Much has been written about book proposals. But less has been written about book marketing plans. This is wrong!

What happens after your book is published has a great deal to do with whether you become published and profitable… or just published.

A book proposal is a direct-marketing document intended to persuade publishers to edit, print and distribute your book. It’s a sales piece intended to communicate the inevitability of your book’s success.

Your book’s marketing plan, however, is intended for an audience of one – You! It’s not intended for your publisher. Rather, it’s intended to identify the revenue streams that you will develop after your book is published.

Your marketing plan should describe profits you will earn above and beyond royalties from sales of your book. It should describe in detail your market and the steps you will take to earn this income.

The reason to prepare your marketing plan now, before you sign a publishing contract or write your book, is that the success of your marketing plan depends on the way your book publishing contract is negotiated.

Coaching and consulting

Let’s assume, for example, that you plan to use your book as a way of enhancing your visibility and credibility among your target market. At the simplest level, you will want to include your web site address at several points in the book. Knowing this goal, you can insist that the publisher agrees in writing to include your web site address in specific locations in your book.

Remember: promises don’t make it! Let’s take the worst case scenario. You and your acquisition editor agree that you can include five mentions of your web site address in the book. However, as often occurs, the acquisition editor, after signing the contract, fades out of the picture.

The new development editor then informs you that author’s URL’s can only appear in one place, in the author biography hidden toward the rear of the book. When this happens, what happens to your coaching and consulting plans?

Likewise, you may have planned to buy books in case lot quantities for resale and/or distribution to your prospects and clients. Understanding this before you sign the contract, you can include the right to purchase books for resale at trade discounts in your contract, ensuring your ‘book pipeline’ won’t get turned off.

If you know you want to offer telephone coaching at $75.00 a call, for example, you can negotiate written permission to promote this service within the body of your book.

Remember: promises are written on air. Only written agreements count!

Other back-end profit opportunities based on your book’s title include:

• Articles, columns, newsletters

• Yearly updates

• Special Reports

• Teleclasses and seminars

• Speaking and training

• Audio/video recordings

• Choosing a web site address based on your book’s title

• Free downloads of sample chapters from your web site

• Fee-based web site services

The possibilities are endless, but nothing can happen if, after signing the contract, the publisher limits your ability to promote your business and your website in your book.

Thus, it’s imperative that you start by preparing a marketing plan that analyzes post-publication profit opportunities and describes the steps needed to make them happen. Only then are you in a position to decide if the publisher’s ‘boilerplate’ contract meets your needs.

The stronger your book proposal and the more experienced your agent, the more likely you’ll get what you want (need) in your contract.

Jay Conrad Levinson says the first volume of his Guerrilla Marketing series earned him thirty million dollars. But only about $35,000 came from the book itself. All the rest came from back-end profits.

That’s how important this issue is!

About The Author

Roger C. Parker is the $32,000,000 author with over 1.6 million copies in print. Do you make these marketing and design mistakes? Find out at www.gmarketing-design.com

---

Are You An Internet Business “Wannabe”? By Ron Larkin

Are you one of the many people who would like to become the next Internet Millionaire? You’ve read all the stories about people who are making money sitting at home in their underwear or on a sunny beach and want to get in on the action. Well, you can, but it isn’t as easy as it seems. It takes a lot of hard work and some cash . Here is a short list of some of the things you will need:

1. A Comprehensive Business Plan Don’t even think of starting until you have made a plan that includes who you will sell to, what you will sell them, where you will get it, how you will sell it and how to get the money to pay for all these things.

2. Your Own Domain and Website You won’t get very far using a free website with a long domain name. Prospects will think that you are not serious about your business if you are not willing to pay for your own name and site.

3. An E-Commerce Program You must have the capability to accept orders, arrange for payment, preferably by credit card, and ship the product. 4. Well Written Sales Copy Your website, sales letters, e-zine advertisements, etc., will need hard hitting selling copy to persuade your prospects to buy from you instead of your competitors. If you can’t learn to do it yourself you will need to pay a professional copywriter. 5. Patience Building a successful business on the Internet takes both time and money. Don’t fall for the “overnight miracle” stories. You will need to re-invest your early profits back into the business. You will make mistakes and need to make changes to your plan. Test and re-test all aspects until you get it right.

---

I learned my craft as a speaker a long time ago, and I have kept on learning and practicing it every day for the past 30 years. That’s the thing about any talent, you have to practice if you want excel. I was also lucky; I learned my craft in the days “BP” – Before PowerPoint. You might think today that PowerPoint makes it easier – not at all. PowerPoint in my experience is the reason why so many people in business have become utterly boring speakers and I have made it part of my life’s mission to change that – especially for women, for whom learning to deliver an outstanding speech is even more important as a key to business success.

First let’s get a definition sorted. What do I mean by an “Outstanding Speech?” Well I don’t mean that you have to be able get up in front of thousands of people and compete with Tony Robbins or Les Brown or Brian Tracy or any top level professional speakers. You don’t need to be anywhere near that good to rate as outstanding, you just need to stand out from the crowd, and as 90% of all business presentations are – how can I say this politely – mediocre, being outstanding is not so hard.

You have delivered an outstanding speech if the day after the speech:

• 1. The audience can remember who you are, your name.
• 2. The audience can remember your message.
• 3. Some of the audience take action because of your speech.

Those don’t seem like tough objectives do they? But often I can’t remember the name of the speaker by the end of the next coffee break and I never even got the message during the speech. The reason that most people fail to achieve these basics is that they never planned to in the first place, which is why simply by reading this article you are going to be streets ahead of them.

So that’s the goal – now let’s look at the three basic rules to achieve them.

• Rule 1 – Learn to love yourself
• Rule 2 – No PowerPoint until after the speech is written
• Rule 3 – Use my PEPP Talk Formula to write and deliver your speech

Rule 1 – Learn to Love yourself.

Why do apparently confident, successful people get on stage and crumble into incomprehensibility? Oh you have done that too huh! Lack of self confidence is a speaker’s greatest challenge, and especially women. When I changed gender I started working more and more with women in business groups and I could not understand why so many women chose to sit down to present. The more I looked into this the more I realised that the social conditioning a women receives thoughout her life often totally undermines her self confidence and sense of being great at what she does. It’s one of the key reasons why women have a hard time competing with men at work, but it can be overcome, especially if you learn to write and deliver an outstanding speech.

Self confidence is all about loving yourself. You see if you don’t love yourself, if you don’t respect yourself, if you aren’t sure of how good you are at what you do then there is this subconscious message in your brain saying, “I don’t like who I am, so why should the audience?” That’s what causes you to start to panic – self doubt. So you need to erase the self doubt by replacing it with self love.

Step 1 – Tell yourself why you like yourself. When you get up every morning go to a mirror, look yourself in the eye and say “I like myself because….” Tell yourself what you like about yourself, as many reasons as you can, and if you have to – LIE!!! Go say it “I like myself because I am an outstanding speaker.” Convince yourself that you really are OK. You are worth listening to, you have value, your ideas can help people, you have earned to right to be confident in yourself.

Step 2 – Create a Wins Book. Get a scrap book and start collecting all the good feedback you can. Photocopy all your certificates, copies of reports from any event when you did good, testimonials from clients, friends, anyone who writes to you and says “Hey! That was great thank you, you have really helped me.” Have you set up a new club – it’s a win. Lost 28 lbs at Weight Watchers – put the 4 silver sevens in your win book, together with an after picture. Delivered an outstanding speech, get a testimonial, ran a successful exhibition stand – get a picture. DO YOU GET THE PICTURE!! Create a book of all the positive and wonderful things that have happened in your life and keep it going. Then before you have to speak, get the book out and read it.

Learn to love yourself and the audience will love you as well.

Rule 2 – No PowerPoint until after the speech is written

PowerPoint tends to make people lazy. We are all busy, but if you get out PowerPoint the day before the presentation, write your notes in the form of slides and then proceed to deliver them at the rate of one every 30 seconds, reading most of them out, is it surprising that the audience is asleep by the end and can’t remember a thing. And how can you expect the audience to respect you when you have shown them so little respect in the first place.

PowerPoint is great if, and that is a BIG IF, you have visuals and useful information that are best conveyed visually. A friend of mine, Cathy O’Dowd, was the first woman to climb Everest from both sides. She talks about teamwork and illustrates her outstanding speeches with stories of her experiences of teamwork under the duress of the life threatening conditions of climbing Everest. She uses lots of slides, mostly awe inspiring images of her expeditions as she takes the audience on a dangerous journey to top of the world. That is how to use PowerPoint – not lists of words and unreadable quotations.

So shut the laptop, write the speech then ask, “Does this speech need visuals, and is PowerPoint the best way to do that?” Perhaps there is a better way to convey the message. You will be amazed at the alternatives. Perhaps you can use a prop, or a volunteer from the audience, or give the audience a work sheet, or get people to do an exercise. There are so many ways to involve the audience creatively to get a message across that are a thousand times more outstanding than a PowerPoint slide.

Be creative with your visuals and involve the audience.

Rule 3 – Use my PEPP Talk Formula to write and deliver your speech.

From 30 years of acting, training and professional speaking I have boiled the key elements of an outstanding speech down to four – represented by the acronym PEPP.

• Speak with PURPOSE
• Draw from your EXPERIENCE
• Present with PASSION
• Make it a PERFORMANCE

Purpose - Set a clear purpose to the speech and let the audience know what it is up front.

This is the most important element in writing an outstanding speech and doing this keeps you focused on your single message. The audience can’t take in more than one message anyway because they will often be hearing lots of other things that day. Make it something they can remember, and repeat is over and over again in a variety of different ways so they don’t forget it. Ask yourself this question.

“What do I want the audience to remember?”

If you can get a single message clear in their minds it will act as a trigger to help them remember the entire speech later and remember what you asked them to do after the speech.

Which brings me to the second part of the purpose. Why are you doing this speech? What do you want out of it? What do you want the audience to do after the speech? Read your report, sign up for a newsletter, come to your exhibition stand, give you their business card, come to your shop, vote for you etc. Be clear about exactly what you want the audience to do, make sure that you tell them and then make it is easy for them to do it. If you need to give an incentive don’t hesitate. “Get a free ebook if you sign up for my newsletter.”

Experience/Expertise – Speak from your experience and expertise – If you have not earned the right to speak on the topic – don’t speak.

Use no more than three of four points to support your message. Look at the letter E – One main down stroke for the main message and three horizontal lines for the suppporting points. We all like stories, we remember them easily and life stories introduce humour and drama into the talk. This helps you as well because it is difficult to forget your speech if it’s a story you have lived through. 2000 years ago one of the worlds greatest speakers taught with stories that we still remember today – It doesn’t matter what religion you are I am sure you know some of those stories, they are so memorable.

Passion - Love your topic; be passionate about the topic and your desire to entertain the audience with it.

If the topic is not something you are passionate about, link it to something you are passionate about. Love the audience and they will love you back – the more passionate you are about the topic, the more memorable and entertaining your speech will be and the easier it is to deliver.

Performance -Remember that no matter what the topic or the occasion, when you speak – THIS IS SHOW BUSINESS.

If you are just going to read out your speech you might as well type it and send it. You have to give the audience more than they can get from reading – so have fun, involve the audience, let the power into your voice, be playful, use humour, become a storyteller, and remember that silence………

…….is the speakers most powerful tool.

I know this is generalising but become a storyteller to reach women, present facts in a logical but entertaining way to reach men, and mix the styles so that you appeal to both and alienate neither. We all like humour, we all like to be entertained – but most of all most people love stories and remember them.

To become an outstanding speaker be a Storyteller with a Message.

Founder and First President of the Professional Speakers Association (PSA), Rikki Arundel is a truly unique International Keynote Speaker, Trainer and Writer. She is openly and proudly transgender and an expert in sales and marketing communications with an impressive track record, and being transgender has provided her with a unique understanding of the differences in the way men and women communicate in business. Email: Rikki@Arundel.com Web: http://www.RikkiArundel.com

Thank you for your amazing speech… It made me laugh, shed a tear, and think. And it’s made me look forward to delivering a speech next month that I’ve been dreading. Anita Holford, Writing Services

…she simply sparkled as a human being. Nancy Vogl, Author, Chicken Soup for the Single Parent Soul.

Get your free copy of How to Get Customers Queuing up to Buy at http://www.SpeakingandMarketingTips.com

---

Everyone has scuffled and been on pins and needles to hit upon an unusual present for a loved one someone special. Many times, we’ve bought something too expensive for us to buy- or, more bad, something we’re not even sure our intended cares for- out of total desperation. In an age where holiday merriment means everything,
the stress to find the right presents can create a lot of stress.

Presents that are unusualsometimes are rare, singular, or even unfamiliar. By now you might
be thinking about many eccentric and glamorous unusual presents. Though remember at some point you need to keep your head about you and make unusual present acquisitions. Just sit down with pen to paper and come up with it.

In a world where everything conforms, sometimes it’s fun to do something completely different. From time to time, giving unusual presents at the perfect moment can be cool also. It takes some reflection to outshine yourself on the same thing time and time again. For that reason offering unusual presents might break the die and make for better and imaginative presents. Offering unique presents can not only be fun, it might be the variance from all the other presents people receive.

After interpretation, almost certainly you already have some other ideas for unusual presents that could possibly expand on these. Visit website

---

With the help of balanced scorecard strategy map, it is very easy to design the organization goals and build business strategies. Balance scorecard and strategy map are interrelated with each other. Strategies map is the foundation to design business strategies or perspective. Using strategy map, you can design the strategies and using balanced scorecards you can build business models.

Strategy Mapping

Strategy mapping deploy the concept of balancescorecard developed by Kaplan and Norton. Balanced scorecards is a business strategic approach which covers four important business perspectives (financial perspective, non-financial perspective, internal process, value proposition. The advantage of strategy maps understands the target market, improving the efficiency of strategic planning.

Business Strategic Mapping Balance Scorecard

Business Mapping helps organization to achieve results through business process improvement. Strategy map is the key to improve the business performance. First determine your strategy then map it. The balance scorecards strategy map is an incomparable tool for communicating strategy. The balanced scorecard strategy map will show how an organization its objectives into results. One should learn to how to design, build strategy map and balanced scorecard to accelerate your organization performance.

Scorecard Strategy Map

The expanded Scorecard Strategy Map concept, paired with the Balanced Scorecard, offers a new way to manage. Balanced scorecard commences with taking companies perspective and converting into strategy map. The strategy map gives you a graphical representation of the strategies. A strategy map also provides which aspects of their strategy are succeeding and where they are falling short.

The main area the strategy mapper will concentrate on main objectives, cause and effect relationship, strategic initiatives and finally metrics and measurable to assess your business success. Balanced Scorecards are part of the measurement system the factor of a management system that is used to focus, align, and balance the organization’s goals and objectives to accomplish long-term strategic objectives.

Business Strategies should create values to the shareholders. The strategy mapping is a complete whole-systems design tool. The strategy map provides clarity as to roles and responsibilities across the organization that are required to bridge the gap between strategy formulation and getting results at the execution level.

Strategic Value Proposition

The strategy map commence with a strategic goal, is followed with a strategic value proposition and ends with a cause and effect systems map that chart what needs to be done to achieve results. Designing strategy map and creating balanced scorecard performance metrics that tightly link operational targets to strategic goals.

Ramki is with Axsellit Technologies Axsellit Software delivers professional, benefit-enriched business solutions. Axsellit Technologies provides Strategy Map and Balance Scorecard Software.

---

So you want to improve your game but are getting stuck? Whatever you do, you still slice those shots and end up frustrated and angry? Then, have you heard of golfdust? It is a surprisingly useful tool in getting your shots back on track.

Golf is a fast moving sport and many people continue to take it up in pursuit of recreation and leisure. Many people enter the sport for the social aspects but, sooner or later, gravitate to the fairways. Only then do the complexities of the game show themselves fully!

If you are like me, hitting a golf ball does not come naturally. Hours of tuition and practice have improved my technique but I could do with more help. That is where golfdust comes in.

You may have heard of, or even used, impact tape. Golfdust is similar. Coat the club head with the dust and, with this, you can see exactly where the ball impacted onto the club. After hitting the ball, look at the accuracy of the shot – then compare it to the impact point on the club head. Only then will you be sure of what adjustments you need to make to enable a better shot with greater accuracy and a sense of smug satisfaction.

Of course, taking a shot is dependent upon a whole host of other factors including the power needed and prevailing weather conditions. But, without accuracy, your shots are doomed from the start. It is claimed that golfdust helps improve the accuracy of your shots and that can’t be a bad thing for any of us.

See http://www.golferupdate.com for information on golf.

---