've been sending them so much clients or so many clients over the last number of years, they all felt that reciprocity to do that for me and that was really powerful. Next one. I had some pre made social media links set up. So you know when you get those emails it's like click here and it posts on Facebook and, and then when you click on the link it opens Facebook and it kind of pre populates a post for you. I had those pre populated links set up for Facebook and Twitter and Instagram or LinkedIn so that it made it very easy for people to click on the link. It opened it up, it had the image of my book on it. It said here's my friend Cameron Herold's new book, the second in command. Here's a link on Amazon and they could just kind of click send, real simple. So I made it very easy for them to send that out. Number five. I asked my list. I got this idea from Dan Martell who runs SaaS Academy and his elite coaching program. I'm also a member of his elite coaching program and Dan and I have been friends forever. He's one of the smartest business minds out there. Dan had told me to ask if people have a newsletter and can they cover my book in their newsletter. So I did that and that was really powerful because a lot of people again want to leverage off my name, they want to share what I'm doing with their list. Kind of like one, I scratch your back, you scratch mine. The fact that I have a brand now and I've been doing some cool stuff with the CEO alliance and my invest in your leaders course. They're happy to mention my new book to their list because it shows that they're friends with me. So because they had a newsletter and they were able to announce it to their list early, that made them look good. I offered to do YouTube lives with people. So many people are looking for great podcast guests. So I reached out to all these people that had YouTube channels interviewing thought leaders on their YouTube channels, and I offered to be on their YouTube channel as a thought leader and walk people through the new content in my book, the second command. Again, they like to do it because it gave a sneak peek to all of their viewers. And that was really good brand building. For my book, the next one, I did LinkedIn Lives. I did LinkedIn Lives about my book. And the same thing as doing the YouTube lives, I did LinkedIn lives. I also did some Instagram lives with people and that actually drove traffic. So I did some LinkedIn lives on my own where I talked about the content and I had all these people show up and they got to ask me questions. And then I also was on people's Instagram lives talking about the book. And it's really easy because all of these people are looking for guests every week. So if you reach out to them and say, hey, I've got a new book coming out, can I be on your show? They're probably going to say yes because they're always looking for great content. I then also offered a bunch of people off Facebook and LinkedIn. I said, if you buy 50 copies of my book, I I will speak to your audience for free. Normally it's $10,000 to help me do a one hour Zoom call. You just buy 50 copies of my book, which is 500 bucks, 600 bucks, all speak to your audience for free, and you can give away that copy of your book to all your audience. And I had a bunch of people take me up on that. So I sold a bunch of books. But then I was also able to take that video content and share that with my audience. And they were sharing the content of me speaking with their audience. So I got a lot of different hits off of that one. I also asked all of the podcasts that I was being a guest on to buy copies of my book for their audience, and many of them did. A bunch of them bought 100 copies, 200 copies of my book, the second in command. They gave it away to their audience. They mailed it out to their audience, and that was pretty huge. I also reached out to my email list and offered to send a copy of my book, the second in command, to any COOs who were in the United States or Canada. As long as their company did more than 5 million in revenue, I would mail them a copy of that book for free. That got a lot of momentum and a lot of positive word of mouth and a lot of great Amazon reviews. I think we're probably up to number 10 right now. I reached out to every Mastermind community that I've ever paid to be a member of. So Genius Network and Strategic Coach and eo, Mastermind Talks and Mavericks and gobundance and Wayfinders, all the different groups that I've paid to be in. I reached out to them and asked them if I could speak to their group about the second in command and if I could mail copies of my book to their members. Some of them bought copies of the book, some of them. I paid for the copies of the book and I mailed them out to their mailing list. One of the groups gave me their entire mailing list mailing address. I sent a copy of the book and then I burned the list afterwards. But it was a great way to get my book into all their audiences. And One Group had 350 CEOs. They bought 350 copies and they sent it out to all their members. So it was a great way for me to add value to their membership. I gave them a discount on that. I think they paid ten dollars per book, including shipping. So I still made about four or five bucks a book. But I pushed huge numbers of copies of the book out to really big influencers and communities that I was targeting as members. Oh, I direct message. I think this is probably number 11. I DM about 1,000 people on Facebook and Instagram. I DM'd a bunch of them myself. And I'm like, this is going to drive me crazy. I outsourced it to an assistant and I got them too, for like five bucks an hour from the Philippines. They went into my Facebook accounts and into my Instagram accounts. They DMed about a thousand people for me, just a thousand random people. And we let them know about the book and asked them to buy an early copy. And many of those people did. And then lastly, this is probably a bit of a silver bullet number 12. I put as a PS automatically on every email signature for me and all of the employees on my team. P.S. check out Cameron's new book on Amazon. The amount of people that replied to those emails saying, oh wow, thanks so much. I just bought your book was astounding to me. It's amazing because on the sales letters, the PS below, the signature is always the number one thing read on a sales letter. So I just used that simple PS in all of my emails and that was huge as well. So I think that's about 12 different tips for you. Lots of great videos down below. You want to subscribe and follow and watch some more of those.

So many things could have been automated. The recruiting team didn't need to spend too much time collecting information on replica role, right? There's a lot of items like that, and it's just really getting to understand who is doing what. I'm kind of a nerd on the back end of it all, so I already knew a lot of these tools, workflows, automations.