Two nights ago I became addicted to the website www.fiverr.com. If you haven’t heard of fiverr, it’s a website that allows people to offer to do a variety of things for five bucks. There are hundreds of different kinds of things people are willing to do – and at $5 per job, many of them are fantastic bargains. Here are a few of the more interesting things I’ve found and am testing in my book promotion and marketing:

1) Improve your PR-rank. If you have a blog or website, it’s important to have a lot of high quality links back to you, which improves your “PR” or page-rank. The higher page-rank you have, the more likely your articles will show up early in search engines. For $5, there are a variety of people offering to give you backlinks; either by posting comments, adding your link to their website, adding you to edu sites, etc.

2) Promotion. People with a ton of Facebook fans or Twitter followers offer to spread your news on their networks (to tens of thousands of people). They can also do things like “get 1000 likes on your Facebook page” (social proof) or get 1000 page hits to your website, or 1000 Twitter followers, etc. People with a good blog and high traffic offer to put up your ad on their site. Some people with radio shows offer to promote you, or YouTubers with tons of subscribers offer to do a video about you. Pick a handful of ones that you think will work, and do them when you want to do heavy promotion.

3) Hand out fliers. A lot of people offer to print or handout your flier or business card. Imagine putting your book’s flier around 10 different cities, or on specific university campuses.

4) Testimonials. You can pay people to leave a testimonial. $5 may seem a little expensive, but having 10 comments on amazon will make a huge difference in your sales. You can also pay $5 to have someone do a positive video testimonial you can use on your site or youtube.

5) More creative stuff. You can get models to take a picture of themselves with your book. You can get a fat guy to write the book’s name on his stomach and dance. You can get a guy in a chicken suit to talk about the book. You can get a dance crew to dance out a song for you. You can get a magician to write your book’s name and message on a card he displays after doing an awesome magic trick. You can get a girl to write a song about your book and perform it. You can get pictures of your book taken at famous landmarks around the world. You can have a comedian do a gig on your book.

You can even cast runes or get a tarot reading about the future success of your book, or get a spiritual healing when you’re getting burnt out!

Definitely worth spending some time on the site to see how you can make fiverr.com work for you.

Ps) You can also pay $5 to get copy editing for a few pages – an easy way to check your press release or sales copy!

Pps) If you have a self-help or how-to book, think of something cheap and easy that you could offer to do on fiverr.com. Mention in your post that you’re the author of XXX book, and you can provide (some related service). This could be another marketing avenue.

Derek Murphy is the author of “Jesus Potter Harry Christ


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