Getting a Head Start on Holiday Sales

Getting a Head Start on Holiday Sales | Southern Authors

You know I used to laugh at the “Christmas in July” ads until I promoted my first Christmas-related book. We actually started the promotion in July and it was the perfect time. Why? Well, maybe no one is buying or thinking about December in July, but the holiday buying season is tough. In order to make any kind of headway you must start early, not just to capture the December sales but also to get in front of any early shoppers. Once those Christmas in July ads start to hit radio and TV, consumers (those who like to shop early) start to gather ideas for their own shopping lists.

When is it too late to start thinking about the holiday market? November is definitely much too late, October is iffy, but if you’re staring September in the face and haven’t done a lick of marketing towards holiday sales, that might be your last chance. Better to start early – mid to late summer is always great. Here are some tips to help you get a head start on the holiday buying season.

Events: start early. If you’d like to do events in December I suggest you start calling stores now. Many stores don’t do in-store events after Thanksgiving, but if you have local connections or some independent stores they might be open to this. Speaking at non-bookstore venues falls under the same category: start early.

Promos: start planning your promos in the fall. I recommend starting the promo roll-out right after Thanksgiving and planning a succession of promotional announcements all the way through late December. If you need to get special pricing on books, or if you’re going to bundle your book with some other items, this will give you plenty of time to plan for that.
Website: now is the time to make sure your website is ready for your holiday marketing. As you begin planning your promos make sure your web designer is ready to go to make any changes your site might need.

Targets: definitely define your target markets as soon as you can, the earlier the better. If you don’t have a good, solid idea of who you’re marketing to yet don’t use your holiday campaign to test this. Test market early. You’ll be glad you did. Don’t waste a holiday promo if you don’t have to. Knowing who you are going after will save you in costly marketing mistakes (and this goes for any time you are marketing).

Ebooks: I suspect with all the e-readers that have hit the market in the last 12 months – and with both Target and Best Buy carrying e-book readers – you’re going to see a lot of promotion for this over the holidays. Make sure your book is keyed into this market, what I mean is: if you had planned to get your book converted to an ebook, now is the time. Also, you might want to offer a special promo, if someone buys your e-book have them forward you the receipt for an additional special holiday bonus.

Social media: if you’re not on Facebook or Twitter yet, now is the time to join, and even if you are this is a great time to maximize your efforts and plan how you’ll use your social media to enhance your holiday promos. Will you offer specials to your social media “tribe” only? Will you have exclusives just for them? Consider early on what your social media strategy will be.

Exposure: if your exposure online is minimal, now is the time to ramp it up. Contacting blogs, websites, doing article syndication, participating in blogs, doing guest blogging… all of these things are great ways to gain exposure online. Remember, it’s not just about the holiday promos, it’s about making sure you are searchable online. That way, if someone searches on what you’re offering, you’ll come up in the search results. This will help you capture holiday shoppers who haven’t been exposed to you or your message yet.

The key to successful holiday promotion is planning and enough advanced marketing so that you’re not spinning your wheels in the Fall wondering why you’re not making any traction. If you’re ready to explode your holiday market start early, it’s the best way to make sure you have a spot waiting for you when the busiest shopping season of the year comes around again!

Penny C. Sansevieri, CEO and founder of Author Marketing Experts, Inc., is a best-selling author and internationally recognized book marketing and media relations expert. Her company is one of the leaders in the publishing industry and has developed some of the most cutting-edge book marketing campaigns. She is the author of five books, including Book to Bestseller, which has been called the “road map to publishing success.” AME is the first marketing and publicity firm to use Internet promotion to its full impact through The Virtual Author Tour™, which strategically works with social networking sites, blogs, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, YouTube, and relevant sites to push an author’s message into the virtual community and connect with sites related to the book’s topic, positioning the author in his or her market. In the past 24 months their creative marketing strategies have helped land 11 books on the New York Times Bestseller list. To learn more about Penny’s books or her promotional services, you can visit her website at http://www.amarketingexpert.com. To subscribe to her free ezine, The Book Marketing Expert newsletter, send a blank email to: subscribe@amarketingexpert.com Copyright © 2014 Penny C. Sansevieri – See more at: http://www.amarketingexpert.com/12-ways-create-mailing-list-will-sell-books-tip-33-52-ways-market-book/

8 Free Must-Have WordPress Plugins for Authors

8 Free Must-Have WordPress Plugins for Authors | Southern Authors

Are you using WordPress as the basis for your author website or blog? Here are 8 Free Must-Have WordPress Plugins for Authors that we believe will make your life easier. Please Note: These plugins are not available for wordpress.com sites.

MyBookTable allows you to have your own book page(s) that links to online bookstores where visitors can buy your book. We use the Developer version of this plugin for our bookstore and book ads. The free version is very robust yet is easy to use. There are also two paid versions that can help you earn more when books are sold through your site. We highly recommend this plugin for presenting and selling your books.

Social Media Widget is a simple sidebar widget that allows users to input their social media website profile URLs and other subscription options to show an icon on the sidebar to that social media site and more that open up in a separate browser window.

WordPress SEO is the most complete WordPress SEO plugin that exists today for WordPress.org users. It incorporates everything from a snippet preview and page analysis functionality that helps you optimize your pages content, images titles, meta descriptions and more to XML sitemaps, and loads of optimization options in between. In non-technical terms, it helps make your site and blog posts easier to find on search engines like Google and Bing

Newsletter – If you aren’t doing a newsletter, you need to start NOW. Most of the big email service providers ( MailChimp, Aweber, Constant Contact) have a plugin so that you can add a signup form to your site.

Social Media Sharing – You have written a great post, now you want your readers to share it. In order for them to share your words, you need a sharing plug in. There is one built into the standard jet pack plugin, however most “experts” suggest that you use an additional plugin as well. We currently use the free version of SumoMe. In addition to making it easier for readers to share you posts, this plugin will make it easy for your readers to join your email list, and more.

NOTE: If you use Twitter as part of your social media platform, when choosing a social sharing plugin make sure that when your post is shared via Twitter, that your twitter name appears in the text generated for them to tweet. This makes it easy for you to see who and how often your post is being shared.

Editorial CalendarAs an author, you are used to planning and deadlines. Did you remember to write a post for next Tuesday? What about the Tuesday after that? WordPress doesn’t make it easy to see when your posts are scheduled. The editorial calendar gives you an overview of your blog and when each post will be published. You can drag and drop to move posts, edit posts right in the calendar, and manage your entire blog.

WPtouch Mobile more and more people are accessing the internet with their cell phones. You need to make sure that your site is readable on any cell phone. This plugin is easy to set up and other than installing plugin updates, you usually will not have to tweak settings.

Related Posts – Quickly increase your readers’ engagement with your posts by adding Related Posts in the footer of your content. There are numerous related post plugins. We recommend Yet Another Related Post plugin.

Authors, are there any WordPress plugins that you can’t live with out? Please share.

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