Breathing Life Into Your Backlist With Web 2.0

When I wrote my first book “How To Enjoy Your Job“, I knew nothing about marketing. I didn't know about blogging, or traffic generation, video, social networking, twitter, podcasting… and the list goes on. So in April 2008, I self-published my book and not much happened! This may be happening to you – or you are scared it will happen to you! You may also have books you published years ago that you are ready to relaunch in some way.

In the months after first self-publishing, I learnt a lot and started a blog, got on the radio and on national TV as well as selling some books – Yeah! But I have certainly learnt a lot since then, so I decided to relaunch the website and take some action to improve my sales. I absolutely believe in my book. It has changed my life, and other peoples and there are so many miserable office workers out there – so I do want to reach a wider audience. I thought I would share what I have done and what I am about to do which may give you some ideas.

1. Built a new blog, combining my old website and old blog. I previously had a website with free signup, buy the book links, press page etc and also a separate free wordpress blog. I had been posting on that for around 10 months so I had a lot of good information, but not much traffic! So I have moved to a hosted blog  “How To Enjoy Your Job” that incorporates aspects of the website that I liked, but enables the traffic building of blogs. I imported all my old posts, added images to most of them and am cleaning up the posts over the next few weeks to optimise them. I have added keywords based on Google's keyword analysis tool.
2. Installed excellent WordPress plugins to help with traffic building. One of the benefits to having a hosted blog is all the cool plugins you can use. In particular, I use All in One SEO which enables better search engine traffic, Related Posts and Blubrry for podcasts.
3. Included a Free Workbook. I had this before but I think it is very obvious now. I am already seeing an increase in numbers of people being added to my list.
4. Made it very obvious how to buy my book. I will check on whether my sales increase next month but it is certainly obvious how to buy the book now. I have used the Amazon widget on the sidebar (although there is also a Buy Now page).
5. Set up a new Twitter account ChangeJob. Twitter is one of my top traffic providers for this blog and in a few months I have gathered over 7000 followers. Over time, this will keep building. I love Twitter and think it is brilliant for connecting to like minded people, but I need a different account to tweet on career related topics. It is separate branding, so it needs a separate account. I have scheduled a whole load of tweets using TweetLater with links to mine and other posts from other blogs.
6. Submitted best posts to Stumbleupon. I also get excellent traffic from Stumbleupon so have submitted some posts in order to get the users of this service noticing my articles.
7. Started preparing the podcasts. I am intending to podcast the whole book, but I am also cleaning up old interviews to put on the podcast as well.

I have previously submitted articles to EzineArticles so will start that practice up again, as well as start building relationships with bloggers in the career change niche (primarily through Twitter).

I hope that gives you some ideas if you need to breathe some life into your backlist. Mostly, this is costing time and not money so it is available for anyone. I am also looking at redesigning this blog based on Chris Garrett's feedback so more plans in the works!