Welcome to this Book Launch Secrets Mini-Series! Over the next few episodes, I'll be sharing my best practices of getting both the Amazon BestSeller and #1 New Release Badge on your listing!
Got a copy of my new book, Discover Your Message?
Click Here to Grab Your Copy!
Implement the Blogging System that 40x My Online Business! Click here to get the training video
Welcome to this Book Launch Secrets Mini-Series! Over the next few episodes, I'll be sharing my best practices of getting both the Amazon BestSeller and #1 New Release Badge on your listing!
Got a copy of my new book, Discover Your Message?
Click Here to Grab Your Copy!
Implement the Blogging System that 40x My Online Business! Click here to get the training video
Hello and welcome to the market. Your message show. I'm your host, Jonathan Milligan, author of the book, your message matters in the latest book. Discover your message. A 14 day guide to uncover your calling and find your niche as a writer, coach, or speaker. And what we're doing in this current mini series. Is teaching you some of my book, launch secrets. And specifically, I want to help you understand what is the 20%. That I can do to give me 80% of the result. And specifically, we're going to be focusing on you as a self published author. Ranking your Kindle book in Amazon. Hitting both the best seller badge that Amazon puts on your listing. And the number one new release batch. That goes on the listing. And if you remember, from the last episode, I talked about how while the bestseller badge is awesome. When it gets displayed as a little orange badge, right over your book. Cover image on Amazon. That it's elusive. It stays there for maybe 24 hours to 30 days. It really depends on the category, the ranking. And if you got outranked. It's very fluid. However, like I mentioned before, The number one new release batch. Is the one that I think you should be after. And when you get the number one new release in a particular category. It stays on your listing for 90 days, which is really awesome. In fact, depending on when you're listening to this, you can go over to Amazon right now, type in, discover your message. And you can see what I'm talking about when you click on my book, cover image. You will see it will show. Number one new release. In starting a business category. By the way. If you don't have a copy of my brand new book. You can get it in Kindle. You can get it in paperback, hardcover. And we have a companion workbooks, like a 60 page workbook that you can write in. It's got exercises, journaling exercises that go along with the book. The book's now available on Amazon Barnes and noble books, a million and lots of other places. If you want to see where it's available, I've set up a new website called platform growth books.com. Platform growth books.com. The link is also in the show notes. You can click on that and you could see all the books that I have available and the books that I'm working on. That'll be coming out really soon. What we're doing in this mini series is unpacking for you the best secrets that I have. Discovered after launching numerous books. Now this is my third book. And I'm going to be launching about six more over the next two years. So I'm committed to this process. And so last time we talked about phase one, selecting the right book categories and why that is important. In this episode, I'm going to talk to you about phase two, your book, launch team. Now, as I mentioned in the past episode, A couple of years ago, I was fortunate enough to be able to meet someone who I would consider to be the expert. In book launches. He has been the main book launch person who has led authors, such as Tony Robbins, Michael Hyatt. Tim Teebo John Gordon. And he has. Mentored me in a way by helping me know what not to do and what to do with book launches. So for example, The F one of the first times I wanted to do a book launch. I thought. Oh, man. If I'm gonna do a book launch team, I need to give them the book like two months ahead of time. Give them enough time to read the book. And I want to make sure I'm ahead of the game and all that. And he's no, the worst thing you can do is start the book launch team too early. You said you honestly. Want to only do it about two or three weeks before the actual book launch. Because people naturally lose momentum. And you want your book to be released while they're still excited about it. And so for my latest book launch, it was right at 14 days before. The book came out toward my silent launch, which I'll be sharing in book. Launch secret number three in the next episode. But for this one, let me give you just some high level. Best practices on using a book launch team. Number one highly recommend that you use a private Facebook group for your book launch. Even if you don't love Facebook or you're not a fan of it. There's no denying that. That is where the majority of people are hanging out. And by creating that private Facebook group, it's going to allow you to keep people more engaged than just email alone. And there's a lot of things you can do around that. By making it fun and game defying, the book launch team process, which I'll talk about in just a second. So we want to have a Facebook group. Second of all number two, invite people from your email list, or if you don't have it social media to join the book launch. Now here's, what's awesome. About a book launch. Anybody can participate. They don't even have to be your ideal reader. To be a good book launch team member. All we want. For. A book launch team member. Is to. Consume the book. Leave a book review. And share it out to their audience, whatever audience they have, and it may just be social media. Awesome. There's nothing wrong with that. And so that's what we want. And so anybody can be a book launch team member. So if you feel like you do not have. Any. Audience. Then simply go to social media. You're probably on social media somewhere. And put a request out. To Hey, I'm going to be launching my book. I want to let people behind the scenes of a handful of people to be a part of my book, launch team. We're going to have prizes. We're going to do some games. You get a chance to read. You get a free version of my book, get a chance to read it at advanced reader. Copy. It'll be fun. A lot of people will say yes to that. It's free to join to get to, to help promote you. And again, it can be family members. It can be friends, it can be old schoolmates. It can be. Coworkers does not matter. All right next. Principle number three. I highly recommend that you game-ify the process. People love. Games. They love competitions prizes. And when it comes to selecting your prizes. It doesn't have to be monetary, although it can be, if you don't know what to do, you could say I'm going to give$50. Amazon gift card. To the first place. 25 to second place and$10 to third place. You can do something as simple as that. You can also do. A one-on-one coaching call for hitting first place. You can give them access to an online course. You can give them access to any assets or anything that you have. Whatever it is. As long as you come up with some kind of assignment or some kind of prizes. That works. Second of all. I also recommend that you have a visual leaderboard. Now my favorite is keep the score.com. It's free to use. It does have ads. But if you pay the$5 a month, it will remove the ads on your leaderboard. And what the leaderboard will do is you take all the names of the people in your book, launch team. Paste them in to keep the score. And then on the back end, you're able to toggle, give them 10 points, 50 points, a hundred points, 200 points. And you can give them points for different challenges. Now let's talk about the challenges. So for my most recent book launch. I had 10 challenges over the course. Of about two to three weeks. And I would do one pretty much every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. So you definitely don't want to do too many. But you want to give them 48 hours to do the challenge. And some of them are real simple. So the first five of the 10 challenges. We're book consumption challenges. Because when someone joins your book, launch team and your Facebook group, the first thing you're going to want to do is give them a PDF version of the books. They can go ahead and start reading. And so we did challenges like, Hey, once you download. The book and read the introduction. Come back to this post and comment below the word done. In your earn 50 points. And then a couple of days later, we did a different one. That's all about book consumption. We said, Hey, can you give us one quote from the book that you've highlighted so far? Posts or paste it in the comment below. And we'll give you 75 points. And then on it went biggest takeaway. Hey, once you finish the book, click done, you'll earn a hundred points. That's how it works. And. Every time they would put done. Obviously their name is next to their comment. We could go to keep the score and give them their points. And boy did our book. Launch team loves us. All right. So that's the first five of the 10 challenges is book consumption. What do you do for challenges? Six through 10. They're all about book promotion. Now the very first one challenge, number six. Is to leave an Amazon review. So once your book is live the day that it's live. On Amazon. You will post to your book, launch team in your Facebook group and tell them. Hey guys. The book is live on Amazon. We're not promoting it yet. But go leave your review. Now in the next episode, I'm going to be talking about. My silent launch strategy. And why I do a silent launch and what I mean by silent launch. Is that I. Do not promote the book to my email list or on any of my social media, nor is my book launch team promoting it anywhere. Yes. It's available to purchase on Amazon. But I don't want people to purchase it just yet. And they're such a specific reason why. You need to wait for the next episode to learn what that is. But. Back to our challenge. So one of the most important things that you want from your book launch team. Is to leave that Amazon review. That means everything. It helps with the rankings. It helps for social proof. And so make that challenge. Number six out of the 10. Like 200 points, give them the most points for that Amazon review we even gave away. Free physical copies of the book and workbook. If people left an Amazon review. So incentivize it, however you need to get those reviews. All right. And then the rest of the seven through 10 are about maybe leaving a review on good reads.com. Which is another place where readers are constantly looking for new books. Have them promote it to social media on their own platforms and give them points, things like that. And that pretty much wraps up the book launch team. Process. So again, you want to use a Facebook group. You want to invite anybody to join? You want to game-ify it. And like I mentioned, we had 10 challenges that we would do every other day, basically Monday, Wednesday, Friday. Five of those were on book consumption, getting them to read the book over the course of two weeks. And then once the book was silently live on Amazon, we pushed them and challenged number six to leave an Amazon review. And then challenges seven through 10. We're all about sharing about the book that it's live on Amazon. Now in the next episode, we're going to talk about my silent launch phase. This is secret number three. And how I was able to get a little bit over 2,500 downloads of my book. Without promoting it to my list. Or on social media. How did I do that? You're going to have to find out in the next episode. So if you're enjoying this, let me know. Will you take a moment and share review or radar show? And it would mean the world to me. If you would share it with somebody and let them know, Hey, I think you're wanting to work on a book. Come listen to this book launch. Series. And also let me know what you'd like for me to cover in future episodes and until next time never forget your message matters