Have you ever considered the costs of hosting a book tour? Hotels, airfare, and personal expenses while you’re away can amount to a shocking total. Hosting a webinar is the best alternative. Anyone from any part of the world can attend a webinar, and they don’t even need to leave their home. Rather than shelling out tons of cash, a webinar allows you to promote your book efficiently and inexpensively – as long as you approach it correctly.
How to Use Webinars to Promote Your Book
1. Go in With a Plan
Write and practice some things you want to say. What are you going to wear? Where are you going to sit while you’re hosting the webinar? It’s not worth going through all the trouble of holding a webinar if you aren’t making a great impression.
Draw up a structure for your webinar, and decide if you want to read from your book, and which parts you’d like to read. Things might veer off course a little while you’re interacting with your viewers, but you’ll need at least a loose structure to keep things running smoothly.
Make sure to allow some time for questions at the end of your presentation. This way, your viewers and potential future readers will feel relevant and acknowledged, and you might gain invaluable insight into how well your style of book promotion resonates with the audience. At the end of the day, it is they who will make or break you.
2. Choose the Right Platform
You can host Webinars on a variety of platforms. Google Hangouts will allow users to host live events with real-time interactions. YouTube also offers its content creators the ability to broadcast live. If you already have an active YouTube channel, it’s easy to target people who are already following you on YouTube, and potentially turn new viewers into subscribers. Recently, Facebook has enabled live video with live comments. If you already have an active Facebook page, this may be more convenient.
Choose the platform that you feel could best fit your needs and collect as many viewers as possible. Depending on the age range of your audience, some may be more fond of what Google+ offers, while others could easily log in to listen to you via Facebook. Remember to assess which platform will help you spread the word about the webinar the easiest and will likewise draw the most people to your event – this way the decision may even be made for you.
3. Set up a Page for Your Webinar
Create a page that features all of the details of your webinar, and include a signup form. Users can submit their names and email addresses to RSVP, and you can send them email reminders about the event. Allowing people to opt in to your mailing list may help you retain new readers. Make sure you keep this page active and update it with new information as it becomes available.
You can create a Facebook event page or a dedicated page on your web domain specifically for the Webinar. Wherever you put it, make sure you cross-link this page on every social media platform that you use.
4. Advertise Your Webinar
It’s easy to advertise your Webinar to people who are already connected to you. You can post about it on your blog, your Facebook, and your Twitter pages. Reaching a larger audience may be a little more difficult, and that’s when you need to consider how you’ll advertise to a broader audience.
Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter all offer advertisement options. You can pay to promote posts, increasing the amount of people who will be exposed to the information about your webinar. You can also run targeted advertising campaigns.
Facebook, for example, allows you to isolate demographics who have specific interests listed. You can find people who like reading and are also interested in the niche you’ve written on, and have your ads shown only to those people. This is more likely to lead to real results than a generalized post that will be shown to people who may not be interested.
5. Don’t Forget Your Call to Action
You’re obviously trying to sell your book, but merely talking about it isn’t enough. You need to have a clear call to action that will make it easy for people attending your webinar to make a purchase. Make sure you have enough links on your webinar page, and periodically remind your viewers where they can click to make a purchase.
While sales are a top priority, make sure you aren’t being obnoxious about it. If all you’re doing is begging for sales, people won’t stick around your webinar for too long. You won’t gain followers or build a bigger audience by asking people to buy something without explaining why. The content of your webinar is what’s most important, and a blatantly aggressive sales approach will only drive people away.
Even if your webinar doesn’t generate a bunch of sales, that doesn’t mean your new followers won’t buy your book in the future. Always stay active on social media and respond to comments or questions people may ask. If you’re very concerned about sales, you can always offer a discount code to people who view the webinar.
You might also want to read “How To Market Your eBook“
This post was written by Sophia Mest, a Content Manager at BizDb, where she aspires to put her writing passion into practice and spread her words across the world. She spends her free time travelling and exploring the wonders of nature. Follow her on Twitter @MestSophia.
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