The Biggest Mistake I Made In Self-Publishing and How You Can Avoid It —

Hey Maverick!

I thought I want to do something a little bit different! I want to share some kindle-tastic kindle publishing tips with you!

Everday I receive emails and messages asking me how I build my website, publish books, create magazines, run my Instagram, Pinterest etc

Truthfully, I’m not that confident that everything I do actually works for you. But I learned a lot over the last 4 years of self-publishing online. Which allow me to quit my day job to work from home full time.

Now I can do what I love doing because I have a passive income stream and I don’t have to rely on a month-to-month paycheck.

But don’t quit your job tomorrow. I didn’t quit my job until I had my side hustle going for 31 months.

Be responsible. You have to work on it over time but every day move closer towards this goal.

So, for the next 12 days, I’m going to share some self-publishing tips and guides to help you start your Kindle publishing, building a passive income and ultimately quit your day job!

Day 1: 5 Things Beginners Need to Know About Kindle Publishing

Day 2: 7 Reasons Why You Should Create an eBook for Your Business

Day 3: How to Write and Publish an eBook

Day 4: How To Find Profitable Niches To Publish Online

Day 5: The Biggest Mistake I Made In Self-Publishing and How You Can Avoid It

Day 6: 6 Steps To Sell More Books on Amazon

Day 7: Designing Book Covers That Sell

Day 8: 7 Most Common Self-Publishing Mistakes You Should Avoid

Day 9: 40 Ways to Promote and Market Your Book

Day 10: 49 Inspirational Marketing Tips From Top Authors

Day 11: Top 10 Best Tools for Self-Publishing Authors

Day 12: 12 Best Platforms to Self-Publish Your eBook and Make Money

Today, I’m going to talk about the biggest mistake I made in self-publishing and how you can avoid it.

Everybody makes mistakes. I made a lot of mistakes especially when I just started my self-publishing journey with Amazon.

I’m going to share with you the ONE biggest and most painful mistake that I’ve made in Kindle publishing. This is one of the most important aspects that most authors overlook.

First, I didn’t build an audience.

I used to think short-term, and only focused on publishing as many books as I could.

It took me years to learn the ugly truth of not building my audience as early as I could.

Just like building any business, you should always focus on the long-term. I didn’t use a blog strategically.

You might be wondering, “Why should I build my own website or blog? Why wouldn’t I just want to have my book sales page on Amazon?

I always answer this question with another question. Would you put your future in the hands of someone else who doesn’t share your personal interests?

Truth be told, Amazon doesn’t allow you to message your followers, they don’t want you to even have your customers’ details, and they can mess with you whenever they feel like it. In fact, Amazon changed their payout to authors without warning on a number of occasions, which has driven small time authors to quit publishing altogether.

Don’t fall for the allure of completely using someone else’s setup. This is Your Business! You want to grow & own your blog/website. You never want to be tied down or forced to go out of business one day should they choose to shut you down.

Blogging is your best shot at publishing a bestseller.

Over the years, I’ve noticed the unfair advantage that some authors had with a blog audience.

The idea is to capture your readers’ email addresses and to build up a list of your fans. This will serve a very important purpose later on because every time you launch a new book, you can blast an email to your 10,000 subscribers and instantly get rewarded for it. And that is what you want to achieve ideally.

Most people fail to understand the exponential power of blogging.

Although you may think that your favorite social media sites like Twitter, Facebook or Instagram is good enough to start promoting your books. The truth is, you are missing out on these stats:

• 61% of consumers have made a purchase based on a blog post that they read.
• 60% of consumers feel positive about a company after reading its blog.
• 70% of consumers learn about a company through its blog versus ads.

Here’s the thing.

Most people throw up a book and pray that the readers will come. But the truth is that getting organic traffic to a brand new book can be quite challenging early on.

And that is why over 90% of authors make less than $10,000 a year, and I made over $250,000 in six months.

The easiest way to sell your books is to first build an audience of loyal fans first. And the best way to establish this audience is with a blog.

There are many other reasons why self-publishing authors should start a blog:

1. You will become a better writer

Blogging is a great platform for you to practice. The more you write, the better you become. And you’ll have a more confident voice as a writer.

2. You can attract new readers through blogging

By creating good content consistently on your blog, you can reach more people from all over the world and build a better relationship with them. It will definitely help you grow your readership.

3. You can establish yourself as an expert in your Industry

Gaining the competitive advantage as a self-published author isn’t an easy task. People love to read books from trusted experts, someone who has proven credibility.

So the first thing that they’ll do is doing a simple author’s name search on Google.

If you have a professional-looking website with great content, this will help you to differentiate yourself from other competitors in your niche. It’ll boost your career in self-publishing even further.

4. You can get direct feedback from your readers

With a blog, you’ll be able to engage directly with your readers in a dialogue through the blog comment section. You can collect their opinions and feedback on your published works.

5. You can promote your book on your blog for launching new books.

6. You can monetize your blog

There are many different ways to make money with your blog. You can generate a passive income stream by promoting other products or services that are relevant to your readers.

Use this 5 proven ways to monetize your new blog that generate less than 1,000visitors a day.

With this concept in mind, let’s move on to the guts of this section.

To avoid making this same mistake, you’ll need to create your self-hosted website/blog now. If you already have your own blog with a loyal following, then it’s your unfair advantage in Kindle publishing. You can promote your book on your blog anytime. I will talk in the coming post.

#1. Register Your Domain

One of the most important aspects of your website is your domain name. If you already know what you want to publish on your website, make sure you choose a domain name that is short, catchy and memorable with no dashes in the name. I use Namecheap & GoDaddy.com to register all of my domains but certain webhosts such as Bluehost will give you a domain for free upon signup.

Learn how to start your blog with Bluehost

#2. Choosing A Webhost

When you first launch your website, you aren’t really going to need a powerful webhost. Initially, you aren’t going to be attracting enough customers to bring a shared hosting account down. So when you are first starting out, your main focus should be on reliability, support and saving $$$.

For example, when I first started out, I looked for the following attributes in my potential webhost providers

• Are they cheap?
• Are they reliable? Do they have a decent uptime?
• Do they have good technical support?
• Do they load one machine down with too many users?

Lots of times, cheaper web hosting plans will have poor reliability or slow performance because they shove too many accounts onto a single server.

Other webhosts will skimp on support so when things go wrong, you end up with a down website for an extended period of time.

My Recommendations

I’ve come across many webhosting companies throughout my 5 years building my business off the internet and have successfully run my blogs & websites on Hostgator.

Overall for a beginner, I recommend going with Hostgator because of the responsiveness of their tech support.

They also offer a very cheap plan for $2.75 a month that pretty much covers anything you’ll ever need on a shared host. You can host as many domains as you would like with unlimited SQL databases and bandwidth.

Learn how to start a blog with HostGator here

Easy Installation with WordPress

The other great thing about Hostgator is that they offer a 1 click install of many popular web applications.

In any case, selecting a domain and webhost provider isn’t a big deal. You can sign up for very little money and start your blog for practically nothing.

Well, there you go!

Do you have any concern not to self-host your own blog?

This is day 5 of 12 Days of Self-Publishing Tips to make passive income online! Tomorrow I will talk about 6 proven ways to sell more books on Amazon.

If you are interested in learning more about my entrepreneurial journey, Check out this ThinkMaverick Magazine App.

If you ever want tips please follow my Instagram page and ask away.

Coming Up Next

Originally published at thinkmaverick.com on April 6, 2018.