Missed Opportunities and Second Chances

One way to reconnect with your audience is with an apology. A lot of email marketers have latched onto this with their 'accidental' broken links. How this works is simple: they send an email with a link to a free product or an offer. Then, within an hour, they send a second email, apologising for the broken link in the first one. Very often, this second email gets a better open rate than the first. The original link might or might not have been broken, but the second email also gets more click-throughs.

Now, this email trick is getting a bit tired, and the effectiveness must be falling (but since some well-known Internet marketers are still using it, perhaps not). We've never used this method ourselves, although we have genuinely sent a few emails with mistakes that needed correcting!

What brought this to mind was being reminded, late on 1st March, that it had been World Book Day. Now, you may know we've published a lot of books ourselves in the last few weeks, and tying in our promotions to World Books Day was an obvious opportunity. The fact is, we missed the opportunity. Strangely, perhaps, so did 'the world's biggest book store', Amazon. Or, if they didn't miss it, they certainly didn't draw it to my attention.

Amazon might have their reasons for not promoting something that could be said to be aimed at 'real world' bookstore customers, but I imagine they could have cashed in big time if they'd joined in - especially with Kindle books being so easy to download. In other words, available instantly.

Easy Competitor Analysis, available from Amazon

As for Cinnamon Edge Publishing, we also missed the boat - except that it has given me something to talk about and a marketing lesson we can all learn from!

Roy

Using Books in the Marketing Mix - Part 2

One of the things a book can do is help to define you and your business. Writing and publishing a book makes you more "expert" but it also makes it clear to people what you're about. So, if I wrote a book about cycling (which I probably will) that straight away tells anyone who sees it that cycling is my "thing".

An example of this is Jacqui's book about How to Become a Foot Care Professional. Jacqui has given a lot of help and advice over the years to various health professionals, therapists and the like, on marketing and developing their businesses, so working with the Foot Care Centre and the College of Foot Care Practitioners was right up her street. Publication of the book will help to spread the news that Jacqui is an expert in that area and, as a specialist in that particular niche she will command more respect and attention from people looking to grow a business in foot care or something similar. They'll also get a lot of great information from the book, of course!

My (Roy's) book, Really Simple SEO for Business Owners will help to spread the message that I'm expert in fast and effective Search Engine Optimisation. It also says that I specialise in it, to some extent, and a specialist is usually taken more seriously and becomes more sought-after than a generalist.

You can do the same in your business. Become an expert and be in more demand (and maybe higher-paid) as a  specialist, by writing a book about your area of expertise.

Roy

Using Books as Part of Our Marketing Mix

You might remember we ran a workshop last summer all about creating content and using it in your marketing. Content in this context means articles, blogs, web copy and the big daddy of written content, books.

Now, we try to practise what we preach, although we're sometimes too busy doing things for other people to do them for our own business. We do need to keep our hand in, though (as shown by our success with the search engine optimisation of SEO Suffolk) and we finally got our fingers out and completed the four (yes, four) books we have been working on, all within the last couple of days!

So, today you can get the first of them on Kindle. It's called How to Become a Foot Care Professional and it's written by Jacqui, who has been the marketing brains behind the success of The College of Foot Care Practitioners and The Foot Care Centre Kings Lynn. Not surprisingly, effective marketing plays a major role in setting up in any new practice, and it's covered extensively in the new book.

The second Kindle book should be available by tomorrow, and this one is called Simple SEO for Business Owners and reveals just how we managed to get SEO Suffolk onto page one in a few days.

Incidentally you don't need a Kindle to read them! Just download a free reader for your laptop or iPad from the Kindle website and the whole Kindle library is available to you. 

Our other two books are now with the publishers Bookboon and will be out in the near future.

Anyway, all this is very exciting for us and provides great publicity for our business, and especially the writing and publishing arm - and that's the marketing message for you. Don't just do as we say, do as we have done and will continue to do, and use books as part of your marketing mix.

Roy