What is your marketing plan?

My background is heavily in online marketing; I love this stuff! Feel free to email me at ben@shepherd.com or leave questions in the comments below. 

(If you are looking for how we market your book recommendation list, go here.)

What is Shepherd's marketing plan for 2024 and 2025?

We are 100% focused on two external marketing channels: 

Search Engine Traffic

We work to rank pages on Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo. Search engine traffic is very valuable as it brings in readers looking to buy a book (unlike social media, where they are just browsing with no specific aim).  Our goal is to give readers something amazing and start building our brand with them.

It takes at least three years for Google to start ranking a website for competitive searches (oversimplification, but the gist). This is a long-term investment, but it should continue to pay off as we provide more and more value to our users. 

The goal is to build a long term connection with readers so that the next time readers look for a book, they come directly to Shepherd (instead of through a search engine). This takes many, many years, so it is a constant focus. 

Email Marketing

Email is our big focus for 2024 and 2025. 

We are working to launch a personalized book recommendation newsletter for readers as well as other email features. We want to build a large list of active readers who want book recommendations around genres, topics, authors, and books they love. It is a medium we control fully, which is a big plus in the world of Google and social media. We plan to use it email to jump-start our reader features as well. 

What about social media?

Currently, we only focus on social media through authors we work with. We encourage authors to share their book list on social media with their fan base. Not only does this help the author sell their book and engage their fan base, but it also helps introduce readers to the entire author community at Shepherd, which helps everyone involved. 

Shepherd itself is not active on social media; for a website like ours, social media is the least valuable traffic (you can read a full breakdown of why). Remember, we are different than an author; for an author, social media traffic can be very valuable since they are building a personal fan base. 

After we get email in place, I will expand to social media by building social channels around genres and start building our following there. I am hoping we can do this in 2025 as we get more of the features we need in place to segment out different types of readers.