Start Increasing Your Readership With These 10 Offline Book Marketing Tips On How To Sell More Books Offline

This article is packed with information to help you start selling your books offline. So it is okay if you read this article a few times over.

I have worked in the publishing industry as a PR and marketing consultant for over 8 years, and the number one campaign that ALWAYS sells tons of books is using B2B tactics where authors sell their books offline in conjunction with online marketing campaigns.

There are many opportunities to market your book offline! Like way too many! You just need a bit of creativity.  Don’t get me wrong, using digital marketing campaigns and strategies to increase book sales works. (like my free 100 Social Media Tips Guide) But promoting your book offline as well can gain you faster results.

How? Implementing offline book marketing tactics will set your book apart from the rest. Most authors are so focused on online marketing tactics that they ignore offline ones. This gives you a HUGE opportunity. (as it is less crowded in the offline space) But this doesn’t mean you can ignore online book marketing strategies.

You Need An Online and Offline Marketing Strategy To Fully Promote And Sell Your Book

When you start to create a marketing strategy for your book, you need to outline an offline and online marketing strategy. Both strategies go together. For example, if someone saw you at a book reading, your goal is to get them to purchase your book (at an online or offline book retailer) and to follow you and promote your book on social media. Why? Because this one reader who you met at a reading can share your book with their online network. But for them to share information about your book online, you need an online presence and brand.

For both traditional and indie published author, offline book marketing strategies can help grow your readership and brand. It can help introduce your book to new readers that online marketing methods can’t. Plus as humans, we love face to face interactions.

Here are 10 Tips On How You Can Start Marketing Your Book Offline.

1. Arrange For A Book Reading At Your Local School

Doing a reading at a local school is a great way to inspire students and bring reading to life. Arranging an author visit has many benefits for students, one of the main benefits is that it validates the lessons teachers and librarians tell kids. Plus author visits bring books and topics to life, like writing, art, science, and civil rights.

2. Get Involved At A Local Literary Convention

As an author, it is so important to be apart of the publishing industry- whether you are an indie or traditional author. Most literary genres have a variety of conventions that you can go to and be a part of. These literary conventions are full of book launches, readings, and authors talking about their work and strategies that made them successful.

Research what conventions are local to you in your genre and then get involved. You can get involved by becoming a volunteer, a speaker, or a guest on a panel. Some conventions will also have an area where authors can sell their books. When you go, make sure you bring business cards so that you can give people you meet details of your books.

Some book conventions are just for book fans, and these are the best ones to go to promote your book to a new audience. Both types of conventions are worth going to promote your book and network. You never know who you’ll meet!

3. Go To Events That Fits Your Genre

Investigate events going on in your area and see what there is that fits your genre. Maybe you write books on knitting or woodwork and could sell them at a craft fair. Perhaps you write YA fiction that you could sell at the local cosplay convention. Perhaps there’s a steampunk market where you could sell your steampunk, Victorian or fantasy fiction.

These are chances to reach people outside your usual circle of readers so grab them with both hands.

4. Run A Series Of Low-Cost Newspaper Ads

People still read the newspaper! Local communities, universities, colleges, and high schools all have their own newspapers. Plus papers that get printed for a smaller demographic or community are excellent resources for low-cost advertising.

When picking a newspaper to run a few ads to promote your book, make sure your book appeals to its demographic. You don’t want to spend money on an ad that is targeted towards an audience who would not be interested in your book.

You can also try approaching widely read newspapers and offer to buy any advertising space they can’t sell for a reduced price.

5. Host A Free Lunch At A Local Community Center (aka Lunch & Learns)

Have you ever had another company come into your office with pizza to host a lunch and learn? If you have ever worked in corporate, you probably experienced this at least once a month.

As an author, you can host a lunch and learn at other companies that are relevant to your book and at community centers. The benefit for you is you get to introduce your book to a new audience and make sales. The benefit for the community center or company is that you are helping to bring a team and community together and are increasing engagement.

6. Host An Educational Workshop

Hold a workshop that has educational value for potential readers. These workshops should not just include you reading your book out loud. Instead, they need to be engaging and offer something of value that your audience can take away with them. Your books and/or services can be included as a solution to challenges they face, but should not be mentioned until the end.  An educational workshop is more for authors who wrote business books and are using their book as a business card.

7. Get Business Cards That Promote You As An Author

Your book is a product, which makes you as an author a business. So, as a business owner, you need business cards. These cards should announce the book by providing necessary details such as reproduction of the cover, price, any associated website address, your email, and your author photo.

8. Donate bookmarks to a local library

Did you know that bookmarks are seriously cheap? Plus they are an excellent way to promote your book offline. So, once you have ordered a bazillion of them give them out for free! Donate them to your local library, ESL center, community center, sports team, or ask to leave some at a local coffee shop.

When making your bookmarks, don’t forget to add how to purchase the book and put a QR code on there to track how well this marketing tactic is working.

9. Sell your book at a trade show, book fair, festival, or farmer’s market.

Who doesn’t love going to book fairs, festivals, trade shows or farmer’s markets? (I am a huge book fair and farmer’s market fan!) These are significant events for you to promote your book offline.

For all these events, ask a few authors to join you in purchasing a booth to promote your books at. Other authors are not your competition. Instead, if you help promote and support each other, you will all sell more books and grow your readership faster.

10. Offer your book as a prize at a charity event.

Promoting your book offline while giving back and supporting a cause is a win win win!

When choosing a charity to work with it is essential to make sure it is aligned with your book, target readers, and brand. Try to offer something with your book as a prize. Such as a lunch with the author.

Why Offline Book Marketing Strategies Work

As an author, your best asset is marketing- both offline and online. Most indie authors don’t market their book at all or they only market online because that seems easier. These authors are missing out on huge opportunities. With offline marketing, your book has a better chance of standing out.

When it comes to promoting your book offline, think outside of the box!

As an author you are already creative, smart and witty- especially when it comes to words. But now you need to take those skills and use them to create a marketing strategy!

There isn’t a one-size-fits-all when it comes to an offline book marketing strategy. Explore your options and test campaigns out to see what works for your book and brand.

The publishing marketplace is saturated. To stand out, you need to ramp up your marketing efforts to attract new readers. This will take time, work, and lots of thinking outside of the box for it to become successful. On the bright side, you don’t need to create complex marketing campaigns to reach more readers rapidly. Instead, you need to work smart, harness that motivation and get some of that author creativity to make a big impact and lasting impression.

Book readers love recommending and sharing books with their friends. After finishing one book, a reader will usually tell five or more friends about it. Why? Because we love sharing stories. We love discussing stories, and we love it, even more, when our friends follow through with our recommendation. Word of mouth is powerful. It is also the reason why book readers can multiply fast! The more readers you have, the faster they reproduce. But before any people start reading your book you need to target them and in order to target then you need to outline who your book’s ideal reader is.

But Where Do You Start When It Comes To Finding Your Book’s Ideal Reader?

The best place to start promoting your book is among the people you already know. They could be friends, family, colleagues, your existing social media following, or people you sometimes see at the gym. Your inner circle is more extensive than you think.

Getting family and friends to buy your book can be tricky, and you don’t want to force them. So instead give them a copy for free. Your primary goal here is to get your existing contacts to share your book with their friends. Plus by providing a copy of your book for free, your network will be more inclined to give something back, like a book review or a little free shout out on their social network.

Outline Your Ideal Reader

Once you have your inner network busy reading your book it is time to start marketing it. Before you start promoting your book, you need to know who your ideal reader is.

Stephen King describes a book’s ideal reader as, “all novels are letters aimed at one person, the ideal reader.”

To create an effective marketing plan for your book you need to identify your ideal reader and target them specifically. The broader your target, the more diffuse your message will be.

It can be challenging for authors to determine why a person will want to read their books. But it is vital for you as an author to understand and outline who your audience is. If you don’t know what value your book is providing your reader or why the reader wants to read your book, then you won’t be successful.

You can read my blog post on how to outline your ideal reader for your book for more information. But if you already know who your reader is then read on!

So, now that you know who your ideal reader is it is time to start getting people to read your book!

How to Attract, Engage, and Convert More Readers Who Will LOVE Your Book

Attract, engage, and convert are the three main steps to getting people to buy your book. Here is an outline to describe how these steps work.

Attract Readers To Your Book

The biggest struggle you will first face as a new author is that nobody has heard of you yet. Your goal is to change this by attracting your readers to come to you. There are many ways you can go about this, such as running social media ads, holding contests, attending fairs, increasing your exposure by doing blog tours, doing a free promotion, and other types of marketing activities allow people to learn about you. Your audience may not be ready to buy the first time they hear about you, but getting them to know about your book is the essential first step. Your audience usually needs to hear about your book a few times before they are ready to make a purchase.

Engage With Your Target Readers

The next step is to “engage” with your audience. Once you have been able to attract people to follow you on social media or gave you their email, then you need to engage with them.

Engaging with your audience is an opportunity for you to build relationships with readers. Once you develop that relationship, readers become more invested in you, and they will be more likely to purchase your book. When you engage with your target reader, it is essential to offer them something of value and answer their questions. Don’t engage with them by saying ‘buy my book.’ Saying this is the fastest way to lose readers.

Convert Your Target Readers Into Book Sales

Your last step is to convert your target reader to buy your book. Many authors try to start at this step. They want sales right away and then when no sales come through they wonder why they aren’t getting any. If you have not attracted and engaged with your audience, you will not get many sales- if any! But, if you attract and spend the time to engage with your audience, it will be much easier to make book sales.

Attracting your target audience takes time, and it will be a continuous effort. The results make it worth it though.

Once you build a solid reader base, attracting new potential readers will become easier. Your current readers will start promoting you through social media, book reviews, and word of mouth.

12 Ways To Build A Solid Reader Base For Your Book

• Create an author website
• Do A Blog Tour
• Ask your readers to send in images of them with your book and then pin them on Pinterest. (people love the human connection)
• Comment on threads in relevant Facebook groups to build your reputation as an expert in your niche or to offer advice
• Start and follow a well-planned social media campaign (psst. get my free 100 tips towards social media success here)
• Do a presentation at a local meetup group. Don’t ‘sell’ your book, provide great information, and make sure to have some books to hand in case people ask.
• Create a discussion on Quora. Ask questions that engage your target audience, but don’t make your discussion a pitch for your book. If you are keyword savvy, then use keywords in your post title and content so that it will show up on the search engines and give you ongoing promotional returns.
• Put a link to your book in your email signature
• Set up an Affiliate partnership or program
• Run a contest or a giveaway for your book from your website or Facebook page
• Contribute advice and ideas to LinkedIn groups and make sure you have a section of your profile that promotes your book
• Write an in-depth blog post on a topic related to or covered in your book, and add a CTA to learn more about your book at the end.

These are just a few ways to promote your book. There are hundreds if not thousands of different ways an author can promote a book. The trick is understanding who your audience is and creating a marketing strategy that will best attract and engage with them.

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So, do traditionally published authors need to market their book? The quick answer to this is 100% YES! If you are a traditionally published author, you still need to market your book.

Traditional publishers and their staff work hard and are passionate about books. If they were not passionate than they would not be in this business. But publishers are also working with a lot of authors, and the reality of the editorial process demands a lot from authors- especially when it comes to marketing their books.

Publishers expect authors to help promote their book and drive sales. They want to work with authors who will help promote the book before and after it is published- because there will be more sales.

Publishers want to publish your book for one of three reasons:

1. You are a great writer and have written a fantastic story
2. You will help promote your book and will work hard to get book sales
3. You already have an established reader base that the book can be promoted too.

Do Publishers Market Books?

To an extent, yes. But all authors are also expected to promote their books. If you are a traditionally published author, you need to work harder at promoting your book than the in-house book marketing and publicity staff.

The publisher mostly works on the author’s marketing behind the scenes by promoting the book to the industry itself. (booksellers, wholesalers, libraries, reviewers, media) This means you are in charge of your brand, social media, and online marketing campaigns. The publisher may guide you- but you need to manage it.

The publisher will continue doing their best to support initial sales through stores and create a positive track record. But once this is finished, they have to move on to the next season of titles.

So, as a traditionally published author you are expected to promote and market your own book over the years the same way as an indie author would if you want to be successful. Plus, for better or worse, the publisher’s industry-facing marketing initiatives may not produce a lot of sales, or may not cultivate a relationship with the targeted reader. So you need to help them promote your book. What will increase sales is working to develop a strong online brand and audience to promote to.

How Publishers Promote Books

Publishers use a wide range of new and old-fashioned ways to promote books. A lot of their book promotions can be seen at Book Expo America (BEA).

One of the leading marketing initiatives publishers do for a book is spend a lot of money to be apart of events like BEA. Publishers attend these types of events to increase brand awareness within the industry and cultivate partnerships.

Publishers will also purchase banners to promote the book. These banners are placed in stores, at events, and used for book signings. But one of the biggest marketing campaigns they run is giving out Advanced Review Copies to media, bookstores, buyers, and librarians. Their goal is to get testimonials, reviews and generate brand awareness. Testimonials and reviews build instant trust and credibility with your target audience. It is a market step that should never be missed.

Sales is another huge component of any Publisher’s marketing strategy. They have a sales team that schedules meeting with book buyers to sell your book too. But keep in mind that book buyers will choose to order books based on if they have an audience to sell to or not. It is so important to work with your publisher to create a ready audience of readers.

Never Stop Growing Your Book’s Readership

As an author, your goal is to continue to build momentum and have consistent sales over the long term. Try to worry less about how much your book continues to remain stocked in a Barnes & Noble, and focus more on ways you can get attention and word of mouth for your book from the readers who are most likely to buy it.

To increase your readership, you need to learn how to create and implement book publicity and marketing campaigns. You need to understand content marketing for authors and start building an audience on social media for your book before it launched. If you are interested, you can download my Ultimate Author Checklist To Selling More Books for free.

To Be A Successful Indie or Traditionally Published Author, You Need To Promote Your Book

The reality of the book marketplace is that all types of authors (whether indie or traditional) need to work on building their own brand. Traditionally published authors need to be prepared to market and promote in the same way self-published authors do. If they don’t then panic will set in, especially if they expected more from the publisher.   

Marketing and selling your book is a long-distance run, not a sprint. Don’t focus on the publication date – that’s only the beginning of your journey. Instead, you need to focus on developing long-term goals.

Create book marketing strategies that can achieve sustainability for your book. Short-term and quick plans will have short-lived results. You want to build results that last years and continue to grow. To get those results that increase over time you will need a long-term marketing plan.

Just remember, your book is a product and a time investment. So, it takes time and consistent work to grow a steady readership.

Good luck.  I hope your book finds the audience that it needs and deserves.

Curious to learn about affiliate marketing for authors? Affiliate marketing is its own breed and can be confusing. In this article we will walk you through how to exactly set up affiliate marketing for authors.

Your book is out and has launched, but where are the book sales? Time is ticking, and you need some solid strategies that will help support book sales. Have you tried using affiliate marketing to promote your book?

Too many authors don’t incorporate affiliate marketing into their long term or short term book marketing strategy. As an author, you can quickly increase book sales by starting an affiliate marketing for authors program.

What Is Affiliate Marketing for authors And How Does It Work When It Comes To Book Marketing

First, what is affiliate marketing for authors? Affiliate marketing is an arrangement where you the author pays a commission to an external website for traffic or sales generated from its referrals.

Affiliate marketing is one of the most popular ways people make money online. Bloggers, social media influencers, vloggers, and at times media outlets usually look to become affiliate partners with trusted brands as a way to make some extra money on the side.

What Does An Affiliate Partnership Look Like?

Affiliate partners who agree to promote your book will share an affiliate link to your Amazon page or website on their blog or social media channels. The affiliate links track the book sales and traffic to your author website that an affiliate partner sends your way. If an audience from your affiliate partner clicks on the affiliate link and goes to purchase your book, the partner will receive a percentage of the sales.

The Basics Behind Affiliate Marketing For Authors

Before you approach influencers, blogger, or vloggers and ask them to become an affiliate partner you need to set up an affiliate program.

Creating an affiliate program can be quick and smooth depending on the platform your website uses. Shopify and WordPress make it very easy to create an affiliate program for authors and other companies. Both offer a wide range of apps and plugins to help you build out your affiliate program. It is up to you which app or plugin you want to use.

In general, here is what an Affiliate Partnership that promotes book sales looks like:

1. The author sets up an Affiliate Program and Strategy.
2. Partnership with an influencer, blogger, vlogger, etc. is established.
3. The author sets up an affiliate link to share with their new affiliate partner.
4. Affiliate partner uses that link to promote the author’s book.
5. People click on the affiliate link which takes them to the author’s website or the book’s Amazon page.
6. The book is purchased.
7. The authors pay the affiliate partner a commission for helping them get another book sale.

Here are some of the common terms associated with affiliate marketing:

• Affiliates: Where you the author are using affiliate program links to promote and make book sales.
• Affiliate marketplace: Is an easy way to find and participate in affiliate programs. It gives companies and authors offering affiliate program a broader group of potential partners to reach out too. There are many marketplaces like Amazon Associates, Avangate, and Clickbank.
• Affiliate software: Software used by companies and authors to create an affiliate program for their product.
• Affiliate link: A tracking link to track the progress of affiliate promotions.
• Affiliate ID: Similar to the affiliate link, but many affiliate programs offer a unique ID which can be added to any page of the product site.
• Payment mode: Different affiliate programs offer different methods of payment. Some payment methods are already built into the affiliate software. But you can always use other methods like PayPal.
• Affiliate Manager/OPM: Some authors and most companies hire a dedicated marketing manager to help affiliate partners earn more by giving them optimization and marketing tips.
• Commission percentage/amount: The amount or percentage an affiliate partner will receive in affiliate income from every sale.
• Landing pages: A single book sales page used for the purpose of increasing sales.
• Custom affiliate income/account: Many companies and authors will offer a custom affiliate income to people making the most affiliate sales for them. This means you might offer them a larger commission for every sale they make you.
• Custom coupons: Custom discount coupons help increase your book sales by giving your affiliate partner a chance to provide a discount to their audience.

There are many affiliate programs available today, which means getting an affiliate partner on board to promote your book can be competitive. So it is essential to make your brand and value proposition stand out and catch the attention of the blogger, media outlets, influencers, and vloggers that you want to become affiliate partners with. Once you have done that, you are on your way to implementing a successful affiliate marketing campaign for your book.

Here are a few tips on how you can make your affiliate program stand out and start making you more book sales:

Locate niche partners whose audience is your target reader

As an author, you should have already defined your target reader. Now it is time to find who your target reader is following on social media. Why? Because you want to partner with people whose audience is your target reader.

Develop compelling promotional material

Provide your affiliate partner with creative messaging and graphics that they can use to promote your book. You may also want to send them a copy of the book so that they can take photos of it to share with their audiences. Your goal is to make their job of promoting your book easy. The less work, your affiliate partners, have to do the more conversions you will see.

Always look out for new affiliate partners

Always look to grow the number of affiliate partners you have. You can find new partners by advertising your affiliate program on your website, marketplaces, and your personal social media page. Or you can always send a cold email.

Look out and help your current affiliate partners

Communication is key. Communicate with your current affiliate partners regularly and ask if they need any support from you or if they have any questions. By continually engaging with them you and giving them tips will help ensure their success in promoting your book.

Here Are A Few Affiliate Marketing Platforms Authors Can Use To Promote Their Book:

Aerio

Authors and publishers can upload their books to Aerio to find new affiliate partners. Authors can also become an affiliate partner by choosing from Aerio’s inventory of fourteen million books to create a curated online storefront on their website.

Amazon Associates

Amazon also offers an affiliate program to people, authors, and companies. You can add your book to the program to attract new affiliate partners. You can also sign up as an affiliate partner and promote other author’s books while receiving a commission.

SmashWords

The Smashwords affiliate program can help you make a little extra on your book and other books you recommend when you use affiliate links. As with Amazon, you can promote other authors to your network or post reviews of books on your web page with affiliate links to Smashwords.

Can Affiliate Marketing Help Authors Make More Money

Affiliate marketing can help you reach your readers and earn some extra income. However, success won’t happen overnight. You may have read claims that affiliate marketing programs can make you tons of money by just spending a few minutes a day working. This is far from the truth.

You will not be able to get rich quick through affiliate marketing. You may get rich from it after spending consistent time working on growing your affiliate partners and following a strong well-planned out strategy.

Affiliate marketing is a strategy that works. It will get you book sales. It will help you grow your readership. But your success depends on how well you execute your affiliate business plan. Remember success takes work and time.

Learn how to publish and market your book by joining my Facebook Group!

Who is your target audience?

If you weren’t able to answer that question instantly it might be time to re-research your target audience. Or if your answer was ‘everyone’ than you need to re-think your answer. When it comes to defining a business or creating a marketing strategy you must ALWAYS start by researching and outlining who your target audience is.

Your Audience is NOT Everyone

If you are targeting everyone, than you probably don’t know who your actual audience is and you won’t connect with anyone. If you don’t properly outline who you’re targeting you will end up creating a brand and marketing strategy that is all over the place.

The clearer you can define your target audience the better. Try narrowing down your target audience as much as possible. Focus on a niche. By focusing on one type of audience you’ll be able to craft your message and value proposition in a more engaging manner.

Growing Your Audience By Defining Who Exactly Is Your Target Audience

Do you have a business that has low engagement? Are you not getting any new leads or sales? If you are looking to grow your online presence or business in the form of followers, leads and  sales start by knowing exactly who your audience is. Then create messaging that speaks to them. Honing in on your target audience should be a top priority if you want to successfully grow your business.

Your business will live and die based on how well you know your audience. Scary isn’t it. Why? Because it is your audience that will buy your brand, product, or services. They are your livelihood. When you have a strong pulse on your target audience, their needs, wants and pains than the task of marketing to them becomes easier. The result is an engaged audience that will help grow your brand and increase sales.

A well defined audience will influence the following areas of your business:

• Your key messages and mission statement
• Your brand’s voice and types of content
• Where you distribute your content
• The channels you will spend the most time prospecting for new leads
• Your marketing strategy, tactics, and campaigns

Your target audience is out there. It is your job to find them and figure out how to engage with them.

A link building strategy for SEO will help you achieve a higher page ranking on search engines. Each link that points to your website acts as a vote. The more votes you get the higher you are ranked on search engines. Links are a strong part of the search engine ranking algorithms. By having a higher ranking on search engines will help drive more traffic to your website.

Basically, the more websites that link and reference your website the more traffic you will receive.

External Links are votes for popularity.

Every time an external website links to your website it shows Google that you are trustworthy and that websites are linking to you because you have resourceful and valuable information.

What is a Link Building Strategy For SEO?

So, how do you get more external pages to link back to your website? You create a link building strategy. Link building is a form of digital marketing. It is the process of getting external pages to link to your website. However, this strategy is easier said than done. Building links are difficult and time-consuming. This is also just one of the many strategies used to grow your business with SEO.

However, not all links are equal. A link from a site with high authority like the New York Times will make a greater impact on a SERP (Search Engine Results Page) than a link from a new website that was created a week ago. It also takes time for the links pointing to your site to start having a positive effect on ranking. Perfecting your SEO takes time and doesn’t happen overnight.

Step One: Creating A Link Building Strategy Starts With Realistic Goals

Before you even start researching keywords and making a wish list of websites that you want to link to your website, you need to set realistic goals. It is important to set realistic goals and to ensure that you are focusing on long-term gains, not overnight quick-wins.

To set proper goals you need to decide what pages on your website you want links pointing too. For example, is it a page on your website that is not ranking high on search engines. Or is it your about page, home page, or a new article that you think people will find resourceful.

Step Two: Creating Realistic Link Targets

The next step to a link building strategy for SEO is finding the right types of influencers, websites, blogs, podcasts, or YouTube channels that you believe will want to link to your website. You want to make sure that your list is full of the right people who will be interested in your content.

For example, if your website is about healthy living, then you will not want to target a blog on Dinosaurs. Unless you have published an article on ‘Healthy Dinosaur Food’ (can someone please write that article?) then there is a huge change that that external blog on dinosaurs will want to link to it.

Basically, please don’t contact random people who are unrelated to your website, topic, and brand. If you do your response rate will be low to non-existent and possibly leave you with a bad reputation.

Most people will only link to another website if it is relevant to them and holds useful information that their audience will find valuable. People are more likely to link to an informative page, like an article, infographic, or video rather than your contact page.

Before you contact anyone and ask them to link to your page, ask yourself this: “Will they care about my content and want to actually link to it?” Research the likelihood that your list of targeted contact will link back to you.

Ask yourself the following questions:

• Have they shared external content before?
• Are they relevant to the content that you are asking them to link to?
• Are they active?

Once you have gathered your answers sort your list by:

• Who will likely link to you
• Who has high domain metrics
• Who has a strong social media presence

The websites that are active and are likely to link to your content should be the ones you email/call first. This way you will capitalize your time and efforts by focusing your energy on the contacts who are most likely to respond to your link request.

Step Three: Creating the Hook

You’ll need to create a hook to attract other websites and have them want to link to your page/website. Content marketing is a huge part of a link building strategy for SEO. For your link building strategy to be successful, your content needs a hook or angle. Your content needs to be relevant and show how it contributes to an overall topic. In addition, your content needs to make people care and want to read it and share it.

Step Four: Emailing Your List of Targeted Contacts

You know what your goal is. You have a list of targeted contacts to reach out to. You have written an amazing piece of content that they would be interested in.

The next step is to email your list of contacts and let them know about your cool article, video, infographic, general content. The key thing to remember when you are emailing your list of contacts is that they have never heard of you (yet) and they were never originally planning to link to you (yet). Make sure you don’t start your email off with the name of your website or company. Instead, start your email explaining why you are reaching out to them and how you find them interesting. Make the email personal.

To help ensure that you get noticed in your email, explain to them why you deserve their time and help. Do not focus on your brand, focus on how you are a resource and what benefit you can bring them. Media, influencers, and bloggers don’t like to highlight or link to brands. If they do, then they are likely getting paid for it. Instead, they like to share relevant information and resources that their audience will find interesting.

Here are some tips for writing your email:

• Explain the benefits your content has for their audience
• What action you would like them to take
• Tell them why they should care (think links back to your hook)
• Show them that you are genuine and not a spammer

What about the Call To Action?

Make sure you include a Call To Action (CTA) in your email. Adding a CTA will help separate you from the spammers. There are a lot of spammers out there who send mass emails asking websites to link to them.

When emailing your list of curated contacts, you don’t need to just ask them to link back to a specific page on your website. Instead, it could be one of the following CTAs:

• Sharing your content on their social media networks
• Embedding your Infographic, videos or widget in one if their blog posts
• Offer to write a guest blog post.
• Asking for a product or book review

Step Five: Follow Up

Bloggers, media, and influencers receive a lot of emails- plus they are busy. Your email can get buried. It is important to follow up on all outreach, even if you do not get a reply the first time. By following up you are reinforcing the fact that you are a genuine person.

What to do if you get a negative reply

If you receive a negative reply, the worst thing to do is to ignore it. If you ignore the negative email than you are damaging your chances of ever building a good relationship with that person. Just think, they may like your future articles.

When you reply to a negative email, ask for feedback on how your content/infographic could be better or if there is extra information that should be added to make it more valuable.

Keep in touch with the contacts that did reply to your email. You can do this by sharing their content on your social media, inviting them to join your digital community, or joining their community. This way you are building a relationship that can continue to benefit your company or website.

How long will it take to improve your website’s ranking

It can take time for your link building strategy for SEO to have a positive effect on the ranking of your website.

The timeframe can depend on the following factors:

• Competitiveness of the industry.
• How competitive your targeted Keywords are.
• Activity of your competitors.
• The types of links you are building
• The history and strength of your domain

These factors can mean that it could take several days to several months before an increase in ranking is achieved.

A link building strategy for SEO is an art. It’s almost always the most challenging part of SEO. But also the one most critical to success. Link building will not happen overnight, but should be apart of your long-term and ongoing strategies. PR can also play a huge role in helping you achieve new links. Earning the attention of the press, bloggers, and news media is an effective way to earn links and can be happen organically.