by Phyllis Zimbler Miller on May 12, 2009
Reprinted from Phyllis Zimbler Miller’s blog posts at the LA Internet Business Examiner.
Excluding the really famous bloggers, almost all other bloggers are 1) constantly trying to attract more readers to their blogs and 2) have these readers consistently read new posts.
There are several strategies that can be used for one or both of these objectives: SEO (search engine optimization) of the blog, contests, giveaways, links from the blogrolls of other bloggers, links from tweets in Twitter, etc.
Yet there’s one basic strategy that many of us bloggers don’t often consider:
KISS — Keep It Simple
Recently I was asked by a book marketing colleague to review a post for his own site before the post went live. He emailed that it was the most controversial post he had written so he wanted another set of eyes on it.
I read the long post – and then told him to lose the entire first page. Because he was writing predictions, he apparently felt compelled to first wander all over the landscape justifying his ideas BEFORE making the predictions.
I told him to lose the first page and start the post immediately with the predictions – because that’s what people would want to read. If they first had to wade through his meanderings, they’d never stick around long enough to get to the predictions (which were quite worthwhile).
We all tend to do this – write “intros” to our posts that go on and on before we get to the relevant information. But our blog readers have so many choices that they usually won’t stick around if we don’t immediately get to the point.
Thus it’s a good business blogging strategy to jump right into the meat of your post, say the most important points, and then add as a wrap-up at the end some additional comments if you feel compelled to do so.
And here are my additional comments for this post:
• Keep the whole post short
• Break up long paragraphs into shorter ones
• Use a font size big enough for people to read easily
• Use a blog format with columns narrow enough to make it easy for people’s eyes to track the text being read
• Use bullet points where appropriate
Print This
Tweet This
by Phyllis Zimbler Miller on May 11, 2009
Reprinted from Phyllis Zimbler Miller’s blog posts at the LA Internet Business Examiner.
Cathy Stucker, whose website is www.idealady.com, has come up with a great new idea – a free site for bloggers to connect in order to ask for guest posts and to volunteer to write guest posts. Then Cathy sends out emails listing the guest posts requested and the guest posts offered.
As soon as I learned about BloggerLinkUp.com, I joined and filled out a form about what types of guest blog posts I’d like to write.
This new project is a really terrific idea because:
• If you’re a blogger, having occasional guest posts relieves you temporarily of the continuous need to write new posts.
• If you’re a guest blogger, writing a guest post gives you the opportunity to get in front of a new audience that may not know about you and what you offer.
It’s a win-win situation – so if you’re a blogger go to BloggerLinkUp.com right now and join for free.
And if you’re thinking about starting a blog, read the blogging article excerpt by Carolyn Howard-Johnson and me. And then signup for free to get the whole chapter – if I do have to say so myself, it’s filled with good advice.
Print This
Tweet This
by Carolyn Howard-Johnson on May 10, 2009
This is a Q&A a la Ann Landers from my newsletter Sharing with Writers. I thought Fiction Marketers would especially enjoy it, so I’m reprinting it here. Anyone would like to subscribe to Sharing with Writers may do so my sending at e-mail with SUBSCRIBE in the subject line to HoJoNews@aol.com.
Question:
The Secret [by Rhonda Byrne] says that one reason people’s dreams don’t come true is that they give up just before they are about to succeed. I am ready to give up. Just call me Peggy, WannaBeWriter
Answer:
I believe that people do give up too soon. Especially when it comes to promotion. It’s one reason I talk about persistence so much.
And The Secret also talks about positive energy. That’s what promotion is. It’s your best shot being put out into the universe and that sometimes (not always) takes time.
That’s not to say that at times it’s not natural to feel like giving up. Putting aside having a well-written book that hits the market at the right time, the speed of an author’s success is usually strongly influenced by its genre. That’s one of the reasons I shared all the stuff I learned when I was promoting my first novel, This Is the Place, by writing my first how-to book, The Frugal Book Promoter. Fiction–especially nonspeculative fiction–is one of the hardest genres of all to promote and I wanted others to know it could be done.
This Is the Place won its publisher’s Mille Award for marketing and sales the first year it was published but only after it almost failed for lack of promotion by the publisher and by me! And not until after I lost a really big wad of money hiring a publicist who didn’t understand using the themes and other elements in a novel to promote it!
This Is the Place is a literary novel published in 2001 (though it’s still available in the new and used book section on Amazon for about $1). I think I sold about 2,000 and even that relatively small number was sold in part because it was set in Salt Lake City and was released just before the Winter Olympics in that city.
But that timing wouldn’t have helped had I not figured out that I needed to promote it and that I was the only one with the passion to do it right. The Secret also talks about passion–only they call it bliss or joy. Once I got started I even got my novel into a couple of airport book stores.
In fact, one of the reasons that The Frugal Book Promoter sells well is that it isn’t general. It’s personal and passionate. It’s full of ideas based on my personal experience selling the hardest of all genres–poetry, short story collections, and literary fiction. I could add memoir (my next book) to that list.
The point here is that none of the three were huge successes by publishing standards. But they were by my standards. They sold well enough, I learned from writing them and promoting them, and I really relished the little successes when they came. When I couldn’t trace great results from the promotion I was doing, I kept doing it and kept adding more ways to do it.
What if I’d given up on one of those dark days when nothing seemed to be working? My world–not just my writing world but my entire world–would be a different place. Am I bragging? Damn tootin’s. I knew The Secret long before it was written. And I’m still practicing it.
I hope you will, too.
Best,
Carolyn Howard-Johnson
Also blogging at Writer’s Digest 101 Best Website picks, www.sharingwithwriters.blogspot.com
Print This
Tweet This
by Phyllis Zimbler Miller on May 10, 2009
Reprinted from Phyllis Zimbler Miller’s blog posts at the LA Internet Business Examiner.
If your business is selling used first edition books or new motorcycle tires, if you’re not on the internet you don’t exist for many people – people who might be your local customers. Even if you are not yet on social media such as Twitter and LinkedIn, you must at the very minimum have your own website.
Here’s what Angela Wilson said in a May 5th post on her website www.MarketMyNovel.com:
As a virtual book tour host and book reviewer, I rely heavily on author Web sites to flesh out my reviews, or to create unique questions for a great interview. If an author has a Web site hosted on free sites like Angelfire or Webs.com, I don’t bother. If they don’t have a Web site, they aren’t serious about their writing career. It isn’t worth it to chase information when so many other authors understand the benefits of a good site. I don’t consider Facebook-only authors. Period. And I am not the only reviewer/interviewer who does so.
Is this a harsh assessment? Not in my opinion. Angela is being honest and using something as basic as one’s own website to identify the serious book authors.
And this website evaluation is often the same for people looking up local businesses. If there are two dry cleaners in your neighborhood and only one is on the internet, which one is more likely to get my business? The one whose site enables me to check the dry cleaners days and hours of operation, etc.
And if that site sends me email discount coupons, there’s probably no contest between which of the two dry cleaners I’ll use. (Yes, I’m assuming both do an equally good job of dry cleaning.)
If you don’t have a standalone website for your brand, business or book, learn as much as you can about what makes a good website (hint: it’s not pictures of sunsets unless you’re selling paintings of sunsets) and then get your own website right now.
P.S. Read my articles on web marketing and Angela Wilson’s complete blog post from which the above quote comes.
Print This
Tweet This
by Phyllis Zimbler Miller on May 4, 2009
Reprinted from Phyllis Zimbler Miller’s blog posts at the LA Internet Business Examiner.
If you’re blogging in support of your brand, book or business, then it is especially important you make it as easy as possible for your blog readers to share your posts with others. The more people who read your posts the more potential customers/clientele you have for your products and services.
Let’s look at two major errors that many bloggers are making:
• Do your readers like to print out a really great post and then get annoyed when there’s no special print option? This is especially annoying when a site visitor uses the regular print function and gets the post PLUS pages of your blogroll, ads, etc., which wastes lots of paper. Does this absence of a special print option stop many of your readers from printing out your great post to share with others?
• Do your readers want to email a post to someone and there’s no email option? Believe it or not, at the moment there’s no email option here on examiner.com. (I’ve submitted a request for this function through the examiner.com support center.)
The interesting thing is that the examiner.com has the Share This plugin (http://www.sharethis.com), which usually includes an email option. But for some reason examiner.com has opted not to include this email option.
Perhaps the examiner.com thinking goes like this: We don’t want people to just email this post to someone; we want people to share this great post on a social bookmarking site.
But many people aren’t yet on bookmarking sites. Why prevent them from emailing a great post to their friends?
(You can seen an example of the Share This plugin with the email feature included as well as an example of a special print option at www.FictionMarketing.com/blog)
If your blog is missing a special print option and/or the email option, rectify this situation immediately. And then encourage your blog readers to use these options to share your posts with others.
P.S. And if you haven’t gotten our blogging chapter yet, do so now. We’ve provided a great deal of useful information for newbie bloggers as well as more advanced bloggers.
Print This
Tweet This
by Phyllis Zimbler Miller on April 29, 2009
Joan Stewart’s weekly newsletter arrived on April 28th and my attention was immediately caught by the lead article “Bloggers, What If You’re Sued?” In fact, this subject is not hypothetical for Joan; she actually was sued for something she wrote in her blog.
After reading the article, I clicked through to her blog post that goes into this topic further. And then I took her advice and I’m now taking a free online course on libel and defamation so that I can hopefully pass the quiz to become a member of the Media Bloggers Association.
I thank Joan for sharing her experience with the rest of us. And read her entire blog post yourself – it’s for your own protection.
Print This
Tweet This
People follow you on Twitter; they don’t friend you as on Facebook. And people can follow you without your “permission” as required for someone to become your Facebook friend.
RSS of Fiction Marketing Blog
Email Phyllis Zimbler Miller
Facebook
LinkedIn
Ning
Email Carolyn Howard-Johnson