The term outreach is used to describe a range of marketing activities, so for the sake of clarity, this is how I define outreach:
Outreach is any activity designed to direct people interested in the type of books you write further down your book marketing funnel.
These activities must satisfy one criterion to be outreach:
Does it link either to your website or to a bio that links to your website?
If the answer is “No”, then it’s not called outreach—it’s called Wasting Your Time.
Take your time to absorb this distinction because it’s vital to your success. Outreach is action-oriented. Your goal is to build trust with the reader. If your outreach content doesn’t encourage a potential fan to take action towards building trust, you are wasting your time.
The purpose of outreach is to build trust with potential readers and turn them into fans.
Outreach must link to your author website. To be more specific, that link must go to a page offering great free content. This can be a promo giving something away in return for an email address, or free content related to the linking content.
For example, you publish a short article on another blog site that links back to the full article on your website. For fiction authors, this could be an excerpt from a new short story linking back to the complete story. In these examples, the Call to Action (CTA) can be a newsletter sign-up form embedded in the content or a free PDF download of the complete article or story.
If your content links to a sales page—either on Amazon or a sales page on your website—it’s not outreach, it’s advertising.
Advertising is a different beast to outreach, with different goals. Remember, outreach is for building trust, and advertising is for generating sales. Advertising can work for authors, but it’s unnecessary for your success, regardless of what some might say. The reason for this is ads only work while the ads are running.
Whereas with outreach, you are building permanent organic links to your work. As organic growth outperforms paid growth on every platform online, ads should never be your primary marketing strategy.
After all, which book are you more likely to buy—the one that keeps popping up in your feed, no matter how many times you have tried to silence it, or the one recommended by a friend over your morning coffee?
Outreach is Active
Outreach is the active part of your book marketing.
Your books and the links they contain, articles and stories on your site, and social media author pages are passive marketing. They’re all content you rarely change once they’re published.
Effective outreach requires you to seek opportunities to draw readers into your books. Most often, this comprises the creation and sharing of content. It can also be simple things like making sure your signature block in emails and online forums contain a link to your website.
Outreach Content is Sharable
Remember what I said in Chapter 5: growth happens when you create content users want to share. So, to improve the effectiveness of your outreach, any content you produce should also be easy to share.
Shareability is where effective social media use becomes an important part of your outreach.
No, I am not contradicting myself here—I still believe social media is low value, and your time is better spent elsewhere. The key word here is “effective”.
While social media is unnecessary for you to succeed, its sheer size as a source of potential readers makes it important for you to understand effective social media use can be valuable.
To be effective in social media outreach, you must distinguish between “sharing content” and “content that is easy to share”.
Emailing your fans and posting the same message on your Facebook page are both sharing content.
How easy it is for the recipient to share the message governs the shareability of each message.
A Facebook post is easy to share by default, but it’s of low value to you. The email is orders of magnitude more valuable, but how do you make it easy to share? By putting social share buttons in the email, of course!
You can make your high-value content easy to share by adding social sharing capabilities, for example:
- Add social share buttons to each of your articles or blog posts
- Put “Click to Tweet” scripts in your articles
- Add a pin to an infographic or relevant screenshot or artwork
- Enable Facebook comments on your posts
Other People’s Lists (OPL)
You can improve the effectiveness of social media outreach by employing the concept of Other People’s Lists or OPL, which I introduced in Chapter 5.
Your reach is limited—whether it be your author website or your author feed on whatever social media platforms you use. This is acute on the most popular social media platforms as they limit your organic reach to push you to paid advertising.
With OPL, you’re not sharing the content. All you need to do is create something awesome, and make it easy for others to share with their list.
This is the real secret sauce the gurus never tell you about. It isn’t the gazillion posts you created that brings the success; it’s the few great posts in the gazillion someone else shared that brings the success.
What’s super cool about this is that you don’t even have to be on a particular platform for this to work—people will share your good stuff on their favorite platform for you.
Two examples from my work:
- I get a substantial amount of organic traffic to my computer programming website from Quora, Reddit and Stack Overflow despite not having accounts with any of them or having ever posted a single piece of content on these sites. This traffic is all from users of these forums posting links to my work.
- I get a nontrivial amount of traffic from Twitter, even though I have never sent a tweet. This traffic comes from Twitter users tweeting links to my content.
You still have to create content that’s good enough to share. However, you can spend all the time you save by not posting yourself into exhaustion creating a few pieces of outstanding content and making them easy to share.
There is also another aspect of OPL you can leverage to improve your reach.
On balance, it’s more effective to post content on external websites or media platforms. Note, I say on balance—it isn’t always more effective, but broadly speaking:
- It’s better to post or share content in a social media group than it is to share it in your personal feed.
- It’s better to publish an article on a related blog or news site than it is to post it on your site.
- It’s better to have a story published in collaboration with other authors than to publish an anthology of your stories.
There are no hard and fast rules here—what works for one author may not work for another. The underlying principle is that it’s better to find an existing audience for a particular piece of content than to try to create an audience for the content. You should keep this in mind when you are planning your outreach.
Being SMART With Outreach
SMART is an acronym often used in vocational education and in self-help literature as a tool for setting effective goals.
It stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time-limited. What it means is for any goal to be effective, it must be:
- Explicit;
- You must have a measure of success or failure;
- You must feel like it’s achievable;
- It must be possible to achieve; and
- It must have a deadline.
For outreach, I have simplified this to the Who, What, Where, When and Why or 5Ws of outreach activities.
You should be able to see straight away why this is so effective in laser targeting your marketing efforts and eliminating time wasters.
Let’s look at the conventional approach to social media marketing in terms of the 5Ws:
- Who? Everyone!
- What? Um, memes are popular, aren’t they?
- Where? Is there such a thing as too many social accounts?
- When? RIGHT NOW! Because, like, it’s super important. Right?
- Why? Because everyone else is doing it, silly!
OK, so I’m going somewhat over the top here, but we’re all guilty of being vague in our intentions and expectations. You can’t run a successful business without specific goals. Of all the positive things you can do for your writing career, having specific marketing goals is second only to having specific writing goals.
So, here’s a better example of the 5Ws:
- Who? Readers of fast-paced, short sci-fi.
- What? A new flash fiction story.
- Where? Publish on my website and then post a link to the story in Facebook sci-fi groups.
- When? May 27th.
- Why? Add 50 new readers to my mailing list.
Here’s another one:
- Who? Readers of YA thrillers.
- What? Guest blog post.
- Where? The YA Thrillers website.
- When? July 1st.
- Why? Increase weekly traffic to my website by 10%.
You get the idea.
Let’s explore the 5Ws in more detail, so you get a better understanding of what makes a great outreach activity.
Who
Who should be as specific as possible. There is no point in targeting “sci-fi readers” or “fantasy readers” or “romance readers” because those terms are far too broad. To allow you to sort the browsers from someone who is likely to become a fan, you need to be more specific. “cyberpunk dystopian romance lovers” is far more likely to help you direct your efforts to the right readers if you write cyberpunk dystopian romance.
What
What is the content itself. It can be anything from a short post to an entire book. It’s not limited to text either—What includes photos, infographics, drawings, and dare I say it, memes.
Where
Where is the platform. Where can be social media, your website, or any other website.
As Calls to Action (CTAs) can be outreach, Where can also be promotions and giveaways in one of your books, magazines or in an anthology you create with other authors. Just remember ads and outreach are different—outreach directs people to free stuff, ads direct people to stuff they have to pay for.
When
When doesn’t need much explanation, it’s the date of publication.
Why?
Why is the most important of the 5Ws because it’s how you measure success or failure.
Why must provide an objective measure of success.
So, if you go back to my last example, “Increase weekly traffic” would not have been an acceptable Why because it’s not an objective measure. “Increase weekly traffic by 10%” is measurable. You can look at your analytics and make a clear decision. Yes, it did, or no, it didn’t.
Make Better Marketing Decisions
Remember the marketing reset exercise we did in Chapter 5?
Now you have a tool to measure the level of outreach success. When you do a periodic review of your outreach efforts, rather than going with your gut, you can confidently identify the activities that brought you the most benefit.
In combination, What and Where cover the gamut of book marketing. “What is the best way to promote my books?” is the number one question I get asked. This question has spawned millions of “How to …” articles, and selling the current trendiest answer to the question is how the Internet marketing gurus make their money. When there are so many thousands of options, it’s easy to see why authors get overwhelmed.
There is no one best way, and what is best for me might not be best for you because your audience is different. Which is why conducting the 5Ws with every outreach activity is so important.
The Indie Publishing Machine is about concentrating on the 20% of efforts that bring 80% of your results, but when you first start, you don’t know what the 20% is. Once you have a clear objective (your goal or your Why) you will learn which things work best for you.
I won’t leave you on your own, though. From personal experience and research, I know there are a few channels and approaches that have a universal application for authors and should be a part of your 20%.
I have included a bonus chapter at the end of the book called “Outreach FAQ” that answers common questions regarding blogs, advertising, book launches, and several other marketing-related questions.
Prioritize Outreach Activities
Before I go on to the next chapter, I want to draw your attention back to the Value Funnel, which I covered in Chapter 5.
Outreach is marketing, so you must complete it within whatever timeframe you have allocated for marketing during the week; remember, marketing time must never exceed writing time.
Given the limited hours available, and the almost unlimited outreach options available, prioritizing activities is very important.
On the value spectrum, social media is the least valuable and cultivating your email list is the most; with Amazon and your website coming somewhere in the middle. Given a list of activities, the Value Funnel helps you complete them in priority order.
Say, for example, you have a Facebook post and an email you have done your 5Ws for and are ready to go, but you only have time for one task. The Value Funnel says the email is the most important, so you send it first. You publish the Facebook post if you find more time later, or you can schedule it into next week’s marketing.
How about if you have a book description and keywords that need updating on Amazon and the same Facebook post? The book description and keywords get done because they’re more important than the post.
If, on the other hand, you have an email to go out and the book description update, then the email takes precedence. And so on.
OK, that wraps it up for outreach. The remaining chapters in the book cover the technical setup of your author mailing list, your author website, and publishing your books on Amazon. And for the technically challenged, don’t panic—the final chapter shows you how to find techies to do all the hard stuff for you.