How Ramit Blogged (And Promoted) His Way To The Best Seller List – with Ramit Sethi

Ramit Sethi, I Will Teach You To Be Rich, Content, PR / Media Marketing

A few years ago, Ramit Sethi was a personal finance blogger whose site nobody knew. After building up a loyal following on his site, IWillTeachYouToBeRich.com, he got a book deal. Thanks to his blog’s readers, his new book, “I Will Teach You To Be Rich,” hit the New York Times and Wall street Journal best-seller lists.

Ramit Sethi is a New York Times bestselling author and founder of IWillTeachYouToBeRich.com,

In this edited excerpt from his Mixergy interview, he talks about how he marketed his blog.

If you build it, they will not come!

You’ve got to build something great–and then tell the right people about it.

I’ll give you an example. One of my favorite posts is called “The $28,000 Question. Why are we all hypocrites about our weddings?” It involves what we all say, which is, “When I have a wedding, I just want it to be simple and beautiful. Just small and beautiful.” Which, of course, is a total lie.

When you have your wedding, you want it to be the best. You want it to be the biggest. And of course, it makes sense. It’s you wedding.

So I said, “Why don’t we acknowledge that and be realistic about it?”

It got a lot of people thinking about it. But the key the success of that post was both writing it (and making it really tactical and having numbers in there), and then going and telling the wedding bloggers.

A lot of times people just write and think, “Let my readers come.”

Nobody cares about personal finance in general. Nobody says, “I want to be a personal finance expert.” If you do, you’re a big nerd. But, if you happen to be planning a wedding, I bet you’re reading a bunch of wedding blogs.

So, if you think of personal finance as a funnel, then you get people in at the wedding level and maybe they say, “Oh, I should check out this guy’s stuff on Roth IRA’s, or what he says about investor psychology.” And all of a sudden that’s 2,000 new readers.

So you’ve got to write great stuff, but in my experience, you also have to tell the right people about it.