THE BENEFITS OF BEING SUBTLE
Marketing on social networking sites is almost like using reverse psychology. Your end goal is to sell your products. But the social networking sites don’t generally like you to be that blatant about it.
So what do you do instead? Simple – you sell your subject. Or rather, you promote it. But you don’t promote it by telling people how fabulous your book is. You promote it by getting them interested in the subject and making it clear that you know what you are talking about.
You might think there’s no difference in this at all, but here’s where people go wrong. Let’s say you want to sell a book you’ve written about saving money by shopping online. The last thing you would do is to go on Instagram, Facebook or any other social networking site and try to sell it directly.
Quite apart from the fact that people just wouldn’t be interested and would see it for what it is – an out and out advert – you might get problems from the networking sites themselves. The majority of them aren’t there for you to take advantage of like this.
So instead you have to think about your subject and find a way to connect with your audience – the very people who ARE going to be interested in a book on saving money.
What you can do here is to dangle a carrot in front of them. Tell them about some of the more unusual ways you have managed to save money recently. If you know of any great deals going on, share them with your readers and followers. They’ll be grateful for it, and they’ll be glad that they’re getting something for nothing as well.
And of course, if you got some useful information from someone you found on a social networking site, you’d bookmark them or start following them, wouldn’t you? After all, they might have more of the same to share.
Now, most of these social networking sites will let you add a link directly to your website – even if that site happens to offer a broad range of goods for people to buy.
So if you are giving away all this free information on a specific subject as part of your input into a particular social networking site, you will find that more and more people will click through to your website. Keep an eye on your site stats as you start to make inroads into this type of marketing. I can almost guarantee that after a while you will see a regular stream of traffic coming from your social networking efforts. And the more you put into them, the more you get out in the end.