Successful Marketing

Guest Post by Heather Hart

I’m blessed to have the job of helping other authors succeed. It’s a great job, and I love it. It was the sole reason behind my latest book, “A Year of Book Marketing.” And I wanted to take a few moments to share some of the tips within that book with you.
To truly market your book successfully, you not only need to know what you are doing, you also need to have the tools to get you there and an action plan to keep you where you want to be. One of my favorite quotes is: 

“If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.”


I believe that if we really want to be successful at something, we have to have a plan. It isn’t always the amount of time it takes that makes something great, it’s simply a matter of maximizing the time we have. And let’s face it, in today’s world time is one of the things that we all lack the most!
One of the best marketing tips I can give you, is to maximize your time with helpful tools. There are hundreds if not thousands of free and paid tools available online today, but there are 3 that I couldn’t market my book without – well, not successfully anyway. They are as follows:

Hootsuite – Hootsuite allows me to schedule posts on both Twitter and Facebook in advance. I can set them for a specific day and time, and then work on something else. This is helpful because I can post about an upcoming sale I’m having, or even schedule some generic promo posts, so I’m not trying to do everything every day. I generally spend an hour on Wednesdays scheduling posts for the coming week. I still log into Twitter and Facebook, but if I get really busy, I know that I’m still being represented there. 

Gremln – Similar to Hootsuite, Gremln lets me schedule posts in advance – but the cool feature about Gremln is that they let you schedule your posts to repeat. So if you’ve got some generic marketing posts, you could have them automatically be sent out every 15 days, or on the first Wednesday of every month – maybe even once a year. This is a huge time saver for me. I find Hootsuite’s interface a bit easier to read, but you could get by with just Gremln as it does pretty much everything Hootsuite does.

Bit.ly – Bit.ly is awesome for shortening links. If you want to link to a blog post with a super long URL, or you want people to be able to remember your link easily, bit.ly can help you with that. For instance, bit.ly/21Devos is the link to one of my devotional books on Amazon. I’ve committed that to memory and I don’t have to pull up the URL if I need to give it to someone.  

 bit.ly/BookMarketing101 is the affiliate link to one of my marketing books. That’s much easier than http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/061564936X/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=061564936X&linkCode=as2&tag=authoassis-20 don’t ‘cha think. 
 
It is my hope that you find the above tools helpful for your own book marketing, but I also hope that you’ll consider reading my new book, “A Year of Book Marketing.” Part one came out January 1^st and is available on Amazon.com. You can learn more about it at: http://authorheatherhart.blogspot.com/p/book-marketing.html
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Helping other authors since 2009, Heather Hart lives in Texas with her husband, Paul, where she fills her days caring for their four young children, writing for Christ, and studying God’s Word. Heather works as a self-publishing-coach.com liaison, author, and authors assistant whose desire is to glorify Christ through her work and to help other authors do the same. You can learn more about Heather by visiting her website: http://authorheatherhart.blogspot.com/

Or, by connecting with her in the following places:
Twitter: @_HeatherHart
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/heatherhartauthoreditor

To celebrate the launch of “A Year of Book Marketing – Part 1,” Heather is having a book launch party over on her blog.

During the month of January, you can enter to win one of the following books on book marketing just by sharing about it:
· 1 Free Copy of Heather’s New Book: “A Year of Book Marketing” (Part 1)
· 2 Free Kindle Copies of My Book: “Marketing Your Book on Amazon”
· 5 Free Copies of Heather’s Book: “Book Marketing 101”

PLUS, to help authors start the new year off right, she’s reduced the price of her book to only $0.99. February 1^st it will go back up to $3.99 so don’t wait to get your copy!
Visit her book launch party page at: http://authorheatherhart.blogspot.com/p/book-marketing.html for more information and your chance to win!