People might meet you at a networking event, and you may receive terrific referrals and book sales from your referral partners… but if anyone is remotely interested in reading your book or doing business with you, they are going to search you out online.

So, you want your online content to align with the great things your network is saying about you!

Story telling is an ancient art form and the people who study these things know that ancient humans crouched around campfires together sharing stories of strength and valour, passion and pain long before a printing press (or the internet) was ever a gleaming idea in a questing mind.
A good storyteller has likely been a necessity in human society since the dawn of time and unlimited wisdom has been passed along painlessly through the vehicle of a good story.

Although the way we tell our stories has changed, their importance is just as significant today as it has always been: people are far more engaged by a good story well told than they are by a simple collection of facts packed together in an orderly row.
As most of us know, life (and business) is anything but consistently orderly and the lyrical surprises inherent in a good story catch our attention like nothing else can, which doesn’t mean that the stories you want to tell about your book are epic romances or imaginative swashbucklers. Your online marketing stories need to be focused on helping your potential readers learn more about your book while lightening their load in some way.

How Do You Tell Your Business Stories?

Here are some ideas to increase book sales:

• A website that is designed to support all of your personal marketing endeavours

• Regular blog postings

• Downloadable templates or white papers (to convert book readers to clients)

• A newsletter/email marketing program

• Informational videos

• Free audio recordings

• Case studies about the problems you solve

• Checklists to help people improve a process

• Social media postings that point people to pertinent articles written by you or someone else

• Linked In activity

• You tube videos

• SlideShare presentations and

• Podcasts

It’s important that you post new content to your online “real estate” consistently. A blog that is updated every six or eight months will add zero value to your online reputation whereas one that is refreshed once a week will pack a much more powerful punch.

Your content needs to appeal to two separate audiences: the real people who might potentially buy from you and the web crawlers that want to know if you merit a Page One search ranking.

So that means your content needs to be cleverly written and cleverly optimized for search. It can seem like a lot of work – but if you are supporting your business with online content anyway, then it should involve just a little tweaking of your existing strategy to expand the scope of what you offer people.

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