John Kuhn and Mark Mullins are business consultants with decades of corporate, entrepreneurial and academic experience. Their newly published book is Street Smart Disciplines of Successful People – 7 Indispensable Disciplines for Breakout Success. And their website, StreetSmartDisciplines.com, has been a success as well, with over 500 visitors in the past month. So how did they do it? Read on to hear their answers to our questions…
Who built your website? How was the experience?
Smart Author Sites did our website. It was a great experience. A very seasoned team of pros that understand what authors need. Outstanding guidance and quality creative suggestion. Completed ON TIME and ON BUDGET!
Which social networking sites do you regularly participate in? Facebook? Twitter? GoodReads? LinkedIn? Any others?
Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google +, GoodReads
How has your online presence (be it through a website or social networking profiles) increased your visibility/book sales?
We have used our website as the primary platform to communication our book’s message and the value to the reader… As we designed our social media campaign, we built it to direct people to our website and let the website do the selling for us.
What is your “secret” to achieving this success? Were there any tricks or creative ideas (i.e. a contest) that you used?
Provide overwhelming and compelling evidence to our potential readers that they will gain tremendous value from reading our book. We recommend that all authors provide entertaining and informative details regarding the book and be selling ALL the time.
What is the greatest lesson you’ve learned in the process of building your online presence as an author?
Being “famous” online does NOT translate to book sales! You have to be actively soliciting people every day to buy your book… use blogs, use articles about your book, post pictures and create some video to post as well… Any time we posted these items we got more traffic, which usually resulted in more book sales.
How and where do you promote your website? Is the URL on business cards? Your email signature?
EVERYWHERE… Every blog, every article, email signatures, business cards, in our book, in our videos, we mention it in all radio interviews and have the show host post it to their website and on all promotional materials.
Final words of wisdom for any new authors wondering how to get started….
Don’t quit! This is really hard. Edit your work a bunch of times and then have other editors look at it too… Then have someone, at the end, when you think you’re done proof the entire book… You will be shocked at how much you missed that was just about to be published! Yikes!