Is Your Twitter Page Engaging Enough? 03/03/2012

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Are you having a party every day on Twitter? If not, you could be—you just need to take the first steps and have fun along the way. I’m somewhat of a newbie in this whole Twitter venue, but I’ve learned a few things along the way that I wanted to share. 

I’ve learned that one of the best things you can do is to engage your followers in conversation. If you want to have an, it’s all about me fest then talk about yourself—which, if you’re a celebrity, that will work for you and people will still follow you. However, if you are an author who is trying to brand your name and promote your books—yet still remain grounded in reality—trying to get others to follow you—will entail giving them a reason to. What’s one of those reasons: being yourself and making an effort to be real as you engage with people. Of course you want to post status updates and sometimes quotes or links to your books, but you also need to ask questions at times to start conversations with others. People want to connect with others and if you can be engaging, then do it and you’ll have many interactions with others on your twitter page.

People like to be appreciated, don’t you? In the beginning of building your platform on Twitter, this will be easier than when you get many new followers each day—but it’s good to acknowledge new followers. You can thank them by listing individual usernames or just every now and then giving a shout out to new follows in general. Either way, it cultivates appreciation all around. When someone retweets one of my tweets or mentions me or one of my blog links, I do my best to thank them for it. Courteous behavior goes a long way towards creating a good atmosphere for everyone.

Respond to people’s messages to you. Certainly if you have a million followers and you get tons and tons of direct messages a day, you most likely won’t be able to keep up with it all. However, as a non-celebrity, you’ll probably have more success in responding to said messages. It shows people that you care and respect them enough to take time out to respond. Obviously, you don’t need to respond to auto messages sent out after you follow someone. I’m talking about an actual message from someone who is looking for an answer. 

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Know who your friends are and support them. Of course, you should be nice to everyone, but it pays off in the long run that when you help other authors, most of them will help you in return. For example, just today, I stopped by one of my author friend’s interview and commented, but then I also tweeted about it. It got picked up by someone’s online daily paper and she got added exposure. True, my twitter profile link showed up and I got exposure with that—but that was not why I did it. I had no idea the tweet was going to get picked up. I simply wanted to help my friend out. She’s helped me many times with free exposure and we (and all my other author friends) actually enjoy helping each other out. It’s a dog eat dog world out there, but it doesn’t have to be. I can’t change the circumstances that authors are in, but I can change my actions and learn to work well with others. Believe me, networking well has definitely given many rewards.

Follow people back, if you can. In my mind, I’ve set a limit to how many people I will follow. I like to be methodical in whom I follow and why. But that’s how I operate not necessarily how you need to operate. I have classified people into different lists on Twitter so that makes things easier with the more people I follow; however, I do hang out on Twitter during the day and like to peruse the tweets and know what I can and cannot handle in terms of amount of information. That being said, I am trying to build up my follow list with what interests me (i.e., political pundits, actors, authors etc.)—but I am making it a rule, that until I reach my limit [which I won’t disclose here…hey, a girl’s got to have some secrets, right!!], I will follow back those who follow me. So this is an issue that you need to work out yourself, but I will say that I’ve finally reached 1000+ followers and that started only after I cleaned up my list and started following some people back. Before I did that, I was gaining followers and losing the same amount and kind of stagnant, not gaining momentum.

Follow the Golden Rule & stay courteous at all costs. Now, this is not a religious conversation. This is a civil one. In today’s society, I feel that we’ve grown more callous and impolite with each passing day. Now, I’m not old, but not a young chick either—again, I’m not disclosing my age! I remember years ago when I was younger, that more people followed the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do to you. Play fair and don’t push each other around. If you wouldn’t want someone to be rude to you, then don’t be rude to them. I must say that the online medium does tend to give some people more courage to be mean—writing things that they wouldn’t as easily actually say to someone’s face. So always be mindful of other’s feelings and be nice. I don’t tolerate discourteous behavior in my Twitter world and I don’t tolerate spammers either—you will be blocked.

Good content is vital to success. People follow leaders not followers. Are you a leader? Are you giving people a reason to come back to hear what you have to say or are you only giving them a hard sell to buy your book? The latter won’t work in giving you a loyal following. I have never liked pushy salesmen, what about you? I like to take my time, figure out what I want to buy and then go to the salesman when I’m ready to check out or by that big purchase. True, it does take about seven times for someone to hear about your product or book, in this case, before they buy it—of course, there are exceptions to this rule. That being said, you will want to tweet the link to your book or for your book trailers and interviews etc.; however, you want to live by the 80/20 rule. Have mostly conversational and engaging tweets about life, giving content people need and asking questions; rather than selling your books. I know I can’t stand when authors are tweeting all day long about their books. I want to follow authors who have something valuable to offer—like information on marketing, encouragement to other authors, networking opportunities and just friendly conversation. What about you?

Never give up when the going gets tough. Believe me, I know how tough marketing your books can be. I have three books published and my fourth will be released this month. However, it’s my dream to continue writing and hopefully someday soon to make a really good living at it. Sometimes it seems unrealistic to rise to the top amongst hundreds of thousands of wonderful authors—but I want to try and am persisting in making it work. When you get down and out, that’s really when you need to find your friends, the ones who know how much you love to write—and will encourage you to keep going and not give up. If writing is your passion, keep on going because you’ll only regret it if you give up—who knows if you could’ve become the next best-selling author!!

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this issue and let me know where your Twitter party is. I’d love to come and hang out with you!  

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Are You Writing Enticing Content that will Get Picked Up? 02/07/2012

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People want to know things—whether the content they’re looking for is intellectual food for thought or way on the other end of the spectrum—they’re looking for something. Have you gotten your share of free publicity on the content train? If you haven’t jumped on board, what are you waiting for?

I missed the boarding call because I was unaware of how to get noticed and was not properly marketing my content. I was posting to my blog every day and I had my few loyal followers; however, I was hitting a brick wall when it came to finding a new audience. So what happened? As I mentioned a few weeks ago on my blog, I learned how to start utilizing social media the correct way—especially Twitter.

Since I’ve been tweeting more and reposting my blog link each day, my content has actually been picked up by the following online news sites. Now, I did not contact these sites and pitch my blog article to them. I just posted it to Twitter the right way and they found my content.

The #Marketing Stylist's #News, created by Lisa N. Alexander
God's Writer Girl Daily News, created by Kelly Kiggins-Lund
Self-Publishing Tips, created by Ezra Barany
Daily Book Giveaways   

So what’s the right way to post? You need to utilize hashtags in your tweets; although you don’t want to go overboard with that…use no more than three in each tweet. My blog content is posted once daily to facebook  and I have several different pages (in the niche marketing for my blog) that I also link the post to. Each daily post is also linked to Twitter; however, since I have started reposting the link several times throughout the day to Twitter (with varying questions or tag lines), I have seen a large increase in traffic to my blog.

I have found Facebook to be useful; although, Twitter has seemed to be more conducive to the marketing tactics that I am using. Start following others on Twitter and you may get new followers in return; however, keep an eye on how many people you are following and clean out your list every now and then. I recently did that. Don’t just follow someone to follow someone and hope that you get a follow in return. Follow people that will bring useful content to your newsfeed each day. You may then find good tweets to retweet and it can bring ideas to you on things to talk about. You can find useful links for information and networking. Also, think about using hashtag topics sometimes that pertain to your tweets, like: #romanticsuspensenovels etc. I’ve even tweeted about the topics listed in the trending section. This gets your tweets listed in sections pertaining to topic and can bring new followers your way. Don’t forget to chat with others on Twitter and respond if someone tweets something to you. Keep track of your profile activity and if you’ve been mentioned anywhere.

Hope this helps…I’d love to know your thoughts on utilizing social media and what has worked and what hasn’t worked for you. 

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Authors: Are you standing out from the crowd? 02/02/2012

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With hundreds of thousands of books published each year, how do you and your books stand out from the crowded arena of other published authors? It’s enough to make your head spin and then maybe even run away and hide due to the overwhelming task of succeeding. Success goes to the person who persevered and never gave up.  Success goes to the person who tried just one more time and said the dream was worth it. 

With the advent of the internet and now the eBook, publishing and marketing books has been taken to a whole new level. The playing field is now equal and there is so much free publicity at your fingertips, you just need to know where to get started. 

One of the main things you need to do is stand out from the crowd. You need an online hub or place where people can readily find you and your books. This would be your website or blog. I have a website and my blog is one of the pages on my site.  Your blog can be separate from your website, but you need to link both places together. 

Blogging is important and may seem tedious and like a thankless task with no rewards, but again—if you keep working at it, you will get blog followers and it is a way to keep drawing people to your website. That is what you want. If you only have a website that is static and never changes, why should people continue to flock to your site? It’s all about online content. People want to read new and fresh ideas and content online and if your blog offers that, you will keep your current followers and draw new readers. 

Join a blog alliance. It will be another way to draw people to your site. I am a current member of the Clash of the Titles Blog Alliance and Book Blogs (their buttons are on the sidebar of this blog). 

So what on earth do you blog about every day? If you get all caught up in that and thinking no one will even read what I have to say, then no one will. You need to believe in your blog before anyone else will. When I started my blog back in August 2010, I wrote short posts about my day or the status of my writing projects, but it didn’t even seem interesting to me and I knew it wasn’t interesting to anyone else. I’m a new author; who cares anyway? That’s why I needed to make the blog interesting. 

I post author interviews, guest blogs, reader corner interviews and I also post book reviews that I do. For this year, I am trying something different—I am having guest authors write on themed blog posts, specific to each month. If you’re interested in guesting, please let me know. The Mustard Seed is a place for authors and readers to connect. 

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Social networking is very important.  Start your own personal facebook page and then a fan page. Open a twitter account. I have my blog linked to post to twitter and also my facebook personal and fan page through Networked blogs and it posts to my book blogs page; this is a great way to get multiple avenues of exposure from one posting.

Try to do as many online author interviews or guest blogs that you can do and post links on your social networking pages. Have reviews done on your books. Look into doing radio interviews. Think about doing book giveaways of your books on your own blog or when you are a guest on another person’s blog. 

Another big part of succeeding in the publishing world is to market your name, not your book. Yes you need to market each book you write, but your name recognition is what will pave the way to continued sales. If a reader likes one of your books, he or she will look into your backlist to see what else you've written. You also need to continue writing books. Don’t stop. After you publish one book, go back to the drawing board and get started on a new book.    

There are so many avenues for success, you just need to keep your eyes open and be willing to think outside the box. What works for one author may not work for you.  Be open to that fact and to find what does work for you. Be open to change and trying new ideas. Not everything you try will always work, but never give up. If you give up, you won’t ever find what could have happened if you stayed with it and kept persevering.  

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Surviving Sans the Internet 10/28/2010

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What’s a writer to do when the Internet goes down? 

Depending on how long the internet connection is down for, the withdrawal symptoms will vary.

1.      No more facebook access ~ can’t spend the morning scrolling down the newsfeed…what a disaster.

2.      Forget about updating twitter ~ will the world get by without knowing what I ate for breakfast or how my exercise workout went or where I’m going for lunch?!?!? 

3.      What about my blog ~ my faithful followers are waiting with bated breath for my daily blog…I don’t think they’ll survive without my next blog posting today.

4.      Email’s down ~ how will I make it through the day without email access.  I’m sure I have hundreds of messages, not to mention the messages I didn’t even get through reading yesterday. 

5.      You mean I can’t surf the news sites ~ forget about watching the news on TV…I want to scroll the news sites online.

6.      Online marketing ~ I need to access the Internet to promote my latest book on the local forums, chat rooms and other social media sites. 

Now back to reality.  Our Internet connection at home has been slow and acting up lately and it gave me the idea to blog about our dependence on online activity.  Believe me, I am one of the addicted ones.  Every day after my husband and I get home from the gym, the first thing I do before I start working in my home office is to check my email.  Lately, I’ve been checking facebook and twitter even before my yahoo email account.  Throughout the day, I check back on facebook and twitter, but I tell myself it’s because I also manage various FB and TW accounts for different marketing clients.  Shh…but I do check my personal page also throughout the day.

I finally just got the TweetDeck app for Twitter on my phone, as well as the app for Facebook.  I’m not sure that it’s such a good thing, but now I can update my status from anywhere, just like so many other people are doing.

So, am I saying that the Internet is bad?  No, it’s not bad but our dependence on it can sometimes be bad.  However, it’s great to have Internet access on my phone when my husband and I are out and we need directions or are looking for a specific restaurant’s address to input it into our GPS. 

As writers, we especially need the Internet in this day and age, for marketing and networking with other authors and with our readers and publishers and book reviewers.  The wonderful balancing act of not allowing our access to the Internet to hinder our main goal of writing every day and trying to complete new manuscripts should be the driving force in our daily interaction online.  We use the Internet for research as well and social networking with friends and family, but we must remember that we are using theInternet and not the other way around. 

Now back to my marketing work and then to work on another chapter in my book ~ but I’m sure I’ll see you on Facebook or Twitter not too long from now!