Today, I have a special treat for you: our first-ever guest blog post! My fiance and #1 supporter Antonio Challita will tell you how to create high-quality cost-effective flyers to get the word out about your book or your product. He talks about combining online marketing with real world marketing to take your sales to the next level. Antonio has a computer engineering background, has worked in technical marketing, and is now a product manager at a major technology company.
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Flyers for my YA book on Amazon Kindle
Last Saturday morning, I woke up and saw hundreds of people outside of our house. There was a big street festival in Chicago, and the games section of the festival was set up right outside our doorstep.
I saw mothers and fathers and teens and tweens lined up to play games, watch bands, and enjoy what the food stands and merchants had to offer …. And that’s when it hit me! The target audience for Kristina’s new eBook was right there, in massive quantities. It was time to augment online marketing with real-world marketing. It was now or never. All we needed was to find an effective and unintrusive way to spread the word about “A First Time for Everything”.
After a quick breakfast, I decided I must create quality flyers and I must create them fast. I sprung into action.
Step 1: I found a packet of thick glossy A4 sized papers that we had and decided to use them. The papers had a professional feel to them.
Step 2: I am by no means a graphic design expert, and decided to use Microsoft Word for the project. I imported the book cover into a document.
Step 3: I decided to make the flyers pocket-sized. I used narrow page margins (0.2 inches) and shrunk the picture to the top left corner of the page.
My thinking was that smaller flyers would increase the likelihood of people placing the flyer in their pockets, purses or wallets, and then of looking at it again when they got home. If the flyer was bigger than that and took up an entire page, or 1/2 the page, then people would be more likely to toss it away.
A smaller flyer would also make it cost efficient to print more flyers per page.
Step 4: I added an Amazon-style label in an Orange-ish Yellow color to point out this is a story on Amazon.
Step 5: I made 9 copies of the flyer on the page and meticulously checked that the spacing between each image and the borders were equal. Here is how they looked like on the page.
The front side of the page
Step 6: I decided to take advantage of the back side of the flyer, and added a brief description of what Kristina stands for, and where can people find her online. So I came up with a box.
Step 7: I replicated the box 9 times, carefully checking the spacing. Here is how the second page of my document looked.
The back side of the page
Step 8: I walked to the nearest FedEx Kinkos, with the glossy papers in my hand.
Step 9: In a matter of minutes I had 23 double-sided printed papers. They looked gorgeous, and they cost just a little over $20.
Step 10: I used the big professional paper cutter at Fedex Kinkos to cut up the flyers. I took my time to cut straight lines between the flyers, and the result was rewarding. I had 207 flyers (23 pages x 9 on each page) that were ready to go! All this in about an hour and a half of work.
Step 11: It was time to execute. I went back home and met with Kristina. The thought was at first intimidating. How do we just go up to strangers and hand them flyers? What do we say? How do we open the conversation?
Step 12: We set a goal. Each one of us had to hand out 10 flyers in the next 45 minutes. We focused on making quality hand-outs instead of quantity hand-outs.
Step 13: Luckily the first group of people we encountered were a friendly couple who had YA tween girls. Out of the blue we asked the parents, do your kids like to read? They responded that they love to read, and it turned out the mom is a librarian. Kristina then smoothly pulled out a flyer and handed it to the mom who was very excited.
Step 14: We moved to a nearby stand were a young lady was advertising memorabilias & necklaces. It turns out that the necklaces were made by teenagers in an after school program. They were affordable & colorful and we each bought one. While checking out, we mentioned that we are also advertising a product for teens: A new & clean ebook on Amazon. The girl saw the flyer and loved it. She took one, and asked us for extras to put in her store. We happily complied.
Step 15: The two encounters built our confidence, and things flowed nicely after that. We handed out more and more flyers. At one point it started to rain, and we ran for cover under a tree where 5 girls were standing. It was a perfect encounter. We had a fun and genuine conversation with them and made 5 more quality hand-outs.
Step 16: Measure. We ended up making about 50 hand-outs that day, and on Saturday night we were in for a nice surprise. We checked our book ranking on Amazon which was hovering near 20,000 that week, and it was up to 12,000. A new record for us!
In conclusion: Always be prepared to do real-world marketing to complement your online marketing. I now carry flyers with me at all times. Your target audience is out there in the real world at networking events, festivals, gatherings, libraries, malls, and so on. You never know when opportunity comes knocking on your door. The question is, will you seize it?
ps: If you are interested in reusing our template to create your own flyers, please leave us a comment and let us know. We will be happy to send you our exact template and save you time.
Random Inspirations 