TIP Tuesday: Making Friends in Facebook Groups- a Smart Guerilla Strategy

"Guerrilla Marketing: the employment of unconventional ways of advertising, using smaller budgets and a larger imagination, to capture the attention of consumers."

Marketing outside of the box. If you want to attract attention to your work. . . 

Be different. Stand out. Be unexpected. 

Get CREATIVE

Authors have to be smart about finding and cultivating their audiences. In today's book market the self published author has to take the fate of their book in hand and get busy engaging audiences to build interest and encourage purchasers. How are they doing it? 

Audience engagement is important for SEO and for increasing sales. 

Take a tip from author Mary E. Martin . . . Make friends.

Mary is the kind of author whose books provoke thought. She uses Jungian ideas and themes in her books and when writing her blogs. She can talk about the essays of Joseph Campbell and isn't shy about opening touchy discourse about current affairs, challenging the established cultural paradigms.
So, it is no surprise that I have found her pushing buttons and raising the caliber of  philosophical discussion in several popular Facebook groups with a Jungian or Campbell focus.

What is she doing? She is making friends and adding to the following of her blog and fans of her work in the process.
If you follow her group activity, as I have done, you'll notice that she participates in group discussions. She asks questions, poses intellectual challenges, proposes ideas, and generally engages with other Facebook group members through comments. Next, after she has gotten a number of lively responses, she shares with the group that she has used the group thread for inspiration in a blog she has written, and invites them to comment. Using this tactic, she is successfully moving traffic to her blog, growing the number of friends she is reaching and the quality of comments her threads attract. She is taking her content to the places where the intended audience of her books visit on Facebook, and her tactic for attracting interest is working.

Mary E. Martin is the author of two trilogies: The Osgoode Trilogy, inspired by her many years of law practice; and The Trilogy of Remembrance, set in the glitter and shadows of the art world. Both trilogies will elevate the reader from the rush and hectic world of today and spin them into realms of yet unimagined intrigue. Be inspired by the newly released and final installment of The Trilogy of Remembrance, Night Crossing. Presently, The Drawing Lesson is a Wattpad Featured novel which you can read in its entirety through Wattpad.com

Tip Tuesday: “Above the Fold”

It is Tip Tuesday!

Expand your online marketing reach by developing effective strategies, SEO best practices and knowledge.

Tuesday's Tip for 11/25/2014  “Above the Fold”

The term “above the fold” refers to the contents of a website which are visible to the user without having to scroll down on their browser.

"Above the Fold"

Did you know the less work people have to do in order to see your offer, announcement, or incentive, the more likely they are to respond to it.

Marketing research shows that the upper right-hand corner is the most effective spot for an opt-in offer.

You can use this knowledge to your advantage.  If the sign-up form for your news letter, the like/share button, the purchase incentive, or that advertisement for your book/music cd/products are not already located above the fold, moving them to a more visible spot will often increase your conversion rate.

Tip Tuesdays, because the more you know . . . the better you do.

Marketing Doesn't Have to Kill Your Creative Joy

The writing and publishing worlds have been going through a deconstruction of their traditional roles and relationships ever since authors envisioned using the Internet to self promote, and market their own work. The role of traditional publishers is still being re-framed.

As publishers have less and less to offer aspiring writers, more and more authors choose self publishing. Gone are the days when publishers had budgets to give fat advance checks, or to invest in marketing for their authors. Even their best selling authors are feeling neglected in the pinch, forget marketing for the mid list picks. Within the traditional publishing houses the majority of promotions and marketing efforts are being left squarely in the author's lap. Traditionally published or self published, we are all in the same boat when it comes to getting our books in front of readers. Now is the time to re-imagine how we are going to bring marketing into our creative writing processes.

Don't Separate Marketing from your Creative Writing Process . . . Use it! 

As an author you have to know your target audience. You have to anticipate and plan for your reader's desires. You have to engage them if you are going to keep them reading. You should ask the same questions when choosing your audience, theme, and plot influences, as you would for marketing your book.

What is my audience looking for? What are they going to get from my book?

Are they looking for answers or seeking entertainment? What is it that will attract them to my book and my website over the books and websites of other authors? Is it my themes? Am I teaching a skill, proselytizing an ideal, or prophesying a dire warning? Am I making a political comment or a spiritual declaration? Does my book hold expert or life knowledge? Do I have more to offer than just this book? Can I hook my audience into purchasing and reading my book through a shared interest, a cause, or sentiment?

These may be questions that both influence who an author is writing for or even about, plot devices, and theme development, as well as where and how they might market a book in the future.

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Time to Think Outside the Book

To stand out in the book market you have to think outside the book, beyond the story you are writing.

Do you as an author bring any added value, knowledge, or expertise to the world in addition to your book? If you do, that is a marketing tool in your bag. Any aspect of your interests, experiences, profession, or life outside of and within the writing world could lead to audience exposure and interested markets.

It's Time to Think Outside the Book 

Your book is an extension of yourself, a form of self expression. It can transmit your skill, your interests, dreams, traditions, education, point of view, loyalties, ideals, values, bias, ideas, hopes, agenda, convictions, frustrations, loves, curiosities, anger, illusion, temptations and fears. Every character has grown from thoughts and experiences that you have had. Every plot twist and turn first wound through your imagination.  Loyal fan bases are often eager to interact with and curious about the life, mind, and/or interests of their favorite authors. Use that to tendency to your advantage.

Marketing research reveals that it takes on average three visits to a website before any purchases will be made. You have a book ready to market. How will you get reader attention? How are you going to entice people to visit your website repeatedly, until they decide to buy your book?

Books do not have the same value to readers as they did in eras of the past. Gone are the days when wealth was determined by the size of your library. Books have competition as suppliers of news, entertainment, education, and inspiration. Audiences have a thousand distractions and options to choose from in the form of the Internet, TV, Film, Theater, Sports. . . need I go on? Bringing audiences back to your site is gong to be an important focus for your online marketing activities. This is guerrilla marketing we are talking about. You have to be able to stretch your reach beyond what has worked in the past and try new tactics.

Once a book is published it isn't changing. The story is over, it isn't going anywhere and your audience knows it. Where as, your life is still growing, and that is where things get interesting. Find a way to interact with or engage your audience further than the immediate entertainment value of your book. Attach your book to a cause, or an interest group you belong to.  Use your website to promote what you have to offer the world in addition to your book.

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Tip Tuesday: Anchor Text

It is Tip Tuesday!

Expand your online marketing reach by developing SEO best practices and knowledge.

Tuesday's Term of the Day:

Anchor Text

Anchor text is the visible characters and words that hyperlinks display when linking to another document or location on the web.


Have a look at this blog video . . . (Passing along the good stuff.)

How to Acquire Anchor Text-Rich Links Without Resorting to Spam or Manipulation 

October 10th, 2014 - Posted by Rand Fishkin to Link Building and Whiteboard Friday

Video Transcription

Tip Tuesday: Site Popularity and Relevancy

It is Tip Tuesday!

Expand your online marketing reach by developing SEO best practices and knowledge.

Search engines are designed to crawl and index hundreds of millions of web pages. In doing this the Google search engine makes heavy use of hypertext in collecting data for analysis and categorization of variables, and trends. It uses data gained from hypertext, including links, to establish relationships, popularity, and relevancy of and between pages. The PageRank algorithm used by Google counts hyperlinks as determining factors in popularity. Pages with the most external links pointing at them are considered the most popular.

Link relevancy is determined by both the content of the source page and the content of the anchor text. It is a natural phenomenon that occurs when people link out to other content on the web.

Tuesday's Term of the Day:

Popularity and Relevancy

Q:  What is the importance of "popularity and relevancy" in search engine ranking?

A: Popularity combined with relevancy metrics determine the best results for a given search query. When determined relevant for a particular query, the most popular and relevant pages become the first pages listed in Google's results.    

This is why elevating your popularity and relevancy with search engine page ranking is an important area of focus for any marketing strategy.

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Tip Tuesday: External Links

It is Tip Tuesday!

Expand your online marketing reach by developing SEO best practices and knowledge.

Tuesday's Term of the Day:

External Links

External Links are hyperlinks that point at (target) any domain other than the domain the link exists on (source). ~ moz.com

For our purposes and understanding, external links are those which originate on another site or domain and lead traffic to you and your website. External links are the most coveted and influential for SEO ranking, as they are harder to manipulate and therefore viewed by search engines as a more reliable indicator of popularity and relevance. Sometimes you will hear these links referred to as back links.

Developing good network relationships with other theme or interest related bloggers and site owners, in order to establish links between pages, is one way of acquiring external links for your blog or web page. This form of linking is referred to as reciprocal linking. Often these kind of relationships are used in multi-site linking where sites band together to create and use links for SEO. Trading articles, offering promotional support, participating in virtual tours, blog jogs, and incentive giveaways are just a few of the creative link building tactics used by savvy marketers who wish to establish reciprocal external links, drive Internet traffic, and raise SEO page rankings.

Another form of external link that will benefit your SEO ranking and lead Internet traffic to your door is one way links: those which come from articles, reviews, media releases, forum or comment signatures, and bylines that lead back to you. You can create many of these links through your own activity and through reciprocal relationships.

Directory links are external links which generally lead traffic seeking resource material and information. Having your site listed for expert content in a directory can be very useful to your SEO relevancy standings.

Acquiring and creating external links is an important step along the path of marketing your book, brand, product or personality online. They are valuable to search engines because they help measure two key factors, popularity and relevancy. More about that another Tip Tuesday.

The more you know the more you grow.
Great day to you.

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Class Act, Selling More Books Through School and Library Author Appearances

Join me in this video interview with author Barbara Techel as she shares her book, Class Act: Selling More Books Through School and Library Author Appearances.

We had a great time using Skype to create this video interview for a Writers In The Sky Podcast. The video format allowed us to add visual elements, slides and URL information, to create a dynamic and engaging experience. Video is a new direction for my interviews and I hope that you will both benefit and enjoy what I have put together.

Barbara Techel is a wonderful author, with an engaging interview personality. She is every blog host's dream, offering clear information and advice with ease and experience. Her book, Class Act, is chuck full of valuable tips for making author appearances profitable and effective as a marketing strategy.

I highly recommend Barbara's book to every author as an excellent marketing how to. Barbara shares information on how to pitch a presentation to schools and libraries. Class Act includes her tips on, how to determine what to charge for an appearance, covering elements of presentation and technology use that are invaluable.

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Blog, Blog, Blog

A blog by any other name is, Free Publicity.

Why aren’t you blogging?

I have heard a lot of excuses for why authors don’t want to blog.

    "I am not good with computers."
    "It is too technical, I don’t know how to set up a blog."
    "It is too much work to maintain."
    "I can’t think of anything to blog about."
    "No one will know how to find my blog."

These are the most common excuses, but none of them need to be a deterrent.  Blog hosting providers like Google and Wordpress are developing more user friendly tools every day.  Gone are the days when you had to know a programming language to create a good looking website to promote your work.  These days blog domains are creating templates that allow inexperienced bloggers to create attractive and exciting multimedia pages.  An author can create what amounts to a decent webpage through their blog.

Take for example Blogspot.com, Google’s blog domain.

When you set up your account you not only get a front blog page, but you can also create additional pages for information  such as, About the author, a page specifically about your Books, Reviews, Virtual Touring and more.

Take a look at my blog.  I have additional pages that allow me to give focus to information I think is of value to my followers. At the bottom of my page I have a YouTube playlists of book trailers showcasing book trailers, for authors whose books I have reviewed.  I can add audio files, and link to sites that have posted my reviews.

Through investing time in creating a blog, I have gained access to all the great features that used to belong exclusively to companies and people with the cash needed to hire a web designer and techno geeks.  I have had fun finding and adding gadgets, personalizing my site to promote my work and I didn’t need to pay a site administrator to get it done. I have even posted attractive links to books on Amazon.com where followers can make purchases.  [See, look left]

Granted I like computers, but I did all of this without knowing a computer programming language, or html code, because Blogspot.com has designed it’s tools with beginner to average computer users in mind.  The same is true for most blog hosting domains.  It serves them to make it easy for users to . . . well, use.

Even if you aren't super with computers, you should be able to create an account, a basic site, and learn how to post. You can afford to play around creating a site because it doesn't cost anything to set up a blog and because you don't have to start posting until you have things the way you like them. You could, if you wanted to, but there is no pressure to start posting immediately.  Also, until you start connecting your social networking accounts to each other no one has to see your blog under construction.

The number one way to promote yourself and your book is through blogging.  Blogging allows you to communicate with fans, to answer their questions  and tell them what you want them to know. 

Many social networking sites have programs or applications which allow you to syndicate your blog, redirecting traffic to flow into your blog through links that announce automatically when you publish a post. That means once you post to your blog, an announcement rolls over to Facebook, or Linked-in, and even Twitter, letting your followers know they have something new to read. 

Subscribe buttons allow followers to receive your blog like a morning paper on their iPads, pcs, smart phones and other media devices. Where have all the newspaper subscribers gone?  Why—to  the internet, where they are reading their favorite morning blogs over a cup of Joe.

So what is really stopping any of us from capitalizing on this obviously a great promotional opportunity? Yup . . .

Fear

"It is unfamiliar territory and it sounds like hard work. I told you I hate computers!"

Let’s do it!

Let's move past our fear response and let’s familiarize ourselves with the tools.  Let’s talk about it as we go. We don’t have to go it alone. If we have a question, let’s look for answers together. 

Over the next few weeks, we will explore blogging, the best blogging practices and we will familiarize ourselves by using Blogspot.com’s tools and gadgets in creating an author blog. 

Just think about it . . .  Free Publicity.

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Using PR and Social Media

Obtaining coverage in media publications (TV, radio, podcasts, online video, newspapers, magazines, online news sites, blogs, etc.) is every author's goal for spread the word about their book. PR coverage is free, third-party validation, which often results in more credibility for you and your book. So how does one secure coverage in these publications and media, and how can social media help?

If you have been reluctant to launch yourself into the Tweet-o-sphere, here is another reason to get yourself out there.

Social media is not just a way for you to spread the word about your activities or book release. It is a way to connect with what the social media gurus call "influencers."

An influencer:  is someone who is connected with and able to influence the public through the media, such as a journalist, reporter or blogger.

Many journalists, reporters, and bloggers make themselves available on Twitter. Oh, it's true, I promise, and using Twitter is a great way to introduce yourself to them.

First you have to find them and one way to do this is to look for influential blogs (use blog search engines like Technorati), subscribe to them, and start following their authors on Twitter. Another way is to start following journalists who target our industry. Then start tweeting with them, but don't oversell yourself or your book.  Get to know their work and site themes first and make sure that you have something to offer them before making your approach. Develop relationships by tweeting about an article of theirs that you enjoyed or by asking a question. (You can also use the comment section on a blog in much the same way.)

The web and social media give access to a whole slew of influencers with which you can easily interact and develop relationships. Building relationships and networking through social media connects you with these influencers who have the ability to place stories about you and your book in front of the reading public.

Join us next week for TIPS on . . .  How to Pitch Yourself .

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Writing From Experience

Today Ink Slinger's Whimsey would like to welcome guest blogger, author Rowena Portch.  Rowena has recently published book two in her Spirian Series, The Union.  Both book one and two of Rowena's paranormal romance series were published in 2010, with book one of the series, The Protected, receiving the Readers Favorite 2010, silver medal for general fiction. The Spirian Series has captured the attention of  reading groups and is garnering positive attention and feedback from reviewers across the country. Take it away Ro . . .

Writing From Experience
By Rowena Portch                 
(Photo of Greg and Rowena Portch Right)

When I explored writing over 30 years ago, a speaker I had listened to mentioned something about writing from experience. At that time, during my younger years, his profound bit of knowledge didn’t really stick. Years later, however, I decided to write about the odd set of circumstances that culminated my life. My memoir, “This is Not the Life I Ordered!” was born.

It was a two-year project comprised of anecdotes, and quotes I had conjured over the years. Though the stories were good, there was nothing to really tie them together; nothing to entice anyone to want to read them. My imagination kicked into high gear, and in three months, my memoir turned into a three-book series about a race of gifted beings called Spirians.

The challenge came with writing from the perspective of a blind massage therapist. Skye Taylor, the woman portraying me, was legally blind. Like me, she was not completely blind. She could still see shapes and some detail providing there was enough light. To keep the story interesting and descriptive, I had to draw upon my memories of what things looked like when I had good vision. Like Skye, most of what I see is in the form of energy, or vibrations that radiate from everything, even rocks and furniture. Describing objects the way that I actually see them would confuse the reader. Hence, I had to translate my experience to match those that a sighted person would recognize.

Many of the events that happen to Skye, happened to me in one form or another. For example, when Skye is in the hospital, she is visited by a mysterious man that leaves her with the gift to heal. This is an actual event. The part where the Shadow woman injects her with a tracking chip was fiction. It was a necessary element to stimulate a sense of danger. This is what keeps readers hooked.

Too many writers try to write about something that they have researched, or have written a story that they have always wanted to read but could never find. All of this is good, but if the personal experience is lacking, it will show in the story. To demonstrate this point, try writing about something you have heard about but have never experienced. Now, write about something that you have experienced. If you put full effort into this exercise, you will notice that one piece of writing lacks passion. The other shows emotion and heart, because the experience is a part of you.

Try this—the next time you go to a coffee shop, write about the people you observe, their displayed emotions, their body language, tone of voice, and appearance. Don’t forget to include your senses. What do you smell, hear, taste, feel? Now, take that short segment and see how you can weave your experience into a fascinating story. Make it short and sweet as if you were recounting your experience to a friend. The more you practice this, the more observant you will become to your surroundings. As a result, your writing will be stronger and much more believable to your readers.

By combining real-life experiences, and weaving them in with a good measure of fiction, what is revealed is a believable story that will keep your readers’ attention and make them yearn for more.