Jo Parfitt interviews author and successful life coach, Arvind Devalia, about what was involved in self-publishing and promoting his acclaimed book, Get The Life You Love and Live It. Learn more at www.arvinddevalia.com

Jo Parfitt interviews Michael Harling to share tips with you on writing a book, finding a publisher and making it sell. For more information on Michael Harling and his book visit his blog at www.lindenwald.com

How to Destroy People’s Concerns about Going Ahead With Your Proposals - Before They Even Happen!

If you are taking a holiday to an exotic and tropical location the common wisdom is to visit your doctor to get inoculated against various illnesses and diseases. You don’t wait to catch yellow fever or typhoid, you get inoculated against them.

In the same way, you can inoculate some concerns both before you make your proposal and during it. Most of us can anticipate the concerns that people are likely to express. If specific concerns are raised fairly frequently in response to your proposal it can be effective to nail these either before or whilst you are making your proposal – rather than passively waiting for them to emerge. Get on the front foot!

There are two ways to do this:

Don’t make the same mistake…

People don’t like to make mistakes and they don’t like to look stupid. The fear of making mistakes and looking stupid can be one of the reasons that customers don’t want to proceed with purchasing. We can use this same concern to kill off specific concerns both before and during the presentation or discussion of your proposal.

Let us assume that you predict that people may express a concern that your new book or information product is quite technical and therefore may be perceived to be complicated. You can inoculate against this by saying:

“Mr Smith, some people make the mistake of thinking that as my book / product is so cutting edge that it may be complicated and difficult to understand. What they find is that in fact the straightforward step by step structure makes it simple to understand and use.”

No-one wants to make a mistake do they? So our customer, who does not want to make a mistake, will immediately decide that your product is simple to understand and use!

Another variation upon this is, “Mrs Smith, some of my most satisfied readers initially made the mistake of thinking that our new cutting edge information product must be complicated. What they have found is that in fact it’s clever and carefully planned structure makes it simple to understand and use.”

Don’t be a whiner!

There is something about a whinging and whining voice that people really dislike. Remember the last time you heard a small child (or even a fully grown adult) use a whining tone of voice. Its effect is similar to fingernails being dragged down a blackboard. Cuts right through you, doesn’t it?

You can use this to great effect to inoculate against concerns. Using the same example as previously, here is how this technique works:

“Mr Smith, when people first hear that our new information product is cutting edge they say (Now use your very best whiny voice for the next sentence), ‘It’s so complicated to understand!’“

The vast majority of people have such a dislike of a whining tone of voice that they will instantly move away from ever having had such a concern about your information product themselves. They don’t want to be associated with that horrible, whiny voice!

Inoculating against concerns is a very powerful way of making sure that commonly expressed concerns are killed off deader than a Dodo before and during your proposal presentation.

Take some of the concerns that people may bring up in response to your proposal and devise some ways to inoculate against these. Remember that you can use them before you make your presentation and during it when discussing particular elements of your proposal.

Unless you are famous you will need to go farming for followers but the problem is deeper than this. If you simply follow people many of them will automatically follow you back. This is fine except you don’t know that they are good prospects for your book. This article is about how you farm for those people that are likely to be interested in your book.

Laying the foundations

If you have not read the other articles in this series go and read them now. If you have you might now be seeing why you have to have all of those things in place before you properly farm for followers. If you don’t already have a great profile, background and a fist full of compelling tweets the people you are looking for will not follow you.

Once you have all the foundations down when the right people find your profile they will be compelled to follow you. By having three or four tweets a day going out that is directly applicable to your subject you are already creating some exposure and you may already be finding people are starting to follow you.

Farming for Followers

Lots of people on Twitter will auto follow you back whenever you follow them. To kick start your followers you are going to use this principle. The basic sequence is that you will start following lots of relevant people, I’ll show you how to find them in a moment.

Between two and three days later you will go back and see if they are following you. If they are then great, if they are not then you unfollow them and find more people to follow. You keep doing this keeping your ratio of followers to followees roughly to 1:1

If you do this consistently you will suddenly find that you are getting hundreds of followers and the numbers starting to increase very rapidly. This is because there is a tipping point. Remember everything you tweet is seen on the timeline of all the people that are following you. That means all their followers get to see your tweets. Remember you have already stacked the deck with three or four tweets of value every day. Very quickly you will be seen as someone worth following.

In this way you will be self selecting for relevant followers, but let me give you the other end of the strategy that will increase your results dramatically.

Finding the right people to follow

This is amazingly simple to do. Research your subject and find experts in the field, search profiles for people that mention the subject in their bios, look for hash tags (Twitter groups) on your subject.

Once you find any of these people you follow them and you follow their followers. For example if you go to http://wefollow.com/ you can find all the tweeters that have the greatest following for any subject that is tagged.

Working on the basis that the followers of a subject expert must be interested in that subject…they are likely to be interested in you because you have a great profile and some tremendous tweets. You just follow the expert’s followers to give them the opportunity to follow you back. In a very short while you will have hundreds of followers.

With some of the biggest experts in my field I have also followed the people they are following. The way I look at it if a personal hero of mine is following someone there will be a reason for it and perhaps I might be bumping into the teacher of my teacher and they must be worth listening to.

Do you reall want to sell your book?

Now some people might think this is a huge amount of effort and is it worth bothering with. The reality is that there is a fair bit of work setting this up. But the beauty of it is once it is set up 90% of it you can automate. You can automate your tweets, and there is software you can use to search, follow and unfollow people automatically.

It would take another series of articles to discuss the ins and outs of the various software packages. So just search around on the internet and make your own decisions. All the software I use I found through Google searches and asking twitter users.

Once you have done all the automated sequences you will never have to do them again. All you are left with is the spontaneous, fun and creative things that you can do with Twitter.

A Final Caveat

As I have stated several times Twitter is a social media platform. This strategy really creates a strong platform but it won’t get you the best from your legion of followers. To really get best advantage you need to interact with your audience not just talk at them.

In future articles we will look at getting marketing information, drawing your audience closer and being perceived as an expert through a few choice questions.

For the moment consider a few simple things such as thanking people when they retweet you, asking and responding to questions and generally having conversations over Twitter. All of this will expand your Twitter empire.

A Final Note

At the time of writing (early November 2009) I have around 2000 followers. I got them in the space of three weeks. But those 2000 followers rocketed me up the USA Amazon bestseller chart. The initial hit I got when I started the Twitter campaign I went from being about 20 000 to suddenly up to 1500 within that two week period. Since then I have been in the top 1000 in the general bestseller chart and regularly number one for sales techniques. In the same period sales for all my other products, views of my blog and hits on my website have also increased dramatically.

So for those people that might thing this is a lot of effort might want to consider how much they could get from developing a Twitter following.