How Authors Use Blog Tours to Get Leverage

Mentors, Gina Gaudio-Graves and Jack Humphrey of Directions University, have espoused using leverage for years. It’s a concept that makes sense at the 30,000 foot level, i.e. use other people who have lists to help you grow your list by becoming valuable enough to them that they will share your content with their audiences. But it is “easier said than done.” One way authors can significantly leverage their book marketing efforts is with blog tours.

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Overview of Leveraging

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At its highest level of leveraging, your content actually becomes incorporated into the other person or business’ profit funnel, such as happens when an Internet marketer who has lots of front end products and even mid-range ones but no true high end product includes the Directions University Associate’s Program for a high end.

The more common – and easier to arrange – level of using leverage is to do guest blog posts for someone with a common target audience but a slightly different type of product so that you are not direct competitors.  Now, when it comes to authors, there really is no direct competition because someone who loves, for instance, fantasy will read multiple authors in that genre and, usually, numerous books in a year.

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Manaher’s Blog Tour Training

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Recognizing this fact, Shawn Manaher, of BookMarketingTools.com and The Author Hangout podcast series, did a short, four-part series, “Setting Up A Blog Tour in 2015,” to instruct authors on how to set up and run a virtual book tour by using a blog tour.

Three Way Win

The beauty of this concept lays in the leverage it gives authors to expand awareness of their books and writing to whole new audiences. By doing a blog posts for bloggers, they create three-way wins:

• Bloggers gain new content of interest to their audiences without having to write it themselves.
• The blog readers win by having new content related to their interests and by discovering a new author whom they might like.
• The author reaches new readers who are potential customers for is new book and even possible subscribers to his or her list.

The big difference between a guest blog and a blog tour is that the blog tour reaches out to numerous bloggers to appear on their blogs, not just one.

Key Points to Ensure Successful Blog Tours

There are four crucial facts to keep in mind when you choose to leverage your books, courses or other products and services.

1. The blogger’s audience must match your ideal reader’s profile. This profile is sometimes called an “avatar.” They need to care about what you write in your blog post.
2. The book must be of exceptional quality.
3. Make sure that your blog post has valuable content in it too so that you avoid coming across as a hard sell pitch, “Buy my book” over and over and over again.
4. To get subscribers to your list, you must offer them something of value. It could be anything your ideal customers consider valuable

• Checklist
• Flowchart
•  Slideshow
• Meme (image plus quote)
• Report
• Ebook
• Discount on the book
• Chapter of your book or a novella
• Free webinar or teleconference

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In building any relationship with an eye to using leverage, remember to always think of those three wins – the blogger, the readers or viewers and you.  The whole goal of using leverage is to reduce the amount of time and effort you need to grow your business. Assuming that you apply the lesson of the three wins, you will reach more people in far less time and at drastically lower cost than if you were to find customers for your books, one book at a time.

So a blog tour can give you and your book exposure to vast new audiences. Approached correctly, you will contact bloggers who already have audiences of your ideal customers. In this way, you leverage your time and effort to get the greatest return in new readers and customers in the shortest amount of time.