Are you planning to write a book in the coming year? Discover why September is the perfect time to start your book platform planning. In this episode of Promote Profit Publish, host Juliette Clark shares insights on building a solid foundation for your book launch and beyond. Learn why aligning your messaging across your book, content, and high-ticket offerings is crucial, and how to use analytics to refine your approach. Juliette explores testing your message, growing your audience, and tracking key performance indicators to ensure your platform resonates with your target market. This episode offers essential guidance for creating a strategic plan that sets you up for long-term publishing success.
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Traffic Takeover: Dominate Online Audiences With Influencer Marketing
I’m by myself, but I have an important topic that all of you should be considering. Before we get started on this topic, let me send you over to AIAuthorAcademy.com. We are redoing the course we did back in April which is AI Platform Building. We have a system down that is very streamlined and uses AI to do a lot of the things that you would normally do by hand, which makes it much easier and very easy to automate. With that, you’ll get four group lessons. We have four weeks. Once a week we have a group meeting, and then we break off and you get one hour each week time slot with me to work on your own stuff because I realize from my own teaching experience that it’s easy to take the information in, but sometimes you need a little help executing. I invite you to go over and sign up for that course and join us. It’s all this month in September 2024.
September: Time To Plan Your Book Platform
With that said, September is when you as an entrepreneur or author should start thinking about, “What am I going to do in the new year?” If you’re thinking about writing a book, this is the time to get started on that platform because there’s so much involved with it. What we’re going to talk about is strategically starting to plan that platform. One of the things that starts out a platform is, “What is your message going to be?” It’s not just the message about your book.
It’s also, remember we’ve talked about very many times in the past that there’s also that component of, “I’m not going to get a ton of ROI directly from that book, what is it I’m going to sell next?” When you target your messaging, you need to look not only at that book but at those big ticket items that will be the result of someone reading the book. All of that messaging not only has to be formulated, but it needs to be in alignment. You can’t have a book about one thing and be selling another thing that’s completely unrelated. We had that happen with an entrepreneur about two years ago. She got a lot of feedback at the last minute about something she posted about her book and people walked away.
Content Creation And Message Testing
Part of that also was because the audience she had been tendering for the book was a little bit different than the audience and campaigns she’d been doing running up to the book. There wasn’t a lot of alignment and it became a problem for her to be able to sell both. The messaging is what’s going to go into your content because content is where you need to start looking next is, “I have my brand. I have my messaging, and now what am I going to produce this content? Content is not only a trust builder, but it’s also experimental.
“How are people responding to my messaging? Are they not liking it?” If they’re not liking it, then that messaging needs to be tweaked a little. This is an important point because if you go through and you slam it through and people aren’t resonating with it, then probably the same thing’s going to happen with the book and the high-ticket course. One of the things that happens with people in marketing is they think that “My message is there. It’s good. Everything is going to work.” The reality is marketing is a guess until it’s not. I think any entrepreneur who’s been out there for a while knows that because they go out and they have this big idea, but then that big idea requires tweaking along the way until they get the ingredients right. I know that happened to me.
Content is not just a trust builder; it's an experiment. How are people responding to your messaging? If they're not liking it, tweak it. Share on XImportance Of Analytics And Key Performance Indicators
It took a good two years to get that messaging where it resonated with people in that. It’s not only important to have that messaging in place, but the funnel is that next step too. How are you going to bring people to your list? How are you going to bring people and get more followers on social media? All of this is a result of messaging and you get yourself out there. Now, how do you tell what needs to be done? How do you tell if it’s working or not? In order to do that, you need to start with a baseline. Preparing those KPIs in your campaign, the Key Performance Indicators will help you understand that baseline, where you started, and then having that goal where you want to be then realistically watching those followers and that email list grow.
There’s going to be some trial and error there. You have to get people off of social media and into your list because as we’ve seen several times, the social media platforms can go away or something can happen, an algorithm changes, and you may lose visibility of those people. It’s very important to have those key indicators there and be able to track your progress. If you don’t do that, you’re not going to know what’s working and what’s not. What is important about this is if you have a message and it doesn’t seem to be getting across, you might have to tweak it. A lot of times with funnels, somebody will bring me a funnel and it’ll be like, “Let’s start all over.” You can reverse engineer and look at those numbers and see where that glitch is in your funnel a lot of times so you don’t want to throw the baby out with the bath water.
The only way that you can tell the reverse engineering and what’s working is if you keep those optimization points in there and if you keep everything in an analytic format so you can see, “Did I have a massive deletion on my email list?” I had that back at the very beginning. I pushed something for an author of mine that was six figures in six months. All of my audience knows that this is a long-term strategy. I had over twenty people in one day unsubscribe and I think it was because it was out of alignment with my message.
Track your KPIs to understand your baseline and set goals. Watch your followers and email list grow, and be prepared for trial and error. Share on XThose are the things that you have to look at because whatever you’re putting out there, whether it’s a content item, whether it is a social media post, you want to be able to see how those are performing. I will tell you, I had an episode on piracy. That thing still gets comments and views, and it’s because it was something that was very unique that other people weren’t talking about that resonated with people, especially the person who had their book stolen, who tried to find out if I could help her a couple of months back, which I couldn’t.
She hadn’t copyrighted the book. Nothing could happen. It is important that you look at those analytics. Why am I telling you about analytics? That’s the one thing that none of you like to do. I don’t like to do it. I hate numbers even though I have to run numbers all the time to have a business. It’s one more number I have to look at. The whole point of it is if you’re not willing to look at those analytics and you’re not willing to get realistic about those numbers that are happening, you’re going to have a lot of problems along the way with growth, and your message. If you are going to write an entire book and put together those programs, you better know that messaging is working first, that’s what your people want and are looking for I know that sounds basic, but you’d be surprised how many times and brought a book and we don’t know. They haven’t done any of this work.
They haven’t built a platform. We have no idea if they spent all this money on an entire book and time writing the book, in addition to now spending money on a publishing package. Most of them don’t have that next step, that big ticket item. Remember, the ROI from your book is not usually direct, which you drop on. That publishing package is probably not going to come to fruition until you sell those big-ticket programs. That’s why all the way through building this all has to be in alignment. you have to make those adjustments, you have to be able to optimize and know that your message is resonating. Some key indicators that maybe you can try to work from. First of all, how much is your list growing?
Building Your Email List And Social Media Presence
List building is harder than people understand. If you can set that first goal of, “I want 500 people.” believe at 500, that’s where most of the mail server platforms begin to charge you. How can you maximize that and what does your growth look like in those initial stages? Social media, where did you start out at? When I started out, I had a contest in 2020 with my coach about how many speaking bookings I could get in that one year. I got up to almost 100 in that one year.
What I didn’t mention was I went from about 9,000 people on LinkedIn to almost 15,000. I’m almost up to 17,000 now, but I haven’t been as intentional about my growth as I was back then. That growth from LinkedIn resulted in me getting almost those 100 speaking gigs because I intentionally went out and I connected with people who could give me that visibility. It is all interconnected, but it’s also, how can you grow that audience, look at those key indicators, and then also grow the list and test your message because you definitely want to do that too.
That’s where the content comes in. You’ve got all your baseline numbers. Now you start putting out that weekly LinkedIn newsletter or you start posting five days a week, testing, video, or, “My video’s getting more looks at than my written?” Looking at what this looks like and what that looks like, “Which is better? Can I do both or do I go with one or the other?” All of that is essential before you start dropping major money into that publishing package and into creating those courses.
I want to leave you with that. We have our planning course coming up again in November 2024. If that’s something that might interest you, reach out to me at ChatWithJuliet.com. Get on my calendar and talk to me about it because we truly do show you a way to set those goals, and break them down into yearly, quarterly, monthly, and even weekly sometimes. When you’re analyzing all of your platforms, you need to be doing it on at least a monthly basis. A weekly basis would be better because you’d catch things that weren’t falling through the cracks sooner, but getting all of that together is important.
Planning And Budgeting For Your 2025 Book Launch
If you’re thinking about writing that book in 2025, you need to not only start getting that set up, but budgeting for it as well because you’re going to need help to get traction on it. I don’t know many people who were able to do it on their own and get effective results. That’s where you start budgeting. When you start budgeting to get that set up, using it, getting familiar, and doing your optimization, by the time you get to your publishing package and your book developer as well, you are already going to have solid messaging in place that will help you sell more books. I know it’s short and sweet, but it’s just me. Have a wonderful holiday. I know everybody’s getting ready to go back to school. Fall is here. It’s a fun time. Have a wonderful weekend. Thanks.
