Today I was talking with a New York Times bestselling author. He was explaining to me how he had used video to drive his most recent book onto the best sellers list. “Nothing sells like video,” he explained.

Many authors have done this in the past few years, including Brendon Burchard, Gary Vaynerchuck and Chris Brogan.

A “landing page” is a page on your website that highlights one specific product offering. It is called a landing page, because it is the page you want people to land on when you direct them to it from email newsletters, social media, affiliate links, etc.

The goal of the landing page is to convert interest into leads or–better yet–sales. In a sense, it is a salesperson who works for you non-stop, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

I hear the following from authors all the time, “All I want to do is write. I hate promoting myself. I’m no good at it.” The result is they don’t work on their platform, hoping somehow that the whole notion will somehow just go away.

Putting your head in the sand is not the answer. It’s no longer a question of if an author needs a program, it’s now part of the writing business and can mean the difference between success and failure.

I started my selling career in high school. I sold door-to-door for Fuller Brush and a local cable television company. In college, I sold Grolier encyclopedias. Each of these sales positions involved “cold calling.” It was basically a form of human spamming: I called on people I didn’t know, who had not indicated an interest in the product, at times that were inconvenient for them. It was brutal work.