by Kathleen Gage The Street Smarts Speaker and Author

If you’re an author, speaker, coach or consultant, it’s likely you know how important it is to market your products and services. The challenge for many professionals is not only what to do, but how to do it. Additionally, knowing what is a wise investment in their marketing and what is not.

Take authors; Countless numbers of authors have the dream of selling lots of books, becoming well known (and even reaching celebrity status), and making their fortune through their craft. Yet, most will not succeed due to lack of how to develop and implement an effective publicity plan. It takes more, much more, than a well-written manuscript to succeed as an author, at least if you want to make money through your writing.

You Have To Gain Visibility
Successful authors understand how essential it is to gain visibility within their market; visibility that equates to more readers, more books sales, more market reach; and ultimately more revenue.

One of the most common beliefs uninformed authors have of how to gain market visibility is through paid advertising. The fact is, most book advertising does not work. Besides most authors don’t have huge budgets for paid advertising campaigns.

Yet, many waste untold amounts of money on ad campaigns that don’t get them a result that justifies the expense of paid advertising. Still others do nothing at all to gain visibility and promote their books.

Why Readers Buy Your Books
The majority of readers buy books based on word of mouth advertising; the title of a book and if they feel like they know the author.

There are a number of ways to have your name and books become more familiar to your market. You can be a guest on radio shows (both online and off), blog tours and teleseminars.

There are plenty of opportunities to do all three, but many authors either don’t know where to begin or are afraid of rejection, so do nothing to promote themselves.

Get the Right Information
As a publicity expert who works with authors who want to use the Internet in their overall marketing, it pains me to think of how many authors could succeed if they were armed with insider information on how to get lots of publicity for their books.

The amazing thing is that a lot of publicity is free. It’s actually easier than most people realize to gain free publicity – and lots of it.

FREE Publicity is Easy to Get
In many cases all it takes to gain thousands, tens of thousands and even hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of FREE publicity is a commitment and a very focused plan.

A method I have been using for years is teleseminars. Not only have I been a guest expert on countless teleseminars, I have hosted many of my own. Usually the teleseminars are free to the listeners, but if done right I make thousands, even tens of thousands of dollars, in back-end sales from a free teleseminars. I have sold everything from my books, training courses, eProducts and mentoring services.

I can remember early on not really knowing how to develop, implement and generate revenues from teleseminars. As a matter of fact, my first teleseminars was a flop financially. Sure, I got a lot of people on the call because of the marketing I did, but had no clue how turn the listeners into buyers. Nor did I understand anything about what to do in the follow-up phase to optimize the process.

That was a long time ago. Today I make substantial amounts of money from each and every teleseminars I host. The last one I co-hosted generated nearly $20,000 in sales with a very high profit margin – between 95 – 97%. A few months ago I sold nearly $50,000 from teleseminars in a 2 week period.

What I learned from the first teleseminars I did is there are specific things that need to be done in order to develop, market, implement and profit from teleseminars. You can’t have a haphazard approach. It’s all about systems.

Kathleen Gage, The Street Smarts Marketer™, is an Internet marketing advisor who works with spiritually minded speakers, authors, coaches and consultants who are ready to turn the knowledge into money-making products and services. Visit http://www.kathleengage.com for free resources to build your online presence and credibility. 

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