Book Marketing Makeover: Top 15 Reasons to Do a Virtual Book Tour

Guest post by Dana Lynn Smith, The Savvy Book Marketer

As publishers' promotional budgets shrink and travel costs rise, the traditional city to city author tour is waning in popularity. But what if you could reach a much larger, highly targeted audience from the comfort of home? You can, with a virtual book tour.

On a virtual book tour, authors promote their books by making virtual guest appearances during a particular time frame on blogs, podcasts, radio shows, social networks, or other venues.

So why should you do your own virtual tour?

1. Sell books. You will sell books during the tour and afterward as a result of the tour.

2. Spend less. Virtual tours are less expensive and time consuming than real-world travelling. Generally the only cost of a do-it-yourself tour is the cost of mailing your book to tour hosts.

3. Reach far more people and a more targeted audience with a virtual tour. In contrast, live author appearances by authors who aren't well known tend to have low attendance.

4. Get great links. The virtual tour provides quality, lasting links to your website. These links have search engine optimization value and may continue to bring new visitors for months or years to come.

5. Get out there! Making a commitment to a tour gives you an incentive to get out there and promote your book and get content onto other websites.

6. Get book reviews. If any of your tour hosts do a review of your book, you'll get the benefit of additional reviews.

7. Build buzz. Tours build buzz for your book and get people talking about you and your book - and sharing with others.

8. Earn implied endorsements. When others host you on their blog or show, there is an implied endorsement of you which enhances your author platform.

9. Interact with your readers. You have the chance to interact with readers and potential customers.

10. Earn a higher Amazon rank. Getting a lot of book sales in short period of time pushes up the Amazon rank of your book.

11. Develop relationships. You get the chance to develop relationships with bloggers and other key influencers in your field or genre.

12. Let readers sample your work. The content of a virtual book tour gives potential book buyers an opportunity to sample your work.

13. Grow as an expert. Nonfiction authors can enhance their expert status by posting content on other venues.

14. Expose your book to new audiences. You get exposure to new audiences you might not reach any other way.

15. Build your mailing list. Additional traffic to your website during the tour gives you the opportunity to build your mailing list and blog subscribers.

To learn how to organize your own successful virtual book tour, check out Dana's new Virtual Book Tour Magic guidebook for authors.

Book Tour Special: Order Virtual Book Tour Magic by December 12 and you'll get an invitation to an exclusive book tour Q&A session with Dana on December 15.



About the Author

Dana Lynn Smith, The Savvy Book Marketer, helps authors and indie publishers learn how to sell more books through her how-to guides, blog, newsletter, and private coaching. For more book promotion tips, get her free Top Book Marketing Tips ebooks at www.TheSavvyBookMarketer.com

The Top 4 Book Marketing Tactics in Today's World

Here are the top four book promotion activities you can engage in to sell more books in today's world . . .

1. Speak. Speaking builds a word-of-mouth army better than anything else. Speak locally - at garden clubs, libraries, bookstores, Rotary clubs, JCs, poetry nights, story swaps, book club meetings, etc. Then expand out to a wider area, to nearby cities, to nearby states. Eventually, expand out to an even wider audience.

When someone hears you speak, they become a bigger fan than if they had just read your book. If they like you when they hear you speak, they will tell ten times more people than by just reading your book.

2. Book yourself on national TV. TV is still the largest mass market media. It still reaches more people than any other media - and with more impact. It's worth spending the time contacting the ten or twenty news and talk shows that reach your audience. For most national TV shows, you can get the contact information in one of two ways: 1. from their websites, and 2. via your network of friends and fellow authors.

Your appearance on one major TV show will not only expose you to millions of viewers, but it also opens the door to dozens and sometimes hundreds of other media: newspapers, magazines, radio, more TV shows, etc.

3. Create relationships with high-traffic websites. How many major high-traffic websites that attract your target reader have you created relationships with? Are these real relationships where you contribute content to them on a regular basis? In today’s world, Internet relationships are the key to marketing success.

Uncover five to ten top websites that already reach the audience you want to reach. Look over their sites until you find a way to contact someone behind the site - a webmaster, an editor, the founder. Then email them with an offer of free content for their readers: an interview with you, a review copy of your book, a free article (that is really good), some tips for their readers, a Q&A column on your specialty, etc. Their obligation, in return, is to link to your website or sales page.

4. Do a Superstar Blog Tour. Or a Mega Blog Tour. Or a Blogpalooza. I’m not talking about the old-style humdrum virtual book tour of 15 or 20 blogs. I’m talking about an event blog tour that creates Internet buzz on a major scale. Event blog tours can build brands, create incredible website traffic, and sell tons of books.

The neat thing is that effective event blog tours take less time to carry out than the traditional Amazon Bestseller Campaign - and are almost always more effective in selling books, building a brand, and driving traffic.

If you want to know more about event blog tours, check out this recording of me speaking about the value and method of carrying out an effective impact blog tour: http://www.bookmarket.com/blog-tour-palooza.htm.

Conclusion

These four book marketing techniques work for almost any kind of book: fiction, nonfiction, memoirs, children's books, how-to, spiritual, business, even cookbooks. You don't have to do all four. Start with one and work it hard – you'll get better results than doing Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, EzineArticles, or other Internet marketing flavors of the week.



John Kremer is the author of 1001 Ways to Market Your Books. If you want to launch a SuperStar Blog Tour™, Mega Blog Tour™, or Blogpalooza™, check out http://www.bookmarket.com/blog-tour-palooza.htm.