Sep 12

5 Easy Facebook Fixes for Your Business, Social Media 101 for the Publishing Industry

Authors, Marketing, Social Media No Comments »

This is a guest post by Jay Echternach of Gotcha Marketing. Used with permission.

Unless you have been living under a rock for the past 5 years, you probably have noticed that your advertising dollars in newspaper, magazines, radio and TV have gained less and less traction with your existing and new clients. This is no surprise to a vast majority of us who have shifted our efforts to the larger social media formats like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

These forward trending and aware businesses jumped ahead of the curve and started posting content on these platforms and hoped for the best. The results, unfortunately, were and have been less then stellar. Fewer and fewer customers are following their brand and they are left to wonder if this new age of social engagement is just not a picture posting format for their wives and kids!

The reality is that well executed, social media IS the new frontier for engaging your customers, especially in the world of publishing. Self-publishing has grown exponentially in the past 5 years as waves of budding authors are now able to get their books in print digitally. Having lost (or avoided) the traditional publishing path, they are left holding-the-bag in terms of getting their book sold and marketed.

Many of these new authors and small publishers turned to the world of social media and began posting and looked for the orders to roll in…and they are still waiting! What happened then? Did the digital media world suddenly collapse before they got their message out? Quite the contrary as the social media world continues to expand with newer platforms like Pinterest, Wellwer and Xanga, which are bigger and bolder platforms with millions of daily users are looking for instant connections, resources or information that fits their lifestyle or needs.

These new stewards of content (first time or self-published authors) took the age old view of advertising (think newspaper ads dominated by feature or price messaging) and began posting this on their personal Facebook page. HUGE MISTAKE!

So let’s look at the 5 Easy Facebook Fixes for Your Business:

  1. Do not post business content on your personal Facebook page, set up a fan page. That allows you to install a fangate page to garner likes and get multiple eyeballs on your Facebook fan page quickly.
  2. Create a FREE offer (think e-book!) to acquire e-mail addresses of potential clients.
  3. Think 80/20 rule; 80% relational / 20% informational. Your clients like to see pictures of your family, grandkids or latest outdoor excursion!
  4. Post visual content Facebook and the web is a visual medium, post pictures OFTEN!
  5. Hire a fun, creative agency to handle your project. We know this seems like a shameless advertisement for hiring us, but really, your hands are full running your business on a daily basis. Additionally, just because your 15 year old daughter likes Facebook, does not mean she gets how to post daily to engage your clients!

The nice folks at Gotcha Marketing are web and social media guru’s and avid readers having spent many years in the publishing world. Let them lend you a hand in creating and developing your next marketing campaign. To follow Gotcha Marketing’s blog simply click this link: www.gotchamktg.com/blog.

Jay Echternach is a web marketing strategist with Gotcha Marketing, located in Portland, Oregon. Jay’s contact info: jay@gotchamktg.com or 503.967.5646.

 

 

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May 03

Ten tips for marketing and selling your book on Facebook

Marketing, Sales No Comments »

Although I am not a writer, I have talked to a lot of writers/authors and publishers about tips for using social media to promote and sell your book. Here are the ten best tips that I have heard.

  1. Use a program like Hootsuite to organize your Facebook posts (and Tweets) so that you can not only make sure that you are consistent about posting, but so that you can do the work all at once and ‘set it and forget it’ if you need to. This will allow your daily interaction to be responding to your fans and engaging them, rather than posting.
  2. Build a fan page on Facebook where you can strategically build a relationship with your fans.
  3. Use Twitter to push people to your Facebook page or a specific promotion for your book.
  4. Use your book cover(s) as part of your profile pictures at the top of your Facebook fan page.
  5. If you want to engage your fans, ask questions to get them talking and interacting. Ask their opinion about topics, plots, characters, etc.
  6. Give away free content. If you are a non fiction writer, and you have key information for your audience that may or may not be in your book, give some of it away. This can be a daily tip, devotion, thought-of-the-day, etc. If you are a fiction writer, share ‘insider’ information about your characters in your posts. Give readers something extra that they might not get from your books alone. I have even heard of authors posting as their book’s characters and building a relationship with readers that way.
  7. Use Facebook advertising to increase the LIKES on your Facebook fan page. This is an easy way to find the niche market that you have written for, or fans of other authors similar to you. Facebook has some great tools to allow you to narrow your target advertising and build your followers fast and relatively inexpensively.
  8. Share a link for your fans to buy your book on your Facebook page. You may have your own website with a store, or you may want to send your customers to another on-line retailer.
  9. If you work with Snowfall Press, you can utilize the Snowfall Facebook App that will automatically install a bookstore on your Facebook fan page, and allow you to sell your book through a PayPal check out system, where the book order will be printed-on-demand and drop shipped directly to your customer. This minimizes your risk, and is one of the only directly sales options available for books on Facebook.
  10. Experiment! New ideas and tools are being created all the time. The most important thing is to do it. It is easy to plan or procrastinate. Quoting our iconic modern philosopher NIKE, ‘Just Do It.’

If you are an author, what other tips would you suggest? Or, what Facebook marketing ideas have you seen work really well, even with other products?

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Feb 02

Blogging and social media is critical for any author

Authors, Marketing, Uncategorized 1 Comment »

I recently had the opportunity to spend some time with a local chapter of the American Christian Fiction Writers (ACFW) in Minneapolis called MN NICE (Minnesota Novelists Inspiring Christian Excellence). The topic was blogging, and the general consensus was that authors benefit when they blog. Blogging is a key ingredient to build a tribe of people who follow you and are the same people who are more likely to buy a book that you write.

Courtesy of stock.xchng.com and jaylopez

The group facilitators did a nice job presenting a list of tips for both new and experienced bloggers to consider.

Here is a short list:

  1. Blog regularly
  2. Create a schedule and stick to it
  3. Your blog should have a focus…people will expect certain things when they come to read it
  4. Create posts with intriguing titles that capture people’s attention
  5. Write quality content
  6. Allow people to subscribe to your posts
  7. Do not rant about the publishing business
  8. Find links that also draw people into the website
  9. Tag each post with key words for the search engines
  10. Use your social media to promote your blogs
  11. Highlight links within the posts
  12. Keep your page simple
  13. Keep your blogs short – between 500-600 words
  14. Comment on other writer’s blogs
  15. Participate in the conversation with people who are commenting on your posts
  16. Include pictures in the blog post
  17. Use easy to read fonts
  18. Host giveaways. Be unique
  19. Use analytics to gauge what works
  20. Use unique techniques like vlogging (video blogging) to create unique content

You may also be interested in some aspirational blog numbers posted by Amanda Luedeke, who is a literary agent with MacGregor Literary. In her post, she says that authors should have 30,000 unique visitors every month on their blog. In addition, authors should have 5,000 Twitter followers; 5,000 Facebook followers; and if you are public speaker – you should be speaking at least 30 times a year to at least 10,000 people.

It only takes a spark, to get a fire going, and if you don’t start with something, you will also end up at the same place. Nowhere.

What other blogging ideas or suggestions do you have?

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