Note: This campaign is running May 15th through June 15th, 2019, so if you’re reading this between those dates then this blog post isn’t done yet, I’m still adding to it, and I’d love your suggestions!

In this post I share everything I did to get the crowdfunding campaign for my new book 60 Days to LinkedIn Mastery up to and over 1,000 pre-orders. I hope these are helpful to you as you market your own book. To be fair, these aren’t all “hacks,” some of them are just plain old marketing, but whatevs.

Note: My book is about marketing yourself on LinkedIn, which means the audience is focused heavily on LinkedIn, so of course most of the marketing I did was focused on LinkedIn. However, you could adapt many of these tips for other social networks, and if you have a business book with a B2B audience then you can probably copy and paste what I’ve done into your own book marketing plan.

Week 1

• Launched a promotion on LinkedIn, explaining that while I normally sell my LinkedIn thought leadership course for $500 (or $497, to be precise), single parents can get it for $21. Why single parents? Go read the post. Sidenote: Whenever I do these “I want it!” posts they usually start off slow for the first few hours, and it always scares me to death. “Oh no, this isn’t working anymore!” I think. Then the responses begin to flood in, and I get anywhere between 200-1,000+ responses and I breathe a sigh of relief.
• Posted a LinkedIn article for the first time in a long time (because articles typically perform terribly since LinkedIn stopped promoting them as much in the feed about two years ago), asking for feedback on the book introduction. Even though I’m pretty sure this won’t drive much attention, I wanted to give articles a try again, just in case. Plus I already had the content ready to go, so it took all of five minutes.
• Posted a graphic of a proposed book cover to LinkedIn, Instagram, and Twitter with links to the crowdfunding campaign. I spent all of a few minutes on this book cover. No matter what I do, if the book gets picked up by a publisher they’re going to take control of the process and it’s unlikely I’ll have a lot of control. But it’s still fun to play around with ideas and get input from my audience on it, and of course it drives that much more attention to the book itself.
• Created a LinkedIn post about what happened within the first 24 hours after the crowdfunding campaign launched.
• Posted my crowdfunding page video and asked for feedback on it on LinkedIn.
• Offered my $49 email course with the same name as the book for free to anyone commenting on this LinkedIn post (yes, offer is still valid if you go there right now and comment, before 22 May 2019). Also sent a link to this post in my weekly email newsletter to 4,000+ people.
• Asked my biz partner at MWI to buy 20 copies for our team.
• Wrote this blog post 🙂

There are also a few social media posts I made which I haven’t mentioned, but they were copies of LinkedIn posts that I pasted on Facebook.

Week 2

Starts May 21st. Here’s my partial to-do list:

• Update this website to promote pre-orders of this LinkedIn book, rather than my older CMO book.
• Update giveaway on this website to be LinkedIn focused.
• Email direct contacts one-by-one who may influence bulk purchasing decisions at their organizations.
• Re-read Growth Hacker Marketing by Ryan Holiday for more ideas.

Week 3

Starts May 28th.

Week 4

Starts June 4th, wraps up June 15th.

I’ve got a lot of experiments I want to try during the next three weeks to attract more attention and build up pre-orders, but you tell me–what’s your best idea on how to get people buying the book in bulk? Selling 1,000 copies to 1,000 people takes a lot of work. Selling 1,000 copies to 50 people is less work.

Give me your best (feasible and free or nearly free ideas) and if I love it I’ll send you a 5 lb bag of Swedish Fish. Remember that drawings “Buy my book and I’ll choose one lucky winner to receive XYZ!” are illegal in the US. I swear, everything I want to do is illegal…