There are many ways to use your book to engage people, and today we’re looking at a mixed bag of possibilities.
Your comfort with creating new ‘things,’ the skills you have, and the audience you already engage with will all influence how you choose to use your book, but by looking at many options today, we’ll get to cover something for everyone.
Creating your book gives you the flagship asset, the thing that encourages people to raise their hand, but to support that, you have the opportunity to make many smaller pieces that move the conversations forward.
The good news is you’ve done all the hard work already. Now it’s a case of amplifying your message in the simplest way possible.
Let us get started
okay, so your book is complete; you’ve grabbed some of the low-hanging fruit, some of the easy options. You’ve dealt with or engaged with people who already know “I can trust you.”
Press Release
A press release is one of the first things you can think about doing. The value of a press release varies depending on how it’s used, and many courses, YouTube videos or experts in the field can dive into it. If for whatever reason, this is something you really want to use to amplify what you’ve created, then there are a lot of other resources there. What we want to do here is really hit on two or three low-cost or no-cost ideas to get a good amount of bang for your buck, as it were, but not necessarily going into maximizing this element, or indeed any of these.
Press releases in 2008… 2009 were often used for SEO. They were a way of getting links back to the sites, and there was a mass production element to them just to get them out there. That isn’t really that relevant anymore, but there is an opportunity to put a press release out there, as long as you craft it in such a way that it communicates value.
You’re really trying to engage those people who are actively interested in what you’re doing. The way to do that is not just to create something but to create something that is valuable and relevant and communicates a little bit more of the message. If you have never written or prepared a press release, search for templates online that will guide you adequately on the process. Link Hubspot here.
Mind Maps
We’ll discuss creating other assets to support the book’s release and give you assets you can refer to elsewhere. Taking the hard work you’ve already done to make the text and recreate other things based on it that can be used in different formats. Another great example is a mind map.
I find mind maps very useful. Suppose you can take the outline of your book that you’ve created, even if it’s just working from putting the title in the center, the next layer outputting the chapter headings, and the next layer out from that going sort of 1-2-3 layers deep just on the salient vital points. In that case, it’s almost reverse engineering how the book was created in the first place. I know not everyone’s like that, but many people are.
How does this tie into the mixed bag, you may ask? In a previous post, we discussed the 5-step email sequence. In that sequence, we talked about an informational email. This email serves the purpose of amplifying a thought or boosting the conversation.
YouTube
You can take some of the content you’ve already got and break it down chapter by chapter into small segments. You don’t need to put the whole thing. You don’t need to read the entire book into a YouTube video and have it up there as a single video.
Within the book, there will be fifty talking points that you’ve got underneath the five main chapters. There will be ten individual things that you can do a brief video on.
It is worthwhile in some cases to create a video specifically for one use case. In talking about it, talk about it from the point of view of that particular channel and specialized niche. It’s a way of creating things tailored to the audience, tailored to the purpose, because then you’ll have videos to which you can point people in addition to the other things we were talking about.
To Conclude,
There are many opportunities for getting your book out to your intended target market. For more possibilities, click here and listen to the book more show podcast, where Stuart and Betsey dive deeper into the subject.