Promote Your Book and Build Customer Confidence

There are many "How To" books that cover just about everything under the sun, so what can you do to build customer confidence and promote both understanding and continuing education of your customers?

Once you have completed your book and it is in the marketplace you cannot sit back and hope the sales will be great, YOU must promote it. So, what can you do to boost customer confidence and promote additional sales? There are the traditional promotion tools like advertising, blogging, exchanging banners with other websites that have themes your book can enhance, etc.

You can also publish a newsletter; this a very popular way of supplementing the information that your book already provides, but it is still just you talking to your customers, i.e., it is still one-way. To involve your customers, you need a venue for them to both participate and contribute, whether it be by them just asking questions, or by sharing their experiences and you providing validation of their efforts. This is difficult with a newsletter because customers do not want to submit questions or share an experience and then wait until the next publication to get your response. They also like the idea of participating in near real-time. If you decide to blog and allow both customer and reader comments, you may learn that customers are apprehensive because there is no privacy to their post and their post itself is subject to public rebuttals. After trying both, I found very little interest on the part of customers to contribute or to supply content to share with other customers.

One thing I did find that is really appreciated is to set up a message board that has access restricted to customers only. This seems to be popular with customers for several reasons, including:

1) It gives your customers a place they can communicate with other customers to discuss the various topics of your book.

2) It allows customers to share experiences with each other as they work through what you have conveyed in your book.

3) It gives you a venue for sharing follow-up explanations or additional information that you may not want to share with the world by posting it on your website.

4) It gives customers a place to ask questions that you can answer.

5) With access being restricted, your customers get a sense of the message board not only being a special place for them, but a place where they are protected from the harassment and intimidation associated with open message boards.

6) When many customers ask the same questions, the message board allows you to answer the question once and all customers can access the same answer. This eliminates a lot of time on your part spent sending email answers to each individual customer.

In addition to being a way of establishing credibility, providing your customers with a message board for is a great way to say "Thank You" and to let them know that you are interested in making sure they are able to implement what your book teaches. You will also find out, and very quickly, that your customers will teach you some things with respect to the topic you wrote a book about. This is a good too because by learning from your customers and acknowledging that you do not know everything about the subject gives your customers a feeling that you are genuinely interested in listening to them.

You could also consider inviting other experts on the topic to join the message board. This will adds to the content of the board and it shows your customers that the intent of the board really is to help them.

If you opt to give this concept a try, and let your customers know before they purchase your book that the board is there for them, i think you will find the entire scenario to be a win-win situation.