I’m about 48 hours into my book launch for The Nonprofit Marketing Guide: High-Impact, Low-Cost Ways to Build Support for Your Good Cause (Amazon link), so I thought I’d share a few first reflections on the process at this point.

Check out these results:

On the evening of June 1, 2010, the launch day, the book was #1 on the Amazon Nonprofit books list, #2 on the Marketing books list (second only to the legendary The Tipping Point), and the big shocker, #1 on the Movers & Shakers list.

Here are the key parts of the strategy . . .

1) The Pre-Order Campaign That Wasn’t

I was told by my publisher, Jossey-Bass, to use June 8 as the publication date. Even though they expected the books to be in their warehouse by late May, it would take a few days or even a week for the books to get to Amazon and that’s the date Amazon was using.

Thus, I had planned a pre-order campaign that consisted mostly of blogger outreach and an email message to my list of about 10,000 people for the last week or so of May.

Then the UPS guy pulled up to my house on the morning of May 19 with 150 copies, and friends forwarded emails they received from Amazon later that afternoon saying their pre-ordered copies were about to be shipped.

It seems everyone, including staff in various departments at Jossey-Bass, was caught unaware that the book had arrived and shipped early. In fact, it’s June 3 today, the book has been out for over two weeks now, and Amazon still has the publication date listed as June 8!

So much for the pre-order campaign. I had to get my rear into gear.

2) The Whole Launch Day Bonus Game- Blech!

If you do any research at all into doing a book launch focusing on Amazon rankings, you’ll find blog post after blog post advising you to set up a long series of bonus offers to entice as many people as possible to buy the book on the same day. Some authors offer literally hundreds of bonuses.

The plan looks like this: you get all of your friends and colleagues (your launch partners) to provide bonus downloads. You tell book buyers to forward their receipt or order number to an email address and they get an autoresponder with a link to all this extra stuff. Your launch partners then promote this to their own lists, presumably using their own Amazon affiliate codes and pumping up themselves for providing a bonus.

My instincts told me this was not a good approach for this book for two reasons.

(1) Nonprofits don’t like to feel like they are being sold to, period. As a rule, the sector is very suspicious of anything that feels like sales. Marketing a book about nonprofit marketing is actually sort of a dicey proposition. Piling on the bonuses just felt like too much old-fashioned slimy marketing and the whole point of this book is to show nonprofits how to market with integrity so they build a community of supporters around them (or how marketing has a soul, as Danielle Brigida so eloquently put it in her review).

(2) I just didn’t feel like hounding fellow bloggers and consultants for stuff and asking them to push my book to their lists (I’m lousy at asking people for things, which is why I’m in marketing and not fundraising). Making a quick buck is not the driving force in our field (Thank God). So this massive bonus book launch strategy that seems to work so well in the small business world had little chance of success in the nonprofit community, in my opinion.

So, instead, I did a much smaller launch day offer of just two bonuses very closely linked to the book’s content. The first bonus was the most concrete, self-contained, valuable thing I have to offer — an Annual All-Access Pass to our webinar series which sells for $465.  The second was a tagline review by Nancy Schwartz of Getting Attention.org, the first stop on the virtual book tour (more on that in a minute). Nancy is also a business partner of mine, so it’s a great fit.

Nancy published my guest post on her blog around 9:45 a.m. ET on Tuesday. The book’s overall Amazon rank at that point, based mostly on pre-orders, was 169,539 and it didn’t appear on any of the lists. I emailed the offer to my list around 11:45 a.m. ET. I received the first receipt from a buyer at 11:23 a.m., presumably based on the guest post. They started popping in regularly about 10 minutes after the email went out.

At 12:30 p.m., less than an hour after the email went out, the book was at 23,348 overall and 18th on the nonprofit list. I decided around this time that I wanted to produce a video for my first blog post about the virtual book tour. Yes, it would have been better to have thought of that days earlier, but I didn’t, so whatever. So I messed around with that for an hour or so.

At 3:24 p.m., I saw this tweet from Jossey-Bass about the book hitting the Movers & Shakers list:

Mind you, I had never heard of the Movers & Shakers list until now. The Movers & Shakers index identifies the biggest gainers in sales rank at Amazon.com in the past 24 hours. Shortly after this tweet, the marketing manager for the book at Jossey-Bass contacted me because the buyer at Amazon wanted to know what I was doing to boost sales, so they could make sure they had enough books in stock to meet the demand. I think we were all a little surprised, given that this is a professional book in a fairly narrow niche!

At the same time that the book hit #4 on the Movers & Shakers list, it was #312 overall, #1 on the Nonprofit list, suddenly #2 on the Marketing list, and #19 on the Business Management list.

I had a little trouble getting the video online (the audio tracking was all off for some strange reason), so it was close to 5:00 pm ET before I posted to my blog about the book launch. Not ideal, but it was only 2:00 p.m. on the West Coast as I often remind myself when this stuff falls to my late afternoon schedule. I had also tweeted seven times during the day and posted to my Facebook Page twice, which is more than usual for me, but practically nothing compared to a typical book launch.

I did see another burst of receipts after the blog post. On my last check of the day before turning off my computer at 10:30 p.m., the book had reached #264 overall and moved into the #1 slot on the Movers and Shakers list. My little book on nonprofit marketing, with my little launch plan, made the single biggest book  sales gain on Amazon on June 1!

3) The Month-Long Virtual Book Tour

All of my friends who know nothing about the publishing world today and who think I’m hotter stuff than I actually am assumed that I would be going on a real book tour. Ha, Ha, Ha. Yeah, right! While that idea was ridiculous, I obviously wanted to get some good publicity for the book.

As I noted earlier, the conventional wisdom is that you need to compress your sales into a very narrow window of time if you want to have any hope at all of getting ranked and getting the attention of brick-and-mortar store buyers. But this a professional book. In a narrow niche. I’ll probably collapse right in the aisle if I ever see the book in an actual store. I’m assuming all online retail sales, coupled with sales associated with speaking gigs, associations, and teaching programs. That’s it. But the book does has content longevity going for it. It’s not trendy or super timely, so it has a potentially long shelf-life content-wise.

To me, that means there’s value in stretching out the publicity campaign a bit, rather than trying to get everything done within one week. So I put together a month-long virtual book tour, anchored with two live events that I scheduled over a month ago, when I still thought the launch date was June 8. The first was a live online chat with the Chronicle of Philanthropy on June 8 and the second was a webinar for Network for Good on June 29. I planned to fill in the calendar with guest blog posts, interviews, etc.

Instead of slamming every blogger I know with a spray-and-pray approach, I hand-picked 20 people and contacted them with a personal email, offering a free review copy of the book, an interview, a guest blog post — basically whatever they wanted. I suggested that they pick a specific date in June that I could put on the calendar, but said I’d be happy with whatever they wanted to do, whenever they wanted to do it.

All but one or two people responded positively, either with a set date or a commitment to do something later after they had read the book.  I also welcomed other people to join in via a tweet and a note on the book home page, and a few other bloggers added themselves to the tour schedule too.

In Summary

My book reached #1 positions on Amazon on launch day, based on one email, one blog post, one guest blog post, seven tweets, and two Facebook updates. Sounds easy enough, right?

The reality, of course, is much deeper than that, because I have spent the last two years building a community of supporters around the blog and the webinar series that gave rise to the book in the first place. That community of fans is what took the book to #1 – not anything particularly special that I did on June 1.

The rest of the marketing I do this month will be focused on building and serving that community. I’ll share more about the other parts of the book marketing plan in later posts.

Right now, the book sits at #1 on the Nonprofit list, #11 on the Marketing list, and at #1,232 overall.

The Writing for Nonprofits Coaching Program is a month of training and coaching to grow your freelance business and nonprofit clientele. Session starts April 26, 2010. Get the details and register.

The next session of the “Writing for Nonprofits” Coaching Program for freelance writers starts on Monday, April 26. There’s still room if you want to join us!

When I talk with nonprofits about hiring freelance writers, I suggest they focus on four questions when making the decision. Put yourself in the nonprofit’s shoes for a moment and consider how they might answer these questions about you.

1. Is this freelancer a good listener?

As important as creative skills are, the ability to listen to a client’s needs and to incorporate them into the project are critical.  Freelance projects will include many variables, such as audience, message, and tone, all of which require that the client and the freelancer work together to get it right. You should treat this relationship as a partnership, which requires that you both listen well.

2. Does this freelancer seem flexible?

Much of communications and marketing is subjective. While some elements, such as correct grammar and word count, are objective, whether the piece meets the client’s needs in terms of style is highly subjective. A good freelancer knows this and will work with her client to get the style right, even if the first draft is way off.

Also, as the project progresses, a client may very well change her mind about how she wants an issue handled or what elements should be emphasized.  Your ability as a freelancer to “go with the flow” and adjust accordingly is important — within reason. Be clear about the number of drafts and the scope of work upfront and ensure that your clients understand how much they can change before a different payment structure kicks in.

3. Do I like this freelancer’s portfolio and client list?

I suggest that nonprofits who are hiring freelancers for the first time review portfolios looking for experience with a similar project or with a similar organization in subject area, size, or some other meaningful measure.  All professional freelancers should provide work samples and client lists and testimonials on their websites.

4. How do this freelancer’s other clients describe their relationships?

I tell nonprofits to check references. What they see on a website is a good start, but I suggest they make at least one phone call before hiring a new freelancer.  Speaking directly with another client is one of the best ways to judge how well a freelancer works with people. I encourage nonprofits to look for freelancers who have received multiple projects from the same client. Repeat business is always a good sign.

If you work for a nonprofit, what questions do you ask yourself before hiring a freelancer? If you are a freelancer, do you think these questions are the right ones to ask about you? Share your thoughts in the comments.

The Writing for Nonprofits Coaching Program is a month of training and coaching to grow your freelance business and nonprofit clientele. Session starts April 26, 2010. Get the details and register.

My quick answer: No!

When I first put my websites for professional freelance writing services online, I ran Google AdSense ads on them. I’d say at least half of the websites for freelance writers that I’ve visited lately have AdSense on them.

But I took the ads off my sites within a few months and never regretted it. I think it’s a mistake to run AdSense or other contextual advertising on your site when you are trying to sell your own writing or freelancing services.

Here is what is says to me when I see ads on a freelance writer’s site, especially in “optimized” locations, like between the headline and the body text, or with the body text wrapping around the ad:

• This writer is more interested in getting me to click on an ad so she can make $0.10 than she is in convincing me to hire her for hundreds or thousands of dollars.
• This writer is desperate for revenue, which means she probably isn’t very good at what she does for a living.
• This writer doesn’t understand online marketing.

I’m not against all advertising, especially when it appears off to the side, instead of in the main body of the site. It can also make sense when ads are presented as “recommended” or “endorsed” products and services (e.g., when you are an affiliate selling someone else’s products that you personally like). Advertising makes perfect sense when that income stream is the reason for the site in the first place and you are creating content to draw people to the site, hoping they will click on your ads.

But if you are trying to convince me to hire you as a professional writer, why distract me with ads for other people’s stuff, especially when it’s unrelated to what I’m looking for? Much of the advertising on writers’ sites is for writers, not for people who need to hire writers.

I hear many of you asking, “But what about a freelance writer’s blog? Writers use blogs to help with search engine optimization and to share with others. Why shouldn’t they earn some advertising revenue off that content that’s not directly tied to marketing the freelancer’s services?”

I think it goes back to your main purpose: Do you want me to hire you or do you want me to click on your ad? If you are writing a blog to position yourself as an expert, then you are using it to market your services. Be very careful about other advertising that distracts from that goal.

Decide what’s most important and then design your site and any advertising on it accordingly.

The Writing for Nonprofits Coaching Program is a month of training and coaching to grow your freelance business and nonprofit clientele. Session starts April 26, 2010. Get the details and register.

When I look back at where I’ve made the most money in my freelance writing career, without a doubt it is from clients who came to me via word-of-mouth referrals from my friends or family, colleagues from past jobs, other communications professionals, or other clients. I’ve had multi-year contracts with clients who found me through my husband, through volunteer work, and through other writers I befriended through the blogosphere. I’m pressed to come up with even one really well-paid gig that I might have landed from a job board.

So how do you make word-of-mouth referrals work for you?

Do great work. Give people more than they expect. They’ll be so thrilled they will naturally tell others about you.

Be clear about what you do. Don’t describe yourself as a freelance writer. Instead, say you write websites or newsletters or fundraising materials, or whatever it is you want to be hired to produce.

Let people know you are available. Without appearing desperate, casually mention to friends and other clients that you have a little time in your schedule for new projects if they know anyone who needs some help with (fill in the blank with what you produce).

Network with other writers and creative types. If you give good referrals, you’ll get good referrals. It’s one of those ying-yang things. I have friends in the freelance communications and marketing worlds who don’t know anything about nonprofits and when they are offered those jobs, they send them my way.  I often refer work to other writers and graphic designers when the potential job just isn’t right for me.

Tell some good stories. When you are in social situations, have some good work-related stories to tell about challenges that a client faced and that you helped solve. It’s a great way to educate people about what you do without sounding like a walking brochure.

Week #3 in the “Writing for Nonprofits” Coaching Program is all about finding nonprofit clients who want to hire you. The program starts March 1, but if you sign up before February 1, you can save $100 with this coupon: JAN100.

The Writing for Nonprofits Coaching Program is a month of training and coaching to grow your freelance business and nonprofit clientele. Session starts April 26, 2010. Get the details and register.

Nonprofits don’t need freelance writers.

What they do need are newsletters, direct mail fundraising letters, Facebook pages, annual reports and other content for both print and online distribution.

But not even the content is the real need. The real need is donors, volunteers, advocates, and other supporters who can help them implement their mission.

So why would you market yourself to nonprofits as simply a freelance writer? When you do that, you fall into the trap of talking about features, when you should be talking about benefits.

The benefits of a good freelancer are newsletters that inspire supporters, annual reports that reassure donors, and Facebook pages that get people commenting and sharing about the cause.

When I first started out, I talked to potential clients about how I could provide freelance writing services. I got blank stares. When I started talking about how I could write their newsletters, special reports, and event speeches, I got paid.

Kerry Karvetski (one of the guest experts in our “Writing for Nonprofits” Coaching Program) doesn’t say on her website that she’s a freelance writer. She says

I write kick-butt e-mails and Web site copy, launch super solid e-mail campaigns and know my way around more than a few content management systems, e-mail services and social networks.

Now that’s what nonprofits need!

The Writing for Nonprofits Coaching Program is a month of training and coaching to grow your freelance business and nonprofit clientele. Session starts April 26, 2010. Get the details and register.

I attended the Land Trust Alliance’s national conference last week in Denver. My husband was speaking and I didn’t want to pass up Rocky Mountain hiking, so I decided to tag along and reserved a table-top display in the exhibit area.

This was the first time I had ever marketed my services at a trade show. It’s too early to tell if it was a success or not, but here are a few things I learned.

People like useful freebies. I gave away pens with my website on them. Of all of the information that I had on the table, people picked up more pens than anything else.

Appeal to the broadest audience possible. I created a free tip sheet about easy ways to market land trusts online. About half the people who took a pen took the tip sheet. My guess is that it was too specific. Something more general like how to create a quick and dirty marketing plan probably would have been more widely appealing than specifically focusing on online marketing.

Location, location, location. I decided to attend this event rather late in the game, and so my tabletop was not in the main flow of traffic. Decide early enough in advance that you will attend, so that you can reserve the best locations on the trade show floor.

Make display items visible from several feet away. Lots of people want to see what you have without having to talk to you. Make sure everything is either hanging on the display or is otherwise standing up. Information flat on the table can’t be seen by attendees unless they are standing right next to it.

Be there in the middle of the conference program. People straggled in the first day. Everyone was there the second day. People straggled out the last day. I’d say 90% of my contact with people came on that middle day.

Put on your outgoing, friendly face. Lots of people cruising the hall won’t initiate a conversation with you, but they will stop and chat if you are really friendly and ask them questions about themselves.

I offered a drawing of free e-courses, e-books, and wine to get business cards and will also add those people to my email newsletter list. I also offered free consulting sessions on-site to get a better sense for what people need. Both produced lots of contacts that I can use to prospect new clients this fall (if I have time).

Have you used trade show marketing for your freelance business? How did it go?

I’ve found that 99% of my new clients come to me via either (1) word of mouth from other clients or friends or (2) through my websites or e-newsletters. They either find me through people we both know or through a web search that connects us online.

Early in my career, I listed my freelance writing business on several different directory sites. For example, many writing associations offer directories of members and some nonprofit associations offer directories of service providers. But as far as I could tell, these listings didn’t do much to generate work.

Have you found directories like these useful in bringing clients to you? If so, which directories or associations do you like best?

I get a lot of inquiries from freelance writers who are interested in working with me. I often do have enough work to subcontract some of it out, but I need more than just a good writer or editor who understands the nonprofit landscape. What I really need is a good writer or editor who gets nonprofits and who can also work in Dreamweaver, PageMaker and/or InDesign.

While I still do a lot of writing and editing in Word, many of my clients ask me to move the document along in the process and get it ready for online or print publication. If a good editor or proofreader has the design program that the document is in (or will be shortly), it is that much easier for me to work with them. I’d much prefer that the proofreader go ahead and correct any problems she catches on a webpage within the HTML file, rather than point them out to me on a hard copy, leaving me to type in the corrections.

Expand your skills and your software options and you will likely expand your writing/editing clientele.

Being self-employed means you often have to take responsibility for tasks outside your areas of expertise. You become an accidental computer technician, bookkeeper, advertising executive, and, if you have a website, search engine optimization expert. It can all be very overwhelming.

To make at least one of these jobs — online marketing — a bit more manageable, here are seven extremely easy ways that writers can market themselves online.

Comment on blogs. Most bloggers accept comments on their posts. Read blogs related to writing or your areas of expertise and submit comments on the posts. In most cases, a link to your website or blog will be included with your comment. You can search for blogs at technorati.com. For nonprofit blogs, see the Nonprofit Blog Exchange.

Join e-discussion lists. Participate in email discussion lists (sometimes called listserves) to become well-known as an active and knowledgeable writer in your area of specialty. Yahoo! Groups and Google Groups are good places to start. For nonprofit lists, also check out N-TEN’s Affinity Groups.

Spend time on your website page titles. Page titles are used heavily by search engines to determine the relevance of your site. Spend some time making sure they are full of keywords, not just your website name.

Use search engine friendly URLs. Search engines also look at the actual names of your files in your website. Place keywords in your file names to improve their rankings. For example, nonprofit-writer.htm is a better file name than aboutme.htm.

Create an email signature. Every email you send, especially those to e-discussion lists with archives online, should include an email signature with your contact information and a bit of information about the kind of writing you do.

Keep family and friends in the loop. Word-of-mouth referrals are a big source of work for most successful freelance writers, so when you communicate with friends and family via email, be sure to give them an update on the work you are doing and the kind of work you’d like more of. Just about everyone has been involved with a nonprofit for some reason at some point in their lives, so you never know where that next referral could come from.

Recycle your articles. Take something you’ve already written and repurpose it as a marketing piece by submitting it to an online article directory like EzineArticles.com. People can download and use your article for free, but they must include your author information which will naturally include a link to your website.

I’m offering more online marketing tips like these in “25 Easy and Low-Cost Ways for Writers to Market Themselves Online,” which is a free download when you claim a keyword at 500Writers.com.

Buzz, viral, blog — whatever you want to call it — word of mouth marketing is big news, and for good reason. It’s cheap and it works. There’s even an association for it. The Word of Mouth Marketing Association has launched a new blog to share research on word of mouth marketing metrics and measurement. For example, the blog describes a study that found that word of mouth is more effective than advertising for spreading information about a product, even if the ties between participants are weak.

Rachel Oliver at JV Media Design offers several steps for accelerating your word of mouth referrals. But remember, honesty is paramount. Jay Lipe at Smart Marketing explains what happens when word of mouth marketing crosses the line. WordSpreadsQuickly.com explains how it used a word of mouth strategy to generate 10,000 downloads of a study in two weeks.

Word-of-mouth referrals are the best kind of marketing for freelance writers. It doesn’t cost you a penny and you don’t even have to do the work. Encourage others to become part of your “secret” sales force by making sure your friends, family, neighbors, spouse’s co-workers, and everyone else you can think of know that you provide writing services for nonprofits. Think about it . . . anyone can be involved with a nonprofit in their spare time, so you never know where that referral for writing and editing services might come from. Make sure your name comes up by letting the people in all the circles of your life know that you are a freelance writer/editor.

I know this strategy works because it’s how I’ve obtained many of my clients. Contact with these people produced writing/editing contracts for me:

• a woman I took a class with
• the co-worker of a woman who took a class I taught
• a man I volunteered with
• my husband’s boss
• a couple I met at a party
• a colleague of an existing client

Share your word of mouth success story by adding a comment to this post.