T-Shaped Marketing for Authors. The New Way to Sell Books.

Online marketing provides today’s authors with a vehicle to reach a worldwide audience where, in the past, they were pretty much limited to their own backyards. But to make any kind of real headway in this crowded space full of millions of people doing the same thing as you’re doing online, you’ve got to be Internet savvy to a degree. You’ve got to figure out a way to stand out among the rest by combining analytical and creative skills together. I’m talking about T-shaped marketing.

Rand Fishkin provides this succinct description of T-shaped marketing on his blog:

T-Shaped basically refers to having a light level of knowledge in a broad array of skills, and deep knowledge/ability in a single one (or a few). (Fishkin, 2013)

In other words, your deep knowledge/ability—the stem of the T—is the content you’ve written about in your book(s). The flat, horizontal part at the top represents the various creative and analytical skills you can learn to best utilize the Internet in selling your book(s).

Did you know that Google owns YouTube? That’s the primary reason why you will want to use video marketing to sell your books; statistics show video content can improve your website’s SEO tremendously, and a strong SEO will help you sell more books over time. In this T-Shaped ebook, we’ll review the different types of videos you can produce—everything from professional book trailers to your very own homemade creations—and the valuable lessons I’ve learned about each type through trial and error over the past nine years. In the end, you’ll come to see that this type of T-shaped marketing is not only effective; it’s actually a lot easier and more affordable for indie authors to get started (and continue with) than you may think.