Launch Day
It's finally time to launch your Guide. You've prepared for this moment, so it's time to finally make some money from your hard work. Like during your pre-launch, the preparations you've made until this point will directly result in sales of your Guide. That said, there are a few last minute strategies you can employ to maximize your exposure, and as a result profits, from your Guide.
Below, there are five sample strategies you can put into practice to maximize your Guides's potential earnings.
Give Away Copies & Get More Reviews
Everyone loves free, especially bloggers and journalists who cover thousands of stories a year. It's hard to pay for every new app, or Guide that comes across their desk. If you were on the fence about giving away copies of your Guide, now's the time to start putting your Guides into the hands of those who could promote your material.
In fact, you could arrange a whole contest and 'giveaway' around your social networks to promote your work, and encourage more people to share your Guide with their own networks.
It's more important now than in earlier stages to generate buzz, and build up testimonials for your work. Turn readers into evangelists, and help evangelists find your work easier by giving them copies of your Guide.
Offer Incentives Through Tiered Pricing
Incentivizing purchases and upgrades will help you maximize your sales revenue. If you want to get people to buy copies of your Guide, give them something of high value in exchange for their time and money. Make their purchase a no-brainer by over-delivering their expectations. The price you charge for your Guide immediately sets expectations for the content value. People expect a Guide that sells for $50.00 to deliver more value than a Guide that's free or $5.00.
Creating a tiered pricing strategy for your content, based on deliverables within your Guide, will help people make decisions on whether or not there's enough value to make a purchase. For instance, offering three versions of your Guide, with three different price points, and three different content values, will not only encourage people to purchase your Guide, but also maximize your earnings because of price-anchoring.
As an example, this is the strategy Nathan Barry -- an expert self-publisher -- employed for his first book:
Furthermore, Jeremy Olson, the founder of Tapity, launched his Guide, App Making: Designing & Marketing Successful Apps, with a similar packing strategy, and earned over 20k in the first 48 hours his guide was on sale. Most people, despite our assumptions, purchased the most expensive package.
You can see Jeremy's pricing table here .
Have An Incredible Blog Post About Your Guide Ready To Go
On launch day, you'll want to have a really incredible blog post about your Guide ready to be published. Make sure you clearly define the problem you're solving, how your Guide solves it, and the reason why people should buy it.
Potential visitors, and anybody who comes across the post or Guide, should realize they need it immediately, and then make a purchase.
Here's are two great examples of Guide authors who have employed this tactic with great success: Nick Eubanks, and Jeremy Olson.
An Aside:
Have a few friends and acquaintances leave real comments and be very diligent in answering all of them as quickly as possible. It's important to show that your work is being consumed and that people are actually engaging with the work in your Guide. Try to avoid encouraging people to provide thoughtless praise on your work; instead, have them ask for clarifications, or more insights on your work.Share Your Guide
On launch day, you should spend a good portion of the day reaching out to influencers privately, and sharing links to your Guide around social networks. It's a fine line between spamming someone and providing useful information these days online, so be respectful. No everyone is going to love your work, so be prepared for that. Today is the culmination of your promotional efforts, so it's time to start promoting your work to all the relevant networks at this point.
In addition to sharing your Guide, you should also re-share guest posts, any coverage of your Guide from other sites, and influencer reviews or blogs on Twitter and Facebook. Try to answer as many questions as possible in the comments sections of your blog, on guest posts, and more importantly on any news coverage posts around the internet.
Seeding Links To Your Guide
It's time to build traffic, and the easiest way to do that is to seed links around the internet where people can find out more information about your Guide. The idea is to leave a trail to your Guide on other websites. Typically, this is done in the comments or in away that allows you to pull that site's audience back to your own site.
Be careful here. We do not mean spamming comment systems with irrelevant links to your Guide. Seek out sites that have active communities already discussing the topic within your Guide. If you provide further insights to the discussion within your Guide, a link to your Guide is appropriate.
The link must be genuine, not spammy, and fit in with the community. For example, on Slideshare, the content you're seeding should be a presentation. It should be visually appealing, interesting, and on point.
It's easy to get carried away, but staying on point within the comment sections on other blogs is by far more successful than spamming every comment system on the internet with a link to your Guide. The goal is to reach out to people who already have interest in the topic matter. People with interest have a higher likelihood of buying your Guide than some random guy, on an unrelated blog, who was tricked into purchasing a Guide through a misleading link.