My Favorite FREE Strategy for Getting More Exposure to Your Ideal Reader Who is Ready & Excited to Buy Your Book

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.

Welcome to the five Day Author Platform Challenge. Today is day number four and today is all about my my favorite free strategy for getting more exposure to your ideal reader who is ready and excited to buy your book. Hi, my name is Shelly Hitz. I'm the best selling author of over 40 books and the list keeps growing. I am the creator of authoraudienceacademy.com and I'm on a mission to help you reach more people with your message. It's time to let your light shine. Today I am going to talk with you about the L in the Build and Grow acronym. This is all for the launch of my book, nine Strategies to Build and Grow youw Author Platform.

I just published the print version last week and so I'm celebrating this week with the launch and with the five Day Author platform. Now I have been just trying to give you as much value as I've been able to give you this week. Well, we're going to dive in today. Today is day four and during these five days I've been covering the acronym build. The B was bridge to your readers. If they don't know you exist, then you're like an island. The you is understanding your target audience, your ideal reader. And that day, day number two, if you've not watched that video, you need to go watch that video and asap. Because that training just really helped a lot of people get clarity and really get crystal clear on who they're marketing to. When you get that part clear, your marketing is not. It's going to just be so much easier, more fun, more enjoyable and more effective. The I in the Build acronym is invite. So yesterday we talked all about permission marketing and what that means and what it looks like and how you can do without being pushy and salesy and self promotional. Today is L. L is linking together with others. How many of you know that there is power when we link together? You know, think about linking arms. When we link together with others, it can be powerful. One of the most powerful book launches I did was back in 2012. And that was the year that my husband and I wrote and published 23 books. Wow. We were just obsessed with writing and publishing books and that's when book royalties started to become thousands of dollars of our income and be able to help us pay our bills. Most of you know my story on that, but it was 2012 and I was really going through a time. I wouldn't say I was depressed, but I was really having some struggles. And I just sensed that God was asking me to go through a gratitude challenge. And they say it takes 21 days to form a a habit. So for 21 days, I wrote out three things I was grateful for in my journal. I wrote out thank you notes, just notes of gratitude and thankfulness to people. I was thankful for every day of the challenge and I kept a journal. Well, I thought it was just for me, but later on I just really sensed God asking me to share this with others. It made such a huge difference for me. And So I published 21 days of gratitude Challenge. It's now called the Gratitude Journal. And literally one week after I published that book, I organized and pulled off one of the biggest, most successful group promotions that I've done.

Crazy. Like I broke every book marketing rule. Like you're not supposed to plan a book launch or a group promotion in a week. Hello.

But there was so much power. A bunch of us Christian authors came together. We did a big promotion of our books and some of them were free, some of them were 99 cents. And it was incredible. That was really before the idea of group promotions became very big. And so it was new. That's the thing too that I want you just to keep thinking, like, how can I do things just a little bit different? How can I put my own twist on this? With that group promotion, it just skyrocketed my book to best selling status. I sold hundreds of books and it just continued. That series has been my best selling series on gratitude. I want you to think about what are different ways that I can link together with others as I'm building and growing my author platform. My brand is author audience. And the reason is because when you have a platform, when you're marketing a book, when you have a message, say you're standing on a stage and you have a message and you have an empty auditorium, what kind of impact will you have?

There's no one in your auditorium. If there's no one like on your subscriber list or following you, or if you don't have anyone in your tribe yet, it kind of falls flat. You're standing in front of an empty auditorium. But think about this. What if you were able to go to another neighboring town and there was someone else there, they had an auditorium and they had this similar type of person that you wanted to speak to and, and they invited you to speak on their stage to their jam packed standing room. Only auditorium. How would that feel? What would it feel like? I'm a speaker. So if I know like I'm standing on a stage and there's like two people, there's a different vibe. There's a different feeling than if it's jam packed and people are like excited and ready to hear your message. That's the power of linking together with others. Because in your niche, whatever niche you're in, there is somebody out there that's already been build a platform that's already gathered the tribe of the people that you want to reach. There's somebody out there that already has all the blog followers, the email subscribers, and there's so many different ways that it can be a win win that you can link together with them. But when you're thinking about this, I definitely want you to think of it being a win win. Because if it's only going to benefit you, do you think the other person is going to be like excited, excited to share their stage and share their tribe with you? Probably not. Yeah. I'm seeing those win wins come in and.

We all start at the same place. When we're building our author platform, guess where we start? 0 we all start at the same place. I did too. I was an unknown author just a few years ago. I published my first book in 2008 and still in 2012, I was fairly unknown. We'd sold some books. We'd had our first number one Amazon bestseller launch the December before in December 2011. But I was really still fairly unknown. My lists were not very big yet. Through linking together with other people, I was able to to gain momentum and really see my author platform begin to grow. Now I have two different platforms. I have platforms for Christian living readers and then I have my author platform. I also have one for teen girls. Right now I'm focusing mostly on the authors, but at that time I was focusing a lot on my Christian books, my Christian readers and some of the things that you can do to link together with others is guest blogging. It's nothing new. You've heard it over and over again. But I want you to think, is there any little twist that I can put on guest blogging? I love for you guys to think about what are my strengths and how can I implement and integrate my strengths into my marketing. If you are a speaker like I am or if you are more comfortable in audio or video, most people are not comfortable on video. If that's something you could do if consider doing a podcast tour or an audio tour like I did, that before where I recorded audios and then I had different people host me and the audios were the main form of the content. Kind of different, right? I did another one where I did it was for my gratitude series around Thanksgiving, I did a 21 video series on 21 Ways to Express gratitude at Thanksgiving. These are practical ways, practical tips. And every single video was hosted on a different blog. I was just looking at those videos the other day. My hair was a lot shorter and I was like, oh my goodness. I just remember pumping out those videos one day, one right after the other. I had a system, I had a template, and I sent everything out to the 21 bloggers. But wow, you can think outside the box for your blog tour. I do have a list of blog hosts@trainingauthors.com if you are interested in doing a blog tour and you just want to check and see if there are any hosts on there that might be applicable for you, it's trainingauthors.com blog hosts and that will take you to the list. Now, when you're doing guest blogging, one of the biggest mistakes I see authors doing is setting up a bunch of blogs that have also a very small audience. If you're invited onto a stage and that person's audience is empty as well, is it going to be very effective? Probably not. You want to really be strategic when you're doing the blog tour. One of the things you can do is if there's a bigger blog that you want to get exposure on. Sometimes you can just kind of get to know the person and find out when are they going to be on vacation, when are they going to be at a speaking engagement, when are they going to be busy with a launch and say, hey, I saw you have this launch coming up, I saw you're going to this speaking engagement and I know you love to have fresh content in your blog. I have this really great blog post that I think would be great for your audience. Would you be interested in using it while during that season that you're going to be busy? See how that's a win win for you and the blog host. Another way to link together with others is to do a podcast tour. I'm planning at some point, not right this second, because I have to stay focused, focus, focused. But I would love to just do a podcast tour blitz where I just get featured on podcast after podcast after podcast after podcast in a very short period of time. So that wherever people are looking, they just start seeing me. They see me on everything. Now I'm Getting interviews regularly, like sometimes almost like once a week. I'm still getting them just organically. But what if I took the focused energy and really set up a ton of interviews? Then it's like I'm getting exposure to their audience, getting exposure to them. And you want to make sure you have a link that goes to a really valuable gift, your lead magnet. So you're building your list while you're guest blogging or while you're on your podcast tour or those sorts of things. One of the speakers, Kadena, she was like, she gets all her clients by speaking locally. And most of the time I think she does it for free. And she has like high paying clients. I sell more books at speaking engagements than probably just about any other time except for like a book launch or something like that. But, you know, you can speak for free. It's another audience that you're getting exposed to. And when you speak for free, make sure you have your clipboard with a list so they can put their name and their email, you pass it around. It's positive peer pressure, right? Because if everyone's writing their name on the list to sign up for your list and get your free gift, they're like, it's kind of like, I'm going to write mine down too. But it's ethical. You're getting them into your tribe, but you can do that through spot speaking and just speaking for free. Now this is something that I've seen more of in the last few years. Have you guys purchased any book bundles on Kindle? Like a book bundle where it's like multiple authors, so maybe like five authors all have their books in that book bundle. So you might get five books for like $0.99 or $2.99 or something like that. And what you want to do is when you decide to do a book bundle like that, you want to be strategic and choose other authors that are related to you and you want to have authors that also have platforms of your ideal audience because then you can pull together your marketing power to promote that book bundle. That is a really great idea. I was actually going to do this with two, two other author coaches and we were considering doing this last year, but one of the other ones, she was just too busy at the time and it just never took off. But I wanted to do it because I just think it's such a great idea. And then you use the marketing power of all of you to drive to that book. And the goal is not just to sell that book, but the goal is to get them on your email list to sell your other books. So you have to have calls to action in the book that you include in that book bundle. Like I mentioned earlier, group promotions are a great way. I have done a lot, a lot of group promotions and I organized a lot of them as well. And what you do is you basically want to come up with a theme. You want to come up with some sort of theme for your promotion. And I've done different ones. Like we did like a back to school one or shop til you'll drop. We did something like that near Christmas. I think we did a March Madness group promotion before, something in July. So come up with some sort of fun theme, I think something that would be really cool. My wheels have been turning to think of something I could do, maybe with author audience, academy members. But wouldn't it be fun to like gather some similar authors and then do a scavenger hunt of some sort? And it has to be done in the right way, like to get people to want to engage and to want to do it and to want to have certain prizes and I don't know, I mean, I'm still kind of figuring out the idea. But what if you did something like that where it's like a scavenger hunt but you had several different people coming together and you pull together all of your marketing power and so you end up getting new people onto your email list, into your tribe, buying your books, and it can be a win, win situation for both of you. So my biggest tip for you right now is to be creative. If you do the same thing everyone else is doing.

Guess what? You're going to blend in. Scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll. Oh, I've seen that before. Yeah. But what if you do something a little different, a twist to it, something that hasn't been done before that's just a little bit different or has a different feeling theme or I mean, think outside the box, be creative. When I first started doing group promotions in 2012, people weren't really doing them. Now a lot of people are doing them and the effectiveness is not as much. When we first started having KDP Select, I mean, I started in the KDP select program the month after it was launched. And those first few months, whoa, it was so effective because there wasn't as much. It was so new. It was like, ooh, a free Kindle book. It was so new and everyone was downloading all the Kindle books they could. And now it's like, oh, my Kindle book is full, or my Kindle is full of free Books. Do I really want to download this free book? It has to be something I really want. There's just that natural effect that something that has been done over and over and over and over and over, people may start to tune it out a little bit. So. So that's part of the fun of marketing, though. Do we have any creatives in the house? But you get to be creative. You get to let the creative juices flow and just brainstorm and think of different ways you can do things that it won't just blend in, but it would just stand out. And I want you to use those creative powers to build your platform. Because when you're linking together with others, you're doing these things, whether it's the guest blogging, it's the podcast tours, it's the speaking, it's the group promotions, the book bundles, whatever it is, when you have your own unique creative twist to it, then that's when it's like, oh, wow, that's cool. And then just think about JV relationships. So a JV is a joint venture, and there can be a lot of different ways you do joint ventures. So one option would be if you know there's somebody else that's similar to you in your niche, you could agree to promote each other. So say, I'll send an email for you. If you'll send an email for me to your list, it would need to probably be somewhat of a similar list size. I mean, it doesn't have to be. Or I'll promote you on my Facebook page and you would promote me. And obviously you would want it to be someone that you would want to promote. But those are similar types of things. Like that could be JV relationships. Or maybe they have a book reviewer list that they built like I do. I have a very powerful book review list. And for my inner circle members, occasionally I will email my book review list and they'll end up getting dozens of reviews. Because I put the time and the effort I've built that I have loyal book reviewers and they're active, they want more books, they want to post them. And so that's obviously another idea. But there's so many ideas and ways that you can work together with others. You just have to think of how is it going to be a win win for that. You can approach group owners in Facebook. So if there's a certain niche that you're in, there's a very powerful and very active Facebook group. You could approach the owner privately and talk to them about a JV relationship, maybe where they are willing to review your book and post their review in their group. Or, or you send them a free copy and so they'll post a review. Or maybe they'll do some advertising for you in exchange for something else. Or you actually pay them for that too. I mean, you could do that, but there's so many options, you guys.

I just want you to think of one thing. So your take action tip for today's training is write down one idea. One. At least one. If you have 10, that's fine. But at least one idea of a way that you can link together with someone else that has an established platform that it could be a win win. Remember, because I get people that email me all the time wanting me to promote their stuff. It's like, I don't know you, I don't trust you. I don't promote people unless I believe in what they do. I know them, I've used their products, that sort of thing. So I mean, it has to be the right situation. All right, here is your options. If you need the options again, you could do guest blogging, guest interviews, speaking for free, book bundles, group promotions, or some sort of jv. Well, thank you guys so much for joining me for day four. Tomorrow my husband and I are getting ready to head out of town to the mountains. We are going to have kind of like a four day weekend away. The video will be in the members area if for some reason you're not able to attend live and I will look forward to sharing with you. Day five is the secret to building a tribe of super loyal fans who will promote your books for you. I was just on a one on one coaching call yesterday with someone and day two of this challenge is all about refining your target audience. It's a really, really great training and it really helped a lot of authors think through some things. But I was on this one on one call and it was about kind of refining her messaging and her target audience. The basis of it was figuring out who is her target audience. We went through and we really refined. I said this is what I recommend. This is what I see. After talking with her over that. Well, today she said she was in an Uber and was talking to the driver. Ended up getting in a conversation. Because she got clear on her target audience. Because she got clear on her messaging, she signed up a paying coaching client in the Uber. How awesome is that? That is so super cool. So if you haven't done day two yet, go back and do day two. It is so worth it because when you get clear on that it does. It really super changes everything. Okay, well, anyways, enough on that. I will see you guys tomorrow. If you haven't purchased a print copy of my book yet.

You can get all the information, the links and everything@shellyhits.com photocontest and I want to give you guys a $47 training. And so go get all the information shellyhits.com photocontEST 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.