Do you want to be part of our Social Media Experiment? #SocMedX

Intrigued? Then stay with us, read on and all will be revealed…

We’ve put everything we’ve learned about business blogging into our latest ebook, How to write a top ranked business blog.

But we didn’t want to just put it out there and make the usual announcement. Northern Lights has done that before and it worked well – the first ebook – Why you can’t ignore social media in business – has now had a several thousand downloads.

So this time, we wanted to try something different.

Our new ebook – and why we wrote it

Victoria reckons Northern Lights has had roughly £100k worth of business that has come directly or indirectly as a result of our blog – either through organic search, or from being able to quickly send links to our blogs to potential clients to answer questions they have and show what we do. Other times, the blog is one part of the sales process. But either way, £100k is not small fry – a blog really is worth investing in!

Most senior business leaders don’t understand social media – and they need to. If you know us, you’ve probably heard Victoria banging on about this issue – it’s something she is very passionate about. See her letter in the Financial Times about this.

The evidence is clear. Large organisations continue to make horrendous social media ‘faux pas’ by thinking SM is something that should be left to junior staff to get on with as it’s a ‘young person’s thing’. Social media still isn’t getting the same strategic attention that more traditional communications gets. The Paris Brown fiasco is a perfect example.

Taking the blog to the boardroom: and what happens when you do

Luckily not all large organisations are like this. We are delighted to be working with a number of clients that have absolutely placed social media activities, such as blogging and engaging through Twitter and LinkedIn, right in amongst their other strategic communications activities – and invested in communications resource to do so.

We are often asked how to write a great business blog – one that is well-written, engaging, gets lots of hits, but (more importantly) that achieves strategic business goals.

We therefore thought it would be really useful to put everything we’ve learned from decades of collective ‘blogging for business’ experience into one place

The new ebook contains contributions from a whole host of business blogging experts. We reckon there’s about one hundred years of collective blogging experience in it.

It really is everything we know – and have spent many years experimenting and grafting to find out. So this ebook will save you vast amounts of time, especially if you’re just starting out.

So what’s the Social Media experiment? #SocMedX

After participating in the Amazon ‘Bestseller in a Weekend’ webinar by Alicia Dunams, Victoria was inspired to test out the Amazon bestseller process. We’ve given ourselves the task of putting together a launch campaign for the ebook, writing all the associated blogs, emails, devising and filming a webinar and YouTube clips to support the launch – all in a very short space of time: we’re launching in just 10 days time!

We don’t have a digital team behind us – we’re doing everything ourselves.

This is completely new ground for us, so we’re learning as we go along. Will it work?  That depends on you. If it has any chance of working, we need your help.

We want you to be part of our Amazon experiment and if we succeed, we will share everything we’ve learned with you for free.

 How do you become an Amazon bestseller in 10 days? #SocMedX

This is the question – and challenge – we have set ourselves. We love having a go at the seemingly impossible!

And the answer?  “Only with your help!” – but we’ll give you loads of free knowledge in return.

All you need to do is buy the book for a greatly reduced price (we have to charge a bit for it to be sold on Amazon) on the day it is launched. And tell everyone you know who might be interested in buying it that they should buy it on launch day too!

Use the #SocMedX hashtag on Twitter and this link: http://bit.ly/1hSQiIH

We need as many people as possible to buy ON LAUNCH DAY to be in with a chance of getting it into the Amazon bestseller list.

#SocMedX – What’s in it for you?

So for less than the price of a cup of coffee (£2.13 on launch day, going up to RRP £8.13* afterwards), you will get:

(*actual price is set to £8.04 as Amazon didn’t allow us £8.13)

• everything we know about business blogging (all our knowledge)
• one hundred years of collective business blogging experience (including all the contributions from industry experts)
• everything we learn about launching a new ebook and ‘Amazon bestseller’ campaign (so you can run a similar campaign without all the legwork we’ve had to do)
• and to be part of an interesting experiment to see if the power of collective social media activity really can achieve an Amazon bestseller in such a short space of time

What we would love you to do now is:

(1)    Stick the launch date in your diary: Tuesday 19 November

(2)    Sign up to our blog and we’ll send you instructions next week on how to take part (you don’t need a Kindle, there is an app to download to your PC – we’ll tell you more next week)

(3)    Tell everyone you know who using the hashtag #SocMedX

(4)    Then buy the book on Tuesday 19 November

Thanks for your support!  We’ll be in touch next week with further details…