Category: Marketing Tools

Market Your Fictional Character on Social Media

You’ll find fictional characters on social media. And they’re all from books.
ivanthegiraffeCheck out Ivan the Giraffe.
He has his own book series
It’s an effective strategy for novelists.

 

Why you want to do this

Why should you create social media profiles for your characters? Here are just a few reasons:

 

By bringing your character to life outside the pages of your book, you’re giving readers and fans an opportunity to connect with the character in a way that further bonds them to your writing. This can be especially meaningful for series authors.

It helps you create character depth while you’re writing your book.

You’ve got something to say on social media besides “buy my book.”

You will have an outlet for precious, beloved material cut from the story.

It can be more fun than tweeting or posting Facebook updates as yourself.

Tips for doing it effectively

Really get into character when you post.

Too many people use their character’s Facebook Page to post content that they post on their author Page, too. You know — the standard “Author XYZ is doing a book signing tomorrow!” or “(Book title) just got another five-star review on Amazon!”Is that really what your character would be sharing on social media?Get into character and have a little fun with it!
Your character’s status updates should be created from their perspective, not yours.

Stay away from those “buy my book” messages that are inherent in author appearance announcements and focus, instead, on what your character might say or do at that event.

Look for real ways to engage readers with your characters.

Let your character ask questions, provide commentary on world affairs or politics, share favorite image quotes, request movie recommendations, or post pictures from a book club appearance. Know what your audience is interested in, and use your character to share information, ask questions, or lead a discussion on that.

Don’t market. Connect.

Stop thinking about selling books. Focus instead on connecting with readers. Your character’s social media accounts provide a way to bring that character out of the type on the page and into a new dimension. You get to bring that character to life.

If you’re forcing your character to share details about book signings or $.99 sale days, you’re just trying to sell. Readers aren’t interested in that — they’re interested in their favorite character’s take on what’s happening in the world around them.

Character profile resources If you like this idea but have trouble imagining how you’d pull this off, consider using social media profile templates that educators use to bring fictional characters to life for today’s social media savvy students. “Fakebook” is one. Here is a twitter template. Just filling out the templates without worrying about hitting “submit” will get you thinking about how you want to approach this.

You might also have fun with “ifaketext,” an online tool that lets you create images of fake iPhone messages — messages that, of course, might have been sent by your character.

Does your book’s character have a social media profile? Share the link in a comment!

Search Engine Optimization-9 Quick Steps

Wanted to share with you this great info graphic created by Platform. They did a great visual on 9 steps for SEO optimization

The Map to SEM Success
Via: PlattForm Higher Education

Pinterest: Who really are using it?

Who, specifically, is using Pinterest?

Is your book’s audience using Pinterest? According to this infographic from OnlineMBA.com, women dominate the site. Most have “some college” education; almost half of the users are in the $50,000 to $99,999 income range. Can they afford to buy books? I’m thinking that the answer is “Yes!”
But, even though it seems that the audience is mainly women it would also be beneficial for men authors to be part of this raising social media platform.
Why?
Recently I was contacted by a male author inquiring about book marketing, when I suggested using Pinterest he questioned whether Pinterest would be useful for him, as it seems that Pinterest is more for females and topics that chiefly interest them. The target audience for his book is men, and he doesn’t think men are on Pinterest.
I pointed out to him that more women than men buy books in general. For that reason alone, he doesn’t want to overlook women in his marketing efforts, whether he’s using Pinterest or another tactic. Women buy books for men as gifts, and his book sounds like the perfect gift to give a man for the upcoming December holidays, anniversaries, or just because “I am thinking of you” and so on.

So check out this info graphic and see where your target market hangs out.
A Case Study in Social Media Demographics
Via: Online MBA Resource

What’s your question about using Pinterest for book promotion?

WordPress plugin: Editorial Calendar

What a lifesaver….Just read a blog post from Niel at WpDude describing the benefits of installing a plugin called WordPress Editorial Calendar. Usually I have post-it notes all over my desk with exerts of blog post ideas I want to follow up with. It does get a bit untidy and of course some ideas do get lost in the shuffle.

I have installed this plugin and I am amazed at how easy and convenient it is. The WordPress editorial calendar allows you to setup a schedule of posts to publish or write in the future.  It also allows you to create a schedule of posts that are in outline or draft that you intend to write at a later date.

Features

  1. See all of your posts and when they’ll be posted.
  2. Drag and drop to change your post dates.
  3. Quickedit post titles, contents, and times.
  4. Publish posts or manage drafts.
  5. Easily see the status of your posts.
  6. Manage posts from multiple authors.

The plugin also comes with a video to show you how to use it. You can download it here

Increase Marketing Strategy with SMS

smstext_messageHave you thought about using SMS text messages to market your products or services?
Statistics point out that 94% of cell phone users will read a marketing text SMS and 23% respond to the SMS text.  Now that is effective marketing.

SMS is an acronym for “Short Message Service”, often called text messaging, and is a means of sending short messages to and from mobile phones.

What advantages can SMS advertising have for your business?

1. Cost Effective
SMS text marketing is cost effective, reaches more people and is simple to set up a  campaign  making it the up and coming tool to market your business. SMS makes it easy to implement a cost effective mobile strategy that can grow as your business achieves success.

2.A moving target audience
Get people where they are at the moment.Most people take their mobile phones everywhere – meaning they can be effective for time-sensitive SMS advertising messages

3. Personal touch
SMS advertising can bring a personal touch.Mobile phones have a very personal nature and  even though bulk SMS is sent to a lot of people, each individual will feel the SMS advertising has come to their phone alone.

Text messaging means information can be sent to groups of people quickly and conveniently, making it an increasing popular e-marketing channel.

4 Get Audience Attention
People generally read every business SMS message they get, unlike junk mail, spam or adverts which can be ignored. A personal sms alert gets their attention.

What  you need to start a SMS campaign.

To successfully use the power of SMS advertising,  you will need SMS gateways. A SMS Gateway is your bridge between the Internet and the world of cell phone SMS text messaging.
Through SMS gateways, you can send single SMS advertising messages, or thousands of bulk SMS messages.
SMS gateways should provide a high quality connection so your SMS gateways give you the fastest and most reliable delivery rates. SMS gateways will also  a delivery report.

2 examples of SMS Gateways

EzTexting
A very easy to use, affordable text messaging company that can send texts in the U.S. and Canada. Lots of smart features including two-way messaging.

eNowIt
A solid text messaging company that features an easy to use interface, two way texting, has some unique services like their Trivia application. Perfect for retail businesses who want to do text messaging.

The effectiveness of mobile marketing has increased due to high end mobile devices which have better features, a moving target audience and a younger target group of customers. Innovative ideas are driving text marketing and making it more effective. By simply replying to a text message, customers are getting discounts on anything and everything from pizzas to movie tickets.
As a promotional tool, SMS advertising is hard to beat,So, if you have a business that you plan to take to the next level of success you need to try out SMS marketing. It is one of the most effective ways to reach out to a focused customer group . Mobile is the future of marketing.

Is a Hit the same as a Visit the same as a View?

How do you measure the  success of your website-ROI?

Looking at your website stats is necessary for figuring out how well your pages or your campaigns are doing. But some of the terms can be confusing.

A question I get asked frequently is:  What is a HIT?  Is it the same as a VISIT?  What is a View?

Hits represent the total number of requests made to the server during the given time period (month, day, hour etc..).

ReCap:   Pages are made up of many items (images, text, etc) and each one of these physical resources are requested by the server for that visit. Each of those is a hit, while a view is the page itself

Visits occur when some remote site makes a request for a page on your server for the first time. As long as the same site keeps making requests within a given timeout period, they will all be considered part of the same Visit. If the site makes a request to your server, and the length of time since the last request is greater than the specified timeout period (default is 30 minutes), a new Visit is started and counted, and the sequence repeats. Since only pages will trigger a visit, remotes sites that link to graphic and other non- page URLs will not be counted in the visit totals, reducing the number of false visits.

ReCap:  Someone comes to your web site and looks around a bit. They may go to one page, or they may go to 100 pages, but they are still only visiting once.

View – How many pages were seen by that visit

Think of it like a book store. A person goes into the store (visit) and picks up 5 books to buy (views). While he is holding the books, he flips through them and looks at a few pictures (hits). So he would have 1 visit to the store, 5 books handled during his visit (views), and maybe 30 pictures he looked at (hits).

So which value is more useful?

It depends on the use of the information. If you’re in marketing and you’re striving for bragging rights or high activity numbers, use Hits.

If you are using your stats to actually identify trends and the personal impact of your site, use Views and Visits.

Hits can always be inflated artificially, by adding a few more images to a page, for example. Visits and Views, however, represent people coming to your site and the number of web pages they saw, which is much more useful for analyzing usage patterns.

So we are actually trying to track what the visitors do.   We want to learn more about the visitors that eventually become good sales leads or purchase from us.

Slideshare- A new Marketing tool

Many businesses have caught on to a powerful marketing and communication vehicle for shining a spotlight on their brand and business using Slideshare.

I wanted to find out what all the interest was about so I took a Slideshare seminar. What a great tool to share information about your business through presentations, documents and pdfs. Slideshare presentations can be embed in your blog posts just like embedding videos.

Do you want to get the word out about your product or service?

SlideShare is the best way to get your slides out there on the web, so your ideas can be found and shared by a wide audience.You do not need video equipment etc.  and this to me is a plus. Just need to type your info and upload. How simple!

Engage Subscribers: 6 Fun Email Ideas

Just read this great post from AWEBER. It tells you how to engage your audience with fun activites.They keep your audience engaged and looking forward to your emails -which translate into more of your emails being opened. Read the article for yourself    .Read the article for yourself.

Turn your blog post into PDF Book

BlogBooker turns blogs into PDF Books
Just found this amazing tool and it is free. It takes your blog posts and creates them into pdf doc. What a great way to archive your work. You can print your BlogBook and make it real, read it more comfortably or share it with friends, publish it …even your images are embed. What a fast easy way to create an ebook!

BlogBooker
Turn your Blog into a PDF Book/Archive.

BlogBooker

Is BlogBooker a tool you could use in your business? Please comment

Your Business Needs an Autoresponder

Why You need an Autoresponder

Autoresponders are one of the most popular tools used on the Internet, as they will enable you to put a portion of your business on auto-pilot helping you build relationships with subscribers starting the moment they sign up.

Autoresponders can welcome new subscribers, educate them about your products, and drive them back to your website – without you lifting a finger.

Plus, with our unique Autoresponder Send Windows, you’ll reach subscribers during the days and times you know work best for them!

Not only do they automate the daily task of manually replying to requests for information, but they also provide instant gratification for the recipient.

When selecting an autoresponder service, there are many factors that need to be taken into consideration to ensure maximum performance.

• Personalized responses – This makes the recipient feel that the message was sent specifically to them.
• Automatic follow ups – Studies have shown it may take up to seven contacts before closing a sale.
• Unlimited text length – If you are inhibited by the amount of text your autoresponder may contain, you may be forced to revise a successful sales letter, ultimately costing you business.
• Free unlimited updating – It is imperative to provide your customers with accurate, up to date information on your products and services.
• Automatic notification – You must have the ability to track your ad’s performance. You should be instantly informed each time someone requests your information.

Autoresponders are an absolute essential part of developing a successful Internet business. The more you can automate your tasks, the more time you’ll have for more important things, such as making more sales.

The one I recommend is Aweber. They have an extensive libarary of  How-to- Videos and articles to help you create a successfull business. They also offer live chat help.