Day 42: Made my first sales funnel!
I spent yesterday and today reading marketing books, taking notes, and then doing the homework and coming up with a sales funnel. Before reading Prosperous Creation: Make Art and Make Money at the Same Time I didn’t even know what a sales funnel was, but the book did a good job explaining the basics of general marketing to a complete newbie.
I also learned a lot from Get Your Book Selling: Jumpstart Your Sales With a Simple Plan That Just Works (Growth Hacking For Storytellers 7) by the same author (update: it’s no longer available). She talked about what a marketing strategy is, lists 15 different ones and explains how to use each one, and then gives guidance about how to choose one (or two) for creating your sales funnel. (While I would assume she’d mention marketing strategies in one of her other books that replaced this one, I don’t know which one it is.)
She then also goes more in depth into the 10 Stages of Audience, which she had mentioned briefly in Prosperous Creation. I was able to create a sales funnel by just coming up with tactics that connected the dots between each of the 10 Stages of Audience. The tactics had to match the marketing strategy I’d chosen, so I was able to more easily decide on tactics depending on if it aligned with my marketing strategy or not. It was so much simpler than I thought marketing would be!
Coming up with tactics was hard, though. The two above books gave more general guidelines for marketing (although she did give a few examples). So I depended on some other books for marketing tactics and ideas:
Reader Magnets: Build Your Author Platform and Sell more Books on Kindle (2019 Edition) (Book Marketing for Authors 1) is FREE! How awesome is that? The marketing tactics are used for books in multiple platforms and not Kindle Unlimited, but a similar tactic for a Kindle Unlimited author is shown in Six Figure Author below.
Launch to Market: Easy Marketing For Authors (Write Faster, Write Smarter Book 4) was a nice, short but comprehensive book on launching a novel. The combination of this book and the one below rounded out a good general explanation of launching on Amazon and the various things needed. However, this was the book that gave me anxiety about all the marketing I had to do, and my friend MaryLu Tyndall had to remind me that I don’t have to do all of it because God is in control of my marketing. When I had calmed down, the book ended up being very helpful to me because it gave a lot of tactics I could do, but I didn’t have to do all of them.
Six Figure Author: Using Data to Sell Books: Write Faster, Write Smarter really appealed to my geeky side. He explains the general principles behind the Amazon algorithms, and it was fascinating. He also lists some more marketing tactics and goes into more detail on some of them that he had briefly mentioned in Launch to Market.
Writing and Releasing Rapidly (Indie Inspiration for Self-Publishers Book 1) was probably my favorite book out of all of them. She has a breezy writing style that made marketing seem like a walk along the beach—sometimes you get hit by a beach ball, and sometimes you run after your kids before they fall in the water, but in general you go at your own pace. She also did a lot of experimentation with launches and gives the hard data that resulted from them, which was fascinating. She explains each of the tactics she used, her experience with them, and how they resulted financially.
So I came up with a sales funnel for my Lady Wynwood’s Spies series. I’ve never made a sales funnel, ever! But I also knew I had to start my marketing now before I even really got going into writing the rough drafts. There are a lot of little things I have to do, and I don’t want to be rushing to do it all the month before I launch the book. Just the thought of the stress gives me hives.
There are several things I need to start on now, such as deciding on if I’ll have a Reader Magnet, and if so, what it will be. Some general things I can set up right now, such as my newsletter landing pages, and learning how to segment my readers. Further down the line I’ll need to learn how to do Facebook and Amazon ads, but I can put that off until a couple months before launch of volume 1.
I’m pretty pleased with myself for doing all this stuff for the first time today. As a research scientist, I never did anything marketing-related or sales-related, so this was entirely new territory. The first two books by Monica Leonelle were especially helpful for introducing all these business concepts.
I also feel a bit more secure in my marketing for this series now that I have a game plan. And the best part about self-publishing is the ability to experiment and tweak things!
I also learned a lot from Get Your Book Selling: Jumpstart Your Sales With a Simple Plan That Just Works (Growth Hacking For Storytellers 7) by the same author (update: it’s no longer available). She talked about what a marketing strategy is, lists 15 different ones and explains how to use each one, and then gives guidance about how to choose one (or two) for creating your sales funnel. (While I would assume she’d mention marketing strategies in one of her other books that replaced this one, I don’t know which one it is.)
She then also goes more in depth into the 10 Stages of Audience, which she had mentioned briefly in Prosperous Creation. I was able to create a sales funnel by just coming up with tactics that connected the dots between each of the 10 Stages of Audience. The tactics had to match the marketing strategy I’d chosen, so I was able to more easily decide on tactics depending on if it aligned with my marketing strategy or not. It was so much simpler than I thought marketing would be!
Coming up with tactics was hard, though. The two above books gave more general guidelines for marketing (although she did give a few examples). So I depended on some other books for marketing tactics and ideas:
Reader Magnets: Build Your Author Platform and Sell more Books on Kindle (2019 Edition) (Book Marketing for Authors 1) is FREE! How awesome is that? The marketing tactics are used for books in multiple platforms and not Kindle Unlimited, but a similar tactic for a Kindle Unlimited author is shown in Six Figure Author below.
Launch to Market: Easy Marketing For Authors (Write Faster, Write Smarter Book 4) was a nice, short but comprehensive book on launching a novel. The combination of this book and the one below rounded out a good general explanation of launching on Amazon and the various things needed. However, this was the book that gave me anxiety about all the marketing I had to do, and my friend MaryLu Tyndall had to remind me that I don’t have to do all of it because God is in control of my marketing. When I had calmed down, the book ended up being very helpful to me because it gave a lot of tactics I could do, but I didn’t have to do all of them.
Six Figure Author: Using Data to Sell Books: Write Faster, Write Smarter really appealed to my geeky side. He explains the general principles behind the Amazon algorithms, and it was fascinating. He also lists some more marketing tactics and goes into more detail on some of them that he had briefly mentioned in Launch to Market.
Writing and Releasing Rapidly (Indie Inspiration for Self-Publishers Book 1) was probably my favorite book out of all of them. She has a breezy writing style that made marketing seem like a walk along the beach—sometimes you get hit by a beach ball, and sometimes you run after your kids before they fall in the water, but in general you go at your own pace. She also did a lot of experimentation with launches and gives the hard data that resulted from them, which was fascinating. She explains each of the tactics she used, her experience with them, and how they resulted financially.
So I came up with a sales funnel for my Lady Wynwood’s Spies series. I’ve never made a sales funnel, ever! But I also knew I had to start my marketing now before I even really got going into writing the rough drafts. There are a lot of little things I have to do, and I don’t want to be rushing to do it all the month before I launch the book. Just the thought of the stress gives me hives.
There are several things I need to start on now, such as deciding on if I’ll have a Reader Magnet, and if so, what it will be. Some general things I can set up right now, such as my newsletter landing pages, and learning how to segment my readers. Further down the line I’ll need to learn how to do Facebook and Amazon ads, but I can put that off until a couple months before launch of volume 1.
I’m pretty pleased with myself for doing all this stuff for the first time today. As a research scientist, I never did anything marketing-related or sales-related, so this was entirely new territory. The first two books by Monica Leonelle were especially helpful for introducing all these business concepts.
I also feel a bit more secure in my marketing for this series now that I have a game plan. And the best part about self-publishing is the ability to experiment and tweak things!
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