If you are looking for a magic bullet to speed your book to greater selling success, creating a 100 gold contact list might be just the ammunition you need.
A gold contact list is simply a list of 100 people that would help you to sell more books. This concept comes from John Kremer of Bookmarket.com. Kremer explains that building a list of 100 key media and book marketing contacts will help you to focus your relationship building efforts where they will have the most punch.
The first thing you have to realize when you build your list is that you don’t have to already know and have a relationship with these people. Come up with a list of people in the field that you want to know and then try to build a relationship with each one.
This will take some time. It will mean finding out where this person is on social media and finding ways to slowly (emphasize slowly) build a connection. This may mean leaving comments on their blog, Twitter and Google+. It means reading their books and articles and writing favorable reviews. It may involve taking a workshop from them, going to an event where they will be speaking or better yet signing up for a coaching program where you pay to talk to them. If the contact is important, do whatever it takes.
Building your gold list does not mean you sit down and come up with 100 people immediately. Start with ten to twenty-five people. Make the number small enough that you can concentrate on building the relationship by contacting them in some small way at least once a month. Finding and following one contact will open up pathways to other influential people that you can add to your list.
It’s a good idea to put your list into some type of contact management program or spreadsheet where you can keep track of contacts you make each month. Unless you actively and purposely work on this, it won’t work. But by keeping it as an important part of your “To Do” list, your mind will surprise you by thinking of creative ways to keep in touch and stay on the radar of your new gold friends.
At Wheatmark, our work with authors does not stop once their books are published. In fact that is just the beginning. That is why we place an emphasis on educating our authors about book marketing.
