Viral Marketing for Books - Tips from Tim Ferris

This video gives some important tips to market your book in a viral way.


Here are some top tips:

- To get people to talk you have to do something remarkable - that does not mean impressive but remark-able. Something worth remarking on.

- The worst response you can get is to have people being apathetic. The best way is to polarize people and get a strong response.

- Ideally you want to have polarized factions to argue, debate and fight with each other online.

- If you want to hire someone for PR get somebody who is a recent college grad who is scrappy and is willing to smile and dial.

- Tim spent about $10K going to conferences and bonding with bloggers and opinion makers over beer at these conferences.

- Tim met every major blogger who covered his book at least once (some maybe two or three times.)

- The way you sell a book without actually selling the book is to sell the concept around the book. People don't like to be arm-twisted and sold. But they do like to be part of something new and be part of some new trend.

- Before you can sell a product, you have to have a certain level of credibility.

- PR means personal relationships.

- Make interesting blog posts that elicit comments from haters as well as fans. For example, Tim made one blog post called Geek2Freak with before and after photos and this got on the front page of Digg. There was another post that made it to the front page of Huffington Post called "Marijuana beats Blackberry for Productivity." In other words, if you want to market your book in a viral manner, you need to create a "sh**storm of controversy."