If you want to build your business around your book or books, there are several tools you’ll need to leverage your intellectual property and time. Here are the four tools that I believe are the most essential to your success.

A Target Audience
You need to know who your ideal readers are or you will not be able to market your book or business to them. Your target audience needs to be definite and fairly narrow. Everyone doesn’t want what you have to offer. There exists a set of people … your tribe … who will not only enjoy your book but will want it enough to buy it. Who are these people? What characteristics do they share? Different ways you can identify your target audience include:

• Gender
• Age range
• Income level
• Educational level
• Family status
• Occupation
• Geographic location
• Hobbies & interests
• Values

For more information on defining your target market, stay tuned for a special webinar I’ll be giving in partnership with Carolyn Ortman in the Spring. In the meantime, you can also read this article from Inc. magazine.

A Website with Blog
I … and countless other entrepreneurs … use WordPress for our websites. WordPress is so popular because it is free and scalable. With the help of free and paid plugins, you can do just about anything with WordPress.

Blogging is important because it attracts search engine traffic. When you post regularly to your blog (one to five times weekly), you are letting search engines know that you are keeping your content fresh. They like this and will index your website more regularly. Blogs can also be used to automate much of your online marketing because you can set things up so that when you post a new blog entry, it gets pushed out to social media automatically.

In addition, your website is the hub of your online presence. It is sort of the “You Central” on the web. All your posts on other sites (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc.) should be point people to your website.

Matching Social Media Presence
When you set up your social media profiles, they should match the look and feel of your website. If you are on Facebook, you should set up a separate Like page that matches your website’s brand. Find out where your ideal readers and clients hang out in social media and set up a presence there.

An Electronic Newsletter
Sustainable businesses build a following and follow up with them. Entrepreneurial authors understand the value of building their email list so they have:

• An opt-in form on their website that is above the fold
• A compelling opt-in bonus to entice their target market to subscribe
• A systematic process of following up and providing value to their subscribers

You can start off inexpensively with email marketing using services such as MailChimp or Aweber … and graduate to the fancy stuff once your business is regularly pulling in a decent income. Your biggest expense will be time … and you can manage that by sending out your newsletter on a monthly basis, setting up a system that makes pulling in the content easy and hiring a virtual assistant to help you out.

Once you’ve got these four tools working synergistically together, you’ll find that your business will grow … providing you with greater income and time to enjoy it!

Want to do email marketing the right way?