Phase 2 - With Books in Hand

With a box of 40 books in my office, I am off an running.

Our first stop is to send books to those "sneezers", influential people I have been corresponding with during the book project. Those include publishers and editors at major business magazines, business leaders from around the country, business authors who have ongoing blogs or websites that drive significant traffic and content editors at business sites like American Express' Open site, Bank of America's small business site.

In addition, we have included a number of popular business bloggers in our book. We gave each of them sections in the book called Reality Bytes. In exchange, they will be receiving books and have agreed to blog about the book for us. This should continue to drive traffic to our site, drive book sales, and build the buzz about our book.

Today, the first two books go out.

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The Books are In

Big news at Square 2 Marketing, our books are being distributed as we speak. We received a number of copies in the office and our distributor has already started sending books to Amazon for distribution to all of you who faithfully supported our cause on August 5th.

Thanks again to everyone who provided input on the title, cover, copy, and more. The process was long, taking over 2 years to complete, but the book is amazing and the feedback has been fantastic. More on the plan to sell books in the next couple of days.

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Using Your Website as a Test Lab

I can count on one hand how many business owners look at website stats on a monthly basis. Even less look at it on a weekly or daily basis. Why should you even care about the stats from your website?

Honestly, your website holds the key to a number of interesting data points that will help you improve your marketing and the more you use it as a lab, to test different marketing ideas, the more effective your overall marketing effort will be. You know that a more effective marketing effort always leads to more sales and more profits for you.

Google now offers Google Analytics which provides you all the tools, for free to use your website as a test lab. If you want to see a brief video presentation on Google Analytics, just click here.

First, set up a base line. See how your site is performing today. How many unique visitors? How many page views? How many people are filling out your forms? You do have contact forms right? If not, put them on immediately. Also, check out what pages people are exiting your site. This lets you know where you lose them while they are visiting.

With Google Analytics you can see how these stats are performing. Keep a watchful eye and make changes to drive up the numbers. Get this set up today and tomorrow I will give you some tips on how to improve performance.

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Topped out at 880

After all the dust settled down yesterday, we exceeded our goal of top 1,000 by getting to 880 on Amazon.com's top ranked books. In addition, were the #5 marketing book, the #10 small business and entrepreneurship book and the #65 business management book. Not bad for a small company like ours. It really shows how any company can compete with the big guys if they use their heads and a smart, aggressive marketing strategy.

What is next? Now that we showed we can move the market on Amazon.com, we take the performance and present the popularity of the book to other book sellers, like Barnes and Noble. Very often they take their cues from Amazon and make purchase decisions based on the popularity on Amazon.

In addition, we have a number of creative opportunities with some related partners that will hopefully provide additional distribution opportunities. Our next step is to get the book back from the printer. Initial estimates look like about two weeks from today.

Stay tuned.

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951 Ranked Book

At 3:15PM on Tuesday, August 5th, Square 2 Marketing has the 951 ranked business book in the world. In addition, we are 5th most popular book on marketing, the 10th most popular book on small business and entrepreneurship, and 65th most popular book on business management.

Guess what? We aren't done yet! Now that we cracked the top 1,000 we are going for more. Stay tuned to see how low we can go.

Thank you to everyone who purchased a book, we really appreciate it and I think you will too, when you have had a chance to read the book.

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Top 10,000 and climbing

Its now 12:27PM on Tuesday, August 5th. Our move up the rankings at Amazon.com is in full progress. We started the day at 221,897 and now we are at 7,666. WOW! We broke the top 10,000 in just a few hours.

Next stop is top 1,000. Thank you to everyone who purchased the book. I know we can do it.

We are also Twittering today's events and marketing activity for the book. If you want to check out Twitter, go to www.twitter.com/square2 and you can see how we use Twitter to drive interest. You will need to sign up for a Twitter account to see our twitters...but its free and a great experience.

Today IS THE DAY!

Today is the day! Its the day we have all been waiting for. As of 10:20AM, we have moved up 100,000 positions from 324,123 to 221,897, so the personal promotional strategy appears to be working. Remember, lets get to our goal of top 1,000 buy purchasing the book today. Just click on this link to make your purchase.

To give you some perspective, last week we sold ONLY THREE books and moved up to 42,044. Its only going to take a few people purchasing a few books to take us over the goal line.

I will be monitoring the site regularly and blogging throughout the day to keep you all updated. In addition, we are tracking web traffic and web stats to the book site, www.realitymarketingrevolution.com. This will give us another data point to evaluate our promotions.

More later.

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Tomorrow is The Big Day

Tomorrow, Tuesday, August 5th is the big day. Our goal is to sell 100 books and get into the top 1,000 business books on Amazon.com. To give you some metrics, last week we got to 42,000 on book sales of only 3 copies. So you see how important each and every one of you are in moving us to our goal.

Despite the big day...our team took a day off on Friday and visited Dorney Park. At Square 2 Marketing, the time we spend as a team outside of work is just as important as the time we spent at work. The team was able to blow off some steam and we all had a great time. Take a look at the attached picture, it is of our team on Voodoo, the newest power roller coaster at Dorney Park. If you look carefully, you can see me in the front seat.

More tomorrow!

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Speed Bumps

For those of you following the story line with our book, you know we are making a major push for book sales on Tuesday, August 5th. The latest speed bump we are dealing with is Amazon.com...the 800 pound guerrilla in the book business today.

If you read the blog, or got a personal email from us, you will notice that the book was for sale at $13,97. Amazon had listed the book at that price until last Monday, when they inexplicably changed the price to $19.95. They also listed the book ad Temporarily Out of Stock.

Despite numerous calls by our publisher (Linx) and our distributor (Ingram) they are as of yet, unresponsive. If you are a fan our Reality Marketing, then you know this is completely "unremarkable." Please don't be deterred, we continue to try to make contact with Amazon, regardless...our push for Tuesday, August 5th is still on.

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