ARTICLE
Did you know that you can use viral marketing to get the news out about your romance novel before it ever hits the shelves, even if those shelves are only virtual? Well, you can. Viral marketing has been around for a long time, and most of the time when you hear the term it is in relation to information product marketing, but the truth is anyone can use viral marketing.
Creating buzz works! The only requirement is to create a viral agent that others are going to want to tell their friends and family about. Think of it in terms of entertainment rather than advertisement and you will be far more successful at viral marketing than the average Joe. Since we are speaking in terms of your romance novel, the idea is come up with a video book trailer, as well as other items that both entertain as well as inform.
Once you’ve created your piece then the next step is seeding that piece. We’ll use a video book trailer as our example since that is one of the easier ways to get the word out in terms of viral marketing. Once you have your video book trailer then you need to make it available online where others can see it. It’s always best to choose a place that allows others to embed the video book trailer in their own web pages, or on their social networks pages. Because this is just like that person going, “Hey check this out!” and there you have viral marketing at work.
The third step once you’ve created your piece and seeded it is to track in this case your video book trailer since that is the example we’re using. You Tube is one of the good places to put your video book trailer since it will allow you to see how many people have viewed your video book trailer. However it is not the only place, there are many others such as Google Video, and Yahoo Video to name two. They too will allow you to see how many people have viewed your video book trailer.
Tracking allows you to see how successful your viral marketing campaign has been, and helps you to improve for the next campaign. If you don’t track your results then you will never know what viral marketing techniques worked and which ones didn’t. This can mean less sales in the long run.
Video Book Trailers are only one example of viral marketing that is available to romance authors, another is using your signature line when posting to romance readers groups, or on romance reader’s forums, and a third is doing interviews on online talk shows such as Blog Talk Radio for example which will actually saves each podcast so that you can put a link to it on your websites.These are all great examples of viral marketing that romance authors can use to get the word out about their books.
