Grow Your Marketing Part 12: The VIP Marketing Programme

We’ve looked at four methods you have available to grow your viability as a writer:

1. Increase the number of potential readers

2. Increase the number of actual readers

3. Increase the amount of money you take away from each book sale

4. Increase the number of times your book is bought

In the process of going through these steps, you may have begun to see how to put an effective marketing strategy together. Such a strategy begins with the book Crack Your Marketing, which teaches you how to ‘grow your own public’. In that book, you learn how you can stop having to look for customers every day like a neolithic hunter, but instead how to ‘farm’ them, saving you tons of time and energy and actually beginning to generate income from your books. It’s also fun and aligned with the things that make you want to write in the first place.

Crack Your Marketing gives you a firm foundation upon which you can build a viable writing career, but this can be developed further through the use of a Portal Product (your key work, the perfect introduction to your talents and powers as an author) and Activation Offers (items which you spread around in the marketplace, like short stories, poems or extracts, which build up your name as a writer).

We’ve also learned about the correct uses of email marketing and how that can broaden your horizons as a writer, expanding and extending your work into fields like clubs, merchandise, teaching, special offers and so on.

You can do all of this without ads, without funnels, without advanced technology — and without spending any money other than on my programme.

You can expand into viability as a writer and possibly beyond.

What’s stopping you?

The Three Biggest Fears

You are probably being held back by three big fears.

1. Fear that your work isn’t good enough.

This is the big one — you suffer from self-doubt and wonder if there is ever going to ever be a viable readership for your work.

2. Fear of not being able to find enough leads.

Even if you are reasonably sure that your work is OK, you worry that you will expend a lot of effort to no result in terms of finding people who might actually buy.

3. Fear of selling.

You’re a writer, not a salesperson. Even if you can accumulate an audience of hot prospects, you feel uncomfortable about ‘selling’ to them.

My VIP Marketing Programme

My unique programme tackles each of these fears in sequence, beginning with the Big One. That’s because, if we left the big one till last, you’d be working over the top of self-doubt until we got to it — so let’s get it out of the way first!

You begin from the point of uncertainty whether your fiction will really work for readers.

Niche Matters

1. I'll start with clearing up exactly what your niche is as a writer. This is something that you may never have looked at before, and certainly not in the way we’ll examine it. You have probably just ‘sat down and written stuff’ without putting much attention on who you’re writing for, and perhaps not having any clear idea of who might read your work. In this step, we’ll focus on what exactly it is that you write and who would like it.

Before you doubt yourself by asking ‘What if no one does?’ it’s highly unlikely that your work has no audience at all. Almost everything ever written has an audience somewhere — the challenge is twofold: finding that audience and ensuring that it is of a viable size so that you can live as a writer.

This is quite similar to farming: we have to find your particular plot of ‘land’ and make sure that we can grow a viable ‘crop’ there. Questions will be asked like

‘What is the transformation you create with your perfect readers?’

‘What emotional effects are you going for?’

‘What would you want your ideal reader to think after reading something of yours?’

and other questions of that nature.

But that’s just the beginning.

2. Next, we’ll deconstruct your writing and see exactly how it works to produce those effects. Again, this is something that you have probably never done. You will see how your stories are working, what is making them tick — and almost certainly see elements in your own work that you never saw before. In addition, you might also spot things which you do as a writer which hinder the effects you’re trying to create —bad habits, unspotted flaws — so you can fix them.

Doing this will also develop a picture of who exactly your ideal reader will be.

Then, having achieved that enlightened understanding of your own work and of your perfect audience, we’ll design a piece with maximum impact and appeal for that audience. This will be your Portal Product. It might be something you’ve already written which you will now have polished up, or it might be something that has been created from scratch to maximise your success.

3. After that, we'll design and implement a channel to give your ideal audience a clear path to getting your Portal Product — which you will be able to confidently market, knowing your readers will benefit.

4. From that, we will develop together a whole series of Activation Offers — shorter pieces of work which you’ll be able to use to spread your name throughout the reading marketplace like seeds ready for a future harvest. Many of these may be already lying around and will just need polishing up to align them with the above.

The result so far? You'll be 100% confident in your ability to deliver for your readers, without burning yourself out trying to flog everything you’ve ever written to an invisible and apparently indifferent audience. This confidence boost will make marketing and sales actually seem like fun to you.

Product: Confident Delivery

Growing Your Audience

1. We’ll begin this next stage by setting up and operating your ‘reader farm’. Instead of using expensive and wasteful ads or manually spamming the internet to try to generate interest, we will put together ‘catchment areas’ so that every day you already have a captive audience who will have arrived on their own determinism and who will be willing to engage with you.

I'll help you connect with up to fifty ideal prospects every day. These people will be the start of your ‘farm’ of warm prospects over the following two months. Setting up all of this won’t cost an additional penny.

2. We’ll gradually cultivate these prospects by working the Marketing Mantra (‘Attract generally, attract specifically, engage fully, provide more’) over and over finding out more and more what they like and what kinds of things they would pay for. This will largely be live communication with actual potential readers, prior to them ever hearing about your book(s).

3. This live dialogue with real people will magically turn into initial sales of your Portal Product, the perfect introduction to you as an author.

Product: Hot Prospects and Sales

Selling Without Selling

This third phase of the programme tackles your fear of selling — not by making you sell, but by almost automating the process so that you don’t really have to do anything.

1. I’ll help you by establishing a set Seed Script which can be left on social media for prospects to fill in. Part of this will obtain for you an additional email address list.

2. Then we’ll cull through those who have responded using a special Selection Criteria and work out what best to offer them and in what way. Most of this, after a short while, can then be further automated so you don’t have to engage with anyone.

3. In addition, I will help you put an email marketing sequence together which uses everything you’ve learned so far to utilise your email address list.

Product: Automated Sales

The VIP Marketing Programme shows you how to get book sales every week and how to build a viable income.

How much does the programme cost?

Unlike most people in this field, I will vary this according to the amount you are willing to invest in it.

If you can only afford a small amount, I will tailor your programme to fit that amount.

If you'd like to invest a little more in your future, you'll get more - more time, more depth, more insights.

As we work through these steps, each one is capable of boosting your career, but one or two will stand out as THE thing which will transform your future — so I’ll focus on that and build it up to maximum potential.

I’m calling this programme the VIP Programme because it will transform you from a struggling writer into a Very Important Person who will begin to see how the whole marketing thing gets products for you.

Each week for two months, we'll focus together on one of the steps, discussing, brainstorming, outlining, developing. You’ll then implement each step — but don’t worry, one of the requirements of each agreed step is that it has to be implementable within the resources available. No ads, no funnels, no additional expenses, just simple things you can do to lift your career — simple, but extremely powerful and coordinated.

What if none of this works?

Best case scenario: over the next 6 months, you build a career which is virtually self-running and enjoyable to manage. You get leads. You get sales. You add names to an email list for future sales. You get more confidence, and the systems we install together mean you can keep growing your career every month, while all the time placing your main focus on writing.

Writing is at the heart of this — it’s the ‘provide more’ part of the Marketing Mantra.

Before long, you’ve made back the money you spent on the programme and everything from there on out is profit made as a writer, doing very little other than write.

Worst case scenario: maybe it doesn’t go as planned. Maybe you’re a few weeks in, and you decide it’s not working for you. Or the schedule doesn’t work, or you feel you weren’t ready…

You'll get to keep all the materials and any bonuses you’ve picked up; you get to retain all the knowledge. You’ll know much more about what to do to succeed — but you won’t have paid a penny more than you felt you could afford.

Does that sound like something you might be interested in?

Drop me a line:

grant@clarendonhousebooks.com