The Evolving Internet Marketer

I’ve been out of touch recently with good friend and business coach, Elli St. George Godfrey. Elli dispenses business advice to established and would be entrepreneurs at www.abilitysuccessgrowth.com and moderates an interesting and informative Friday Twitter chat for small business owners that can be followed using #kaizenblog.

What’s the (Marketing) Plan

In the course of exchanging emails to arrange some catch-up time, I noticed Elli had added a tag line promoting her forthcoming book titled, “When Life Happens: How Women Business Owners Handle Personal Crisis“. Great premise and I’m sure it’s going to be a great book.

The problem, I noticed, was that while Elli piqued my interest with her tag line there was nothing I could do about it. In other words, there was no link leading me to more information.

Seeing a missed marketing opportunity always fires up my fingers so I sent her the following email:

Noticed your tag line about upcoming book. Do you have a publisher or will you self publish (not sure if you’d told me this before). What’s written so far? Do you have any excerpts that you can drive people to that will build excitement and interest faster than just a “it’s coming” tag line? I looked at your site and found no reference to the book. Are you planning a new website to promote? Have you registered a domain name for the book? Are you reaching out online to mommy bloggers, mompreneur sites and other woman-run sites to build relationships that you can tap when the book is out? I’m very interested in your launch plan.

More (Book) Marketing Advice

If I were advising Elli, I’d suggest that she have at least a page up on her site describing the book and providing links to excerpts if not whole chapters with a mechanism (email, RSS) to subscribe to future updates and social media links to enable visitors to spread the word.

Don’t Wait to Setup Your Social Media Presence

And don’t wait to start developing your social media channels themselves. I’d suggest that she create a Facebook page to support the book and use the Discussions tab to start a dialogue with her potential audience. If she can manage it I’d also have her start a companion group on Linkedin and promote it to working women business owners and other interested parties.

Both these social initiatives could be set up with the mission to provide a resource and create a community for women who are facing or who have surmounted personal crisis while growing or managing a business. Wow! How needed is that?

The fact is that close to 9,000 Business titles were published in 2009 so getting attention, and readers, for yours is a process that has to begin well before the ink is dried on your initial production run.