3 Ways Authors Can Use Giveaways and Contests

Today is a Hit splits episode for Author audience.

Welcome to the Author Audience show, the podcast that helps you reach more people with your message. Create a book, connect with your audience, change lives. Here's your host, Shelly Hitz.

Giveaways Authors can use them for multiple reasons. I'm going to share with you three ways you as an author can use giveaways. Hi, my name is Shelly Hitz. I'm the best selling author of over 40 books. I'm the creator of authoraudienceacademy.com I'm on a mission to help you reach more people with your message. Today I'm going to Share with you 3 ways authors can use giveaways to sell more books. The first way is, is to build buzz. So you can use a giveaway to simply build buzz. You could use it to build your email list. You could use it to grow your Facebook fans or Twitter followers or whatever platform you're focusing on. I really recommend that you use it to build your email list. That is property you own, Facebook and Twitter. It's kind of like you rent that space and it could get closed down at any time. But, but you can build buzz. And giveaways are something fun, something that doesn't feel spammy. Like buy my book. It's like, hey, I have this cool prize and I love to give it to you. Here's how to enter. You want to make it as easy as possible. You could simply do a giveaway on your Facebook page. You can have them do different things. And something that's really cool for authors is to have those who buy your book take a selfie with their book or a selfie of the book or a picture of the book anywhere. You know, it could be picture of the book on the beach or a picture. You know, you can get really creative with these photo contests and have a cool prize. You could do the photo contest on Instagram or on Pinterest, depending on your niche. And there are so many different ideas. And use a special hashtag that is for your book. It is so fun. Like these types of things are things that can go viral. Now it has to be set up right. So I recommend that you do some brainstorming. I love doing a brain dump and I recommend doing that. Get a blank piece of paper or go to your whiteboard or on your mind map or wherever you like to brainstorm and make sure you have a good solid strategy in place of how you want to do this. You know, what kind of hashtag are you going to use? Which platform are you going to focus on what kind of prize are you going to give all these things. But it helps it to build buzz about you, about your brand and about your book. Especially if you're getting pictures of your book or people with pictures of your book, you know. But you can do all sorts of contests. The second way that authors can use contests are to sell books. So you could actually have a contest where anyone who buys your book during a certain amount of time gets entered in to a contest for a really cool prize. Maybe you give away a hundred dollar Amazon gift card or maybe you have a really cool partner that donates a prize. So maybe you're like, Shelly, I just don't have $100 cash and I'm not sure I'm going to be able to get back $100 in royalties. And I just don't want to take that risk. Find a partner. You guys find a way. Really look at all the options. You can find a way to. I did a big book launch for one of my books. I approached a bunch of different, similar types of businesses that offered different software or different things and a bunch of places donated prizes. You can definitely find a way to get a prize. So the first way was to build buzz. The second way is to sell books. The third way is to engage your customers. Or if you have a membership site, you can use it to engage your members. I have a membership authoraudienceacademy.com and I just got this idea yesterday. I saw it in a Facebook group. Someone said that they run these contests in their membership. And I thought, oh, that's a fun idea. I brainstormed with cj. We were yesterday brainstorming in the gym. We were side by side on treadmills. How fun is that? And we were brainstorming ideas and we decided, let's do a contest for Author Audience Academy members. So every month I have a different challenge. It's either a live workshop or it's maybe a seven day incremental challenge. This month it's the Kindle to Print challenge. So that'd be fun to do a special contest. And I just announced it to my members. But I just said, you know, we decided we want to give away a $50Amazon gift card to everyone who finishes this challenge. So it's to motivate my members to take action. It's proven that when you're able to, whether it's free content like your opt in or it's your book or it's a product. And if you've been following me, you know I recommend you have some products on the back end to sell as well. Membership sites are amazing, but if you have some sort of content that your customer, your reader is consuming, if they consume it and implement it and get results, they're more than likely to sing your praises to stay around longer. And so the more my members implement and get results, the more likely they're going to want to stay in the membership. Right. Makes sense. So we're doing this contest for anyone who finishes within 30 days. So our live workshop is tomorrow and if you would love to join us, you can still get in by joining@authoraudienceacademy.com if you are a member. We're going to be doing it live tomorrow, 1pm Eastern. And then you have 30 days to complete all the steps. Publish your book as print. And then what I did for my contest is I won a selfie of them with their book, their book baby. They're giving birth to a new book, birth to a print book. And I'm going to actually promote them on my blog. So I'm going to do a blog post with all their pictures and links to their books and then I'm going to randomly choose a winner for that $50 gift certificate. So it's fun. Contests can really be fun. You can make it whatever you want and I'll see how this goes and we'll probably do some more in the future months in Author Audience Academy. I'll probably do some for my list or here on Facebook and we'll just see how it goes. But I encourage you to really start thinking, like, what is one way I can use giveaways to grow my business to get buzz, number one, number two, to sell more books, or number three, to engage my customers and members. Contests are amazing. So a couple tools that you can use. I have used rafflecopter.com Rafflecopter is a free tool and it does have a paid service. You can also use kingsumo.com it's a plugin for WordPress sites. And you can also just do it from your Facebook page. You know, have them do something or Pinterest or wherever you want to do the contest. Amazon now offers you the ability to do a giveaway for any book on Amazon. So you can actually go to that book page and you can set up a book. You can giveaway. You could choose a book that you love that's given you tons and tons of value, that has really helped you and choose to use that as a giveaway. You'd have to think about like the result that you want out of the giveaway and figure out like the best way to do it. Because what I recommend doing is having some way where they're like submitting to sign up to your email list or they're, you know, they're somehow doing an action where they're going to have a relationship with you. You know they're going to continue that relationship. The take action tip is think. Think about what you can do with contests and giveaways in your business for your books, to build buzz, to sell more books, to engage your members, or maybe it's even to engage people in a free Facebook group or wherever your tribe is, wherever your lifers are, you can use contests and giveaways to engage them, to get them to implement what you're teaching so they get results and so that they want to stick around and, and I'll see you next time. Bye Bye.

Thanks for listening to this episode of the Author Audience Show. Connect with us online@authoraudience.com where you'll find all the resources mentioned in today's episode. While you're there, grab Shelley's free video training on how to write and publish your book using her Six Step Ascent method. Join us again next week to learn how to reach your audience with your message.