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I’m Still Not Sold on Klout

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I stopped checking my Klout score/profile about a year ago because I simply can’t understand how the score is calculated.  Plus, my score seems to always stay in a range of 74-78 when I do check it, so I stopped looking.  I got an email from Klout about a week ago telling me that my score had just gone up, so of course I clicked to check it.  It seems my score had been 74, but had suddenly jumped up to 78.  No explanation why, and a quick scan of my scoring history shows this had happened often.  A couple of days later I get a second email from Klout telling me my score had again gone up.  Whoa, it might be 80 now, I think!  I click over and it shows that my score has gone ‘up’ to 78.  It seems that right after Klout sent me the first email saying my score had gone up to 78. that the next day it fell back down to 74, then a day or so later it bounced back up to 78.

With no explanation for why any of that happened.

Klout was social media’s ‘it’ company a couple of years ago.  The promise was that Klout would accurately measure your level of influence online.  The promise for brands was that it would allow them to connect with true influencers.  The promise for users was that it would let brands that created products that you are influential and passionate about connect with you and give you free stuff.

It’s now almost 2014 and we are still waiting for Klout to fulfill on its promises on either the brand or user end.  Despite promise and claims to the contrary, Klout has never effectively measured online influence for the average user.  Instead it attempts to measure online activity, and correlate influence to that level of activity.  A shaky conclusion to draw at best.

As a Klout user, Klout says my score is 78.  IOW, Klout thinks I am pretty influential.  So as such, Klout needs to understand that I won’t promote its service to other people (that Klout says I have influence over) until the service is relevant to me.

Klout can become relevant to me by seeing that I get Perks that are relevant to me.  The last Perk I received was, I kid you not, a Kobe Bryant poster.  I have left 80K tweets on Twitter since 2007, and I would be shocked if a combined 0.000001% of my tweets were about Kobe, the Lakers, and the NBA.

That’s the last Perk I got.  The last Perk I wanted was to see my last 3-day Enterprise car rental be bumped up to a full week based on my high Klout score.  Or to see my coach ticket get upgraded to first class, for the same reason.

That would have been relevant to me.  That would have led to me positively promoting Klout as well as the brands that leveraged the service to connect with me.  Unlike Kobe and the NBA, I am constantly tweeting about travel.  I am constantly tweeting about driving or flying to an event or for client work.  How Klout can’t see my ‘influence’ on those topics and connect me with travel brands but can see that I am influential about Kobe Bryant is a complete mystery to me.

If Klout wants to become relevant to me it needs to do two things:

1 – Accurately identify products/people/ideas I am not only influential about but passionate about as well
2 – Tie perks to those products.

That’s it.  Until then, my Klout score is just another social media number that bounces up and down that I have no seeming control over or understanding of.

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Embracing Your Fans Shouldn’t Be a Campaign, It Should Be Your Business

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Over the last couple of years there’s been a pattern of brands running campaigns designed to ‘show our fans how much we love them’.  Typically this involves the brand surprising the fan with some sort of free gift, the fan(s) is thrilled, and this is all filmed and turned into a commercial, then promoted in case studies at conferences, white papers, etc.  The basic format is a commercial or video that says ‘We found 10 fans that love our brand, and we decided to show them how we love them right back’.

It’s great that brands are connecting with their fans and rewarding them for being fans.  It really is.  But brands should be smart enough to embrace their fans all the time, not just when the cameras are rolling.

Your brand shouldn’t embrace its fans because it could lead to good publicity, you should embrace your fans because you want to.

Fans don’t want to hear from you just when its convenient to you, they want a relationship with you.  They want constant contact and interaction.  So if you launch a ‘campaign’ designed to connect with them once or twice then disappear, you are actually hurting that relationship with your fans and making them less likely to promote you.

As I said Wednesday in #Rockstarchat, the most successful brands are the ones that make the transaction secondary to the person.  These brands want to connect with their customers and create a better experience for them and a deeper connection.  With the understanding that doing so will lead to more sales.

Your fans love you and view your brand as being their brand.  Which is why they want you to connect with them, they want you to ask them how they can help you and when they give you advice on how to make your brand better, they want you to act on that advice.

This isn’t rocket science, folks.  This is about building relationships.  Think about when someone likes you, if you only initiate contact with that person when you want to see them and if you only want to do the things that you like with them, how would that person react?  They probably wouldn’t like you for very long.  You want to show that person that you are willing to do some of the things that they like to do as well.  It can’t be only about you, there has to be some compromise.

It’s the same thing with connecting with your fans.  You can’t do it only when you can make a commercial out of it and get positive publicity.  It has to be because you love your fans, and want a closer connection with them.

That closer connection takes time and energy and a plan to develop, but its so worth it for your brand.  And before you say that you have no idea how to create a plan for connecting with your fans, remember that I wrote the book that shows you exactly how.

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Why Did Lady Gaga Spend One Million And Create a New Media Company Just to Launch a Fan Site?

Lady Gaga, little monsters, think like a rock starIn February of 2012, Lady Gaga launched LittleMonsters.com.  The community site was designed to be a place/hub for her most passionate fans to come together.  Gaga invested over one million of her own money into the site and even created a new company called Backplane to build out the exact site experience that she wanted for her fans.

While brands are spending millions on marketing to acquire new customers, and partnering with agencies or creating their own to help them better win new sales, Gaga is doing the same thing, in an effort to connect with the very people that are already giving her business.

Why would she go to all of this trouble to build something for the people that already love her?

Data.  Good old-fashioned customer data.

“Pretty much no artist up to this point has really known who their fan base is”, explains Gaga’s manager Troy Carter.  “Their fans specifically by name, age, where they live, what they do, what they like, who their friends are, which concerts they attended, which music they listen to, which songs they skip, where they skip them, just really understanding, having real data.

“And having that data helps you make better decisions as it relates to the music you release, where you tour, how big the venues are, who you invite, the price of the ticket, how much merch to carry with you. Everything. And these are all going to be data-driven decisions that we’re going to be making. It won’t be through Twitter. It won’t be through Facebook. It will be through your own sites that you build, your own communities that you build.

“This is going to be a very transparent thing that you have with your fans, and information that your fans are going to volunteer,” he said, “because they want a better experience.“

For how long have I been banging the drum of the importance of connecting directly with your most passionate customers?  Since at least 2007.  The reason why is simple:  Because the more connected you are to your fans, the better you understand them (and they you).  And the better you understand your most passionate customers, the more effectively you can market to them.

The best part?  Your fans want to share this information with you!  They want to connect directly with you and have a closer connection with you.  One of the things Lady Gaga has noticed on LittleMonsters.com is that fans have started sharing their artwork of the rock star.  Gaga then goes in and picks her favorite works, and then puts them on t-shirts and other merchandise and sells them back to her fans at concerts.

The result?  Merchandise sales at concerts are up 30%.  Hello!  I’m not harping on connecting with your fans and I didn’t write Think Like a Rock Star simply because I wanted you to embrace your fans (although you should, literally!).  I want you to connect directly with your fans because it will have a massive impact on the growth of your business if you do.    

Find your fans, connect with them and connect them to each other.  Watch your business grow.  This isn’t rocket science.  Don’t know how to get started?  I wrote the book that shows you exactly how to connect with your fans step-by-step.

But speaking of rocket scientists, next Monday I’ll be headed to the city that’s home to many rocket scientists.  I’ll be in Huntsville, Alabama presenting Think Like a Rock Star at the Alabama Governor’s Conference on Tourism.  You still have time to register and the event runs from Sunday, August 18th through Tuesday, August the 20th.  I’ll be on site signing copies of Think Like a Rock Star most of the day on the 19th.  Hope to see you there!

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How Paper.li is Flipping the Role of a Brand Ambassador Program to Focus on Its Fans

KellyTweetLast Wednesday during #Rockstarchat we were joined by Paper.li’s Marketing Directory, Kelly Hungerford.  Kelly was joining the chat to talk about Paper.li’s Brand Ambassador program, which the company launched a few months ago.  Kelly talked about the program, how it was formed, and what the brand’s goals for the initiative were.

What struck me most from our chat was the focus of Paper.li’s brand ambassador program: The goal is to put the spotlight on the brand’s fans.  This is an interesting disconnect from most brand ambassador programs, where the main goal is to create a way to organize some of the brand’s biggest fans so they can better promote the brand.  Paper.li appears to have flipped this model, using the program to promote its fans, with the secondary goal being promotion of the brand itself.

Kelly told us that over the last couple of years, that Paper.li began to identify publishers that were independently helping others better use Paper.li.  So Kelly decided that a brand ambassador program would be a good way to bring together and acknowledge some of its community members that were going out of their way to help others.

So basically Paper.li is rewarding the behavior it wants to encourage.  As Paper.li promotes its brand ambassadors, that helps validate their love of the brand, and gives them more incentive to promote the brand to other people.  So Paper.li’s brand ambassador program is driving additional promotion of the brand, even though that’s not the primary objective.

KellyTweet2Another interesting aspect of Paper.li’s brand ambassador program is that members get early access to new product features and releases.  Kelly said this was a perk that members specifically asked for.  The benefit to the members is obvious and goes back to the idea of giving your fans ‘special access’ and helps them feel like the rock stars (because they are).

But giving brand ambassadors early access to new product features has two huge benefit for Paper.li.  First, it allows Paper.li’s power users to give the brand valuable feedback on the features.  This is done before being released to tbe public, so its possible the brand can still make changes based on feedback from its brand ambassadors.

The second key benefit for Paper.li is that when the new features are officially rolled out, the brand ambassadors will already be familiar with the features and how to use them.  So the brand ambassadors can become teachers and help teach other Paper.li members how to use the new features!  Again, this becomes a promotional tool for the brand, because when Paper.li rolls out new features, it immediately has its biggest fans telling other Paper.li users why these features are so awesome.

So ironically, by flipping the focus of its brand ambassador program to focus on spotlighting its fans, Paper.li has created a powerful promotional tool.  I think this is a very brave move by a brand to give its fans so much control over the direction of such a program.  But I think that willingness to embrace its fans came from how Kelly and team made great efforts to personally connect with its fans.  This lead to them having a better understanding of its fans and what they wanted from their relationship with the brand.  This is why many brands don’t launch a program such as this, because they don’t understand their fans and what motivates them.  As such, they fear ceding control of a program such as this.

So by creating direct benefits for its biggest fans, this program is indirectly creating big benefits for Paper.li!  If you want to view the transcript from last week’s #rockstarchat (which had a TON of key takeaways) then click here(click Transcript on the left).

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Learn How Paper.li Created its Brand Ambassador Program Today at #Rockstarchat!

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UPDATE: Here’s the transcript from this chat!

I’m thrilled to announce that Paper.li’s Marketing Director Kelly Hungerford will be joining #Rockstarchat today at 1pm Central on Twitter to discuss how the brand created and launched its brand ambassador program!  This is a great opportunity to learn from Paper.li because I know so many of you work or brands that either have or are considering launching such a program.  Kelly will help you understand how the process has gone for Paper.li, and will be happy to answer any questions you might have.

Here’s the points we’ll cover:

1 – What prompted Paper.li to want to launch a brand ambassador program?

2 – What are Paper.li’s goals for the program?

3 – How are members selected?  Is there a cap or can anyone join?

4 – How does Paper.li measure if the program is working?  What metrics do you track?

5 – What have been some of your A-Ha! moments from launching this program?

 

And if you would like to get a bit more background on Paper.li’s brand ambassador program, check out this guest post that Kelly wrote here a few months ago.

So if you want to join in on the fun, check out the #Rockstarchat happening on Twitter today at 1pm Central!  You can follow the tweets here(Click the All tab at the top to see all the tweets), and here’s the transcript!

BTW, if you subscribe to my Think Like a Rock Star newsletter then you got a heads-up about this yesterday.  Click here if you want to subscribe!

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You Want to Have a Fan-Centric Brand

KathyQuoteI wanted to talk in very broad strokes today about why it pays to have a fan-centric brand.  And what I mean by that is a brand that places a premium on connecting more closely with its most passionate customers.

But before we get into this post, I want to start with a very simple and profound truth: When your brand participates in a conversation it changes that conversation.  Think about the online (and offline) conversation that your customers are having about and around your brand.  When you take an active role in that conversation, it changes.  When you interact with your customers and they with you, both groups have a higher level of understanding of the other’s POV.  This is why it floors me to see so many companies that are scared to death of engaging with their customers online.  Yes. it can be scary if you’ve never done so, but the opportunities are enormous.

This is why cultivating more interaction with your customers is so important:  Because interaction leads to understanding.  And without understanding there cannot be trust.  Think about the people that you trust.  Can you think of anyone that you trust even though you don’t understand who they are or what they stand for and believe in?  I bet you can’t, I know I can’t.

You want more interaction with your customers because that can lead to trust.  And without trust, you cannot have advocacy.

Then the process is: Interactions > Understanding > Trust > Advocacy

So then the starting point is to focus on having more interactions and engagement with your customers.  Social media helps with this as it gives you a constant way to monitor online conversations and respond.

But it has to be your focus to want to engage your customers.  Which is why I laid out this process because that level of engagement is the starting point for cultivating advocates/fans.

Now, if we are saying that you need to engage with your customers in order to eventually create advocates, then how do you explain the fact that Apple has such devoted fans?

This was truly the beauty of Steve Jobs and why he was such a visionary CEO.  Jobs had the ability to understand today, what products customers would want tomorrow.  For example, roll back the clock to 1999 or so when Napster was about to forever change the music industry.  Many artists, such as Metallica, saw Napster and peer to peer file-sharing as a huge threat to their business and a lost of income.  Jobs understood that Napster had changed our behavior, and as a result, we wouldn’t want to buy $17.99 CDs anymore just to get the 2-3 songs we wanted to hear.  We wanted a way to buy songs individually.

Enter iTunes.  And of course, we needed a way to store all these digital files and take them with us.

Enter the iPod.  Where the music industry saw the threat posed by file-sharing, Jobs saw the opportunity, and capitalized on it.  Because Jobs was the rare visionary CEO that had an uncanny understanding of his customers and what they wanted.

When did everyone decide that they wanted a smartphone with a scrolling interface? 2 seconds after they saw Jobs debut it on the iPhone in 2007.  Jobs understood Apple’s customers and what they wanted in his products.  Which is why his customers trusted Apple to create the products they wanted, and this is why the brand had such devoted advocates.

The odds are that your brand does not have a visionary CEO like Jobs.  So you do need to interact with your customers so they can understand you, and vice versa.  But that just means you have one extra step to take to create a truly fan-centric brand.

Oh and PS: Guess who’s blogging again? 😉

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Give Up Control to Get Control

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“I just said we gotta do this, this is at the heart of the brand.  We’ve got a real problem in losing control of our ability to talk to friends.” – Former Maker’s Mark CEO Bill Samuels Jr. on how he pitched the idea of launching a brand ambassador program to his Board of Directors.

I am in love with this quote right now.

Often when a business considers launching a brand ambassador program or even a fan-engagement strategy on a smaller scale, one of the key worries is a loss of control.  Companies fear giving more control over to their customers and letting these customers have any significant amount of say and control over the path that the program takes.

These companies can only see that they will be losing control.  They can’t see what they will be gaining.

In my book Think Like a Rock Star, I’ve included several case studies from where rock stars gave their fans control of a message, idea, program.  What do rock stars like The Donnas, Katy Perry and Jewel understand about their customers that your company does not?  Why would they give away control so freely to their fans and actually look for the opportunity to do so?

Because rock stars understand that when you give control to your fans, you get back their trust.

When you give up control, you gain trust.  And people advocate for brands and people that they trust.

In the Maker’s Mark example, the brand had always prided itself on having a one-to-one relationship with its most passionate customers.  Maker’s Mark truly embodied the rock star mindset of embracing your fans.  But as the brand grew beyond just a small Kentucky brand into a national brand, it meant that its network of fans became national as well.  So the founders realized that the brand had lost control of its ability to connect directly with its biggest fans.

The solution?  A brand ambassador program.  With a brand ambassador program, Maker’s Mark had a vehicle that let the brand connect directly with its biggest fans (its brand advocates), and by extension, it could then connect with all the customers that the brand ambassadors came in contact with.  By creating this program and giving up some control to its members, Maker’s Mark regained control of its ability to connect direct with its fans.  It regained the ability to connect with its fans that it lost when the brand went national.

Maker’s Mark understands what most rock stars do: That if you embrace your biggest fans, you will gain their loyalty, and their trust.  And they will work for you to help build your brand.

Sometimes it’s worth it to give up something small, to get something bigger in return.

Pic via Flickr user LunchBoxStudios

PS: Every week we discuss how your brand can create more passionate fans in the Think Like a Rock Star newsletter.  Click here to signup for free.

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How Can Employers Help Their Employees Become Advocates For Their Brand?

Today’s #RockStarChat topic will focus on how companies can cultivate brand advocates and fans from their own employees.  Seriously how can a company hope to excite its customers if its own employees aren’t excited about working for the company?  We’ll discuss this at 1pm Central today, and luckily a few members of Dell’s Social Media and Digital team have volunteered to stop by and talk about how Dell does just this.

Basically, I think the process for creating fans among your employees is similar to creating fans among your customers.  First, you need to focus on ways to connect directly with your employees, and they to you.  There needs to be some way for employees to voice their thoughts, ideas and concerns to the company, and understand that their voice is being heard.

Second, there needs to be an effort made to connect employees to each other.  Many companies have started creating internal social networks that allow employees to connect with each other and ask work-related questions, help each other, or just talk about their life and interests.  These channels are vital to the employees as it lets them help each other (boosting productivity) but also hits them boost morale and their connection to their fellow co-workers.  If you already have a copy of Think Like a Rock Star, I talk about doing this in Chapters 7 and 8.

Those are just a couple of quick thoughts as I’m far more interested in hearing what y’all have to say about today’s topic.  But I do think that before any company can think about launching any type of program to cultivate fans or connect with brand ambassadors, it needs to invest in creating channels that connect their own employees.  To each other, and to the company they work for.

See y’all at 1pm Central, follow the #rockstarchat tweets on Twitter.

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Three Ways to Create Content That Creates Fans

KatyFireworkOver the past few years there has been a big surge in the use of the term ‘content marketing’.  And really, the idea that your content IS your marketing.  As social media usage has become mainstream, we’ve all become content creators.  The impact this has for marketers is that promotional content is far less effective than it used to be. Brands are competing now with their own customers for the attention of new customers.

The reason being?  Because customers are typically creating more compelling content than brands.  Customers are creating value for each other via the content they create and the content they share.

But this idea of ‘creating value’ gets tossed around a lot, and pretty loosely.  Along with its first-cousin, creating ‘awesome’ content/blog posts, etc.  Today I want to talk about three ways to create content that creates fans.  But I also want you to understand that these approaches create fans because they create a positive change for the reader.  They are making the reader better by giving them a new skill, a new perspective, or simply inspiring them to take action and ownership.  You create fans by moving them to take action.  That action can be to help others, or it can be to help and better themselves.  But it creates a positive change for the reader.  As Kathy says in the foreword to Think Like a Rock Star, “Rock stars aren’t just making better fans, they’re making their fans better.”  Ask yourself how your content will do exactly that when you create it.

Here’s three ways your content can create fans:

1 – By teaching.  This one is probably the easiest to wrap your mind around because the benefit to the reader is so clear.  If you teach the reader how to be better at something, then obviously your content has created value for them.  You’ve given them a new skillset, a new ‘superpower’.

Where this becomes interesting is when you apply it to a blogging business.  Many companies will say ‘well why would I want to teach my customers to do this stuff for themselves, then I am just blogging myself out of business!’  Actually, you’re growing your business.  Teaching your readers not only creates fans, it establishes you as the expert.  I am reading Jay Baer’s new book Youtility right now, and he opens with a great story of how Robert Stephens, the founder of Geek Squad, responded when questioned about how he was killing his business chances by creating videos showing his customers how to solve their own computer problems.  He made this same point, that he was giving his customers a skillset, but that many of them couldn’t solve their problems as effectively as the videos showed, so they ended up contacting Geek Squad to help them.  And even if the customers did learn how to solve their own computer problems as a result of the videos, that still creates positive word of mouth for Geek Squad.  So either way, Geek Squad wins.

2 – By raising awareness.  This one is tricky.  You want to create content that raises awareness of idea, theory or belief that your customers and fans are passionate about.  But at the same time, you want to give them ways that they can get involved to help affect a positive change, even if that simply means spreading the word to others.  Remember that taking ownership is taking power, so if you can give readers an incentive to become involved and take ownership, that gives them the incentive to help spread your message.

An example of this is what Innocent Drinks does with The Big Knit.  This is an annual event the UK company has that’s designed to give its customers a way to help the elderly in the winter months by giving them clothing and sources of heat.  Every year Innocent Drinks asks its customers to knit hoodies and caps that will fit over its bottles, which are then sold and a portion of the proceeds go to provide heat for the elderly in the winter.  The event raises awareness of a problem, and then gives customers a way to participate in helping to solve that problem.  Participants then take ownership in helping to create the solution to the problem.  And that’s empowering, which is one reason why the quirky drink company from the UK has so many fans.

3 – By inspiring others to take action.  This can go along with raising awareness, but the key is that the action you are inspiring readers to take can often be for themselves.  You are inspiring them to become involved in something, to make a different to someone, and that someone could be themselves.

A big reason why Tim Ferriss’ books are so wildly popular is because he is a master at creating a positive change for his readers.  Just a few days ago he had a guest post by one of Tim’s fans telling how she applied his teachings on how to eat, cook and exercise to lose 100 pounds.  This is incredibly powerful because this content isn’t coming from Tim, it’s coming from one of his fans.  She is telling her story (with compelling visual evidence) of how Tim’s teachings created a very positive change in her life, and in the process her story inspires others to take action.  As a bonus, note at the end of the post how Tim is creating a free support group for others that are attempting to reach similar goals as Briana.  That’s another way that Tim creates fans because actions such as this show that he has their best interests in mind.

 

So there are three ways to create content that creates fans.  But remember that the common thread running through these ideas is creating a positive change for the reader.  You are giving them a new skill, or giving them a way to take action, or the inspiration they need to get started.  You are helping them to move forward.  If you can create content that does this, then you will also create fans.

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You Can’t Screw Up Your Marketing If You Give it to Your Fans

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Over the past few months I’ve been sharing with you what I’ve been learning from the process of creating my book Think Like a Rock Star, and then marketing it, etc.  Today I wanted to give you an update on how the book’s doing and also talk about my marketing efforts to this point.

First, here’s the Amazon average sales rank for each month so far this year for TLARS:

January – 713,959

February – 524,232

March – 415,237

April – 68,196 (The book was released on Amazon in paperback on April 1st)

May – 88,169

This is what you expect from the typical business book launch.  Sales peak at launch, then start going down.

But guess what?  The current Amazon average sales rank for June is currently 34,339.  TLARS is currently experiencing its best sales ever, even better than it did at launch back in April.

That’s interesting, but even moreso when you factor in that I’ve done almost no marketing for the book.  I”m not a big-name author and simply couldn’t afford to hire a publicist and a marketing team to promote the book for me.  You won’t see any banner ads for the book, and other than writing a few posts here and tweeting about it and Facebooking about it, I’ve really done no marketing for the book.

So why is it selling?  And better yet, why is it selling more copies?

First, it’s a pretty damn good book.  I think everyone knows that I’m not exactly prone to bragging, but I am incredibly proud of Think Like a Rock Star.

Second, the book has some killer marketing.

Ok so the book is being marketed, but not by me.  Originally, I wanted to create this elaborate plan to market Think Like a Rock Star.  But due to several events/misshaps (the main one being Amazon releasing the book 3 weeks early), a lot of the big marketing push that I was envisioning for the book’s launch fell away.

Then I realized that this was actually a perfect opportunity to apply Think Like a Rock Star’s core message to its own marketing.  The core lesson I teach in Think Like a Rock Star is the value of embracing your fans.  So I decided in March that since I couldn’t do an elaborate marketing push myself for the book, that I was going to let the fans of the book market it, especially via reviews on Amazon.

So what I started doing was engaging with anyone that mentioned the book online, especially positively.  I thanked them profusely, and then started interacting with them.  And part of that interaction was to ask them to please review the book on Amazon.

My thinking was this:  I knew the book was good.  So if more of the book’s fans were talking about the book, that would drive sales.  So the more reviews up on Amazon, the better!

As of today, there are 40 reviews on Amazon for the book, and 35 of them are 5-star.  The remaining reviews are 4-stars.  I am convinced that those reviews are now driving sales of the book.  Sales are going up on Amazon, but the only thing that’s changed is the number of reviews on the site has gone up.

The fans are driving sales of the book.   Seriously, check out the reviews, they are glowingly positive.  In fact two of them are so complimentary of the book that they actually embarrassed me a lil bit.  See if you can figure out which ones they are.

And to clarify, only 14 of the 40 reviews came from people that I knew on January 1st.  18 of the 40 reviews came from people that I didn’t know when I asked them to please review the book.  These were people that I saw either mentioning that they had read the book, or they had reviewed it on another site like GoodReads, and I asked them to review it on Amazon.

Want to hear the amazing part?  When I asked these strangers to please review the book, several of them thanked me for asking them to review it!  Are you kidding?!?  But fans want you to connect with them!  And it’s a lot of fun to do so!

The point of all of this isn’t to brag on the success of my book.  It’s to show you how easy it is to generate new business by simply embracing your existing fans.  All I did was connect with people that were already talking about this book.  That’s it.  If I can do this, surely you can too.

And BTW, if you have read Think Like a Rock Star (thank you!) would you please consider reviewing it on Amazon for me? 😉