rainbowsoverruins

7 Simple Ways to Improve Your Blog

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As part of my outreach for Rainbows Over Ruins, I arranged for a publicity team to help me. They are the ones responsible for getting my radio interview on Toginet.com, arranging for an author video, writing a press release to notify the media about the book and exploring all the possible interviews and placements that may occur in traditional and social media outlets.

My job has been to help them craft the manner in which all of this is presented. It falls to Muriel to make sure that I am comfortable working in the social media arena. I have established personal accounts with the usual venues: Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram and WordPress. They may not all contribute to my outreach campaign, but I set them up just in case. Part of the long term strategy will be to add an extra layer of professional pages.

When Muriel called this week, she wanted me to understand ways to grow outreach more easily and customize my blog to enhance its presentation. That’s the source of my 7 Simple Ways to Improve Your Blog list this week.

  1. Probably the most important task is to blog regularly, at least once a week, if not 2-3 times per week. Once you engage an audience, regular posts help keep people on your radar.
  1. To help you do this, learn how to schedule your blogs and other posts. You can do this within your dashboard as well as other programs that have been developed. Hootsuite is particularly good for scheduling tweets. And there are others.

3. People like a clear “takeaway” from a blog. That’s why you see so many posts with lists and headlines like “8 ways to clean house” or “5 ways to handle a situation.” Providing a checklist improves your credibility.

  1. “Tagging” posts is also important. Our use of the Internet is dependent on keyword searches. Finding a blog you like is no different. When you are researching a subject, blogs pop up in your search results based on the tags the blogger inserted when creating their copy. Ideally, tags tie into any content you create. If you are trying to expand your reach, you may want to follow what’s trending for high energy buzz words and incorporate those stories into your next blog.
  1. Customize your blog. Scattered throughout the dashboard for blogs are a number of links and widgets to change subtitles, add photos, link to social media, as well as a website for the book.

6 Add informational pages to your blog. Just like tabs on a website, you can insert about pages that let your audience know more about you, your products and the site.

  1. Add hyperlinks to your blog. Whenever inserting a URL into your content would upset the flow, hyperlinks enable you to highlight a topic and hide a website address behind it. This can be helpful to send people to your website, reference sources or other information that would improve their knowledge without requiring you to write in depth about it yourself.

I’ve only incorporated a few of these items so far, but this list helps me see where I can make improvements. I hope you find it useful as well.

To Your Success,

Susan

Like the little engine who could, the publicity machine is rolling

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It’s odd. From a quiet role, listening, evaluating and estimating costs, I’ve had more pictures taken in the past couple weeks than in years. I’m being told that people want to see and hear authors, the better to get a feeling for the person behind the words. It makes sense.

It’s one of the aspects of social media that Peter considers now that he participates on Facebook. He asks himself daily – what am I doing today that would be interesting to my friends? And he makes a point to schedule a “photo opp” for a regular post.

Now that he is reading posts daily, he has strong opinions about what makes up a good post. He strives to avoid wishful thinking. He’ll share posts that he finds amusing or inspirational. But mostly he’s looking for photos from his life that might be interesting.

So with his tutelage, I’m beginning to look for fun shots – like me with a sabre toothed cat from the Museum of Natural History. Not here. Not yet. I have some technical mastery to achieve first.

The first interviews are in the pipeline – an Internet radio interview aired and is archived on Toginet.com and we shot an “author video.” Balboa’s video vendors provided services for this first venture. It was all relatively painless. The area around my office served as a location and I just answered questions. I’m looking forward to receiving the cut. While the author video is being edited, my plan for this week is to review a strategic plan for promoting the book.

Peter and I have never used a publicist for his books. Perhaps we should have. Publicists have the connections to get press releases out, provide an extra pair of hands to drive stories to others and, quite honestly, they are probably better at it than we are. Plus I know that there are too few hours in the day for me to do this alone. That’s why I made the decision to hire a publicist.

For the television show, we have the benefit of higher visibility and a handful of people to promote the show every day. We have grown enough that our post on Facebook have been seen by over a million viewers. Even with visible growth from when we started, we are happy when the show is picked up by some media organization for a story, so I have measured expectations about what the response will be to my book. My hope is that people will get to know me through the publicity and then seek to continue a relationship over time.

As an author, part of my responsibility is to participate as much as possible. Facebook is reasonably easy. It reaches a greater number of people with only one message. And I am always surprised by how many people are following our activities even if they don’t respond regularly. Twitter isn’t bad either, although I don’t have a strong presence there. I use LinkedIn as well — so with only a few posts, I can reach quite a group of people.

But the name of the game is to tell as many people as possible about each event in conjunction with my book. That’s where email messages need to go out as well to reach friends and associates who are not connected to me via social media. At this stage, this is very time consuming. As I sat down to email friends about the interview, I was reminded why I want to hire an assistant to create the database for such things. I do not have a formal mailing list yet. The result is that I will have to write individual notes to each person I want to contact unless they give me permission to send news updates to them. You forget how tedious it is until you are under a deadline to get the word out before an air date or broadcast time. That was me last week, emailing friends until midnight, then up at six to get the word out to a few more people before the 8:00am air time on the West Coast.

In this case, I ran out of time. The downside is that far fewer friends learned of the air time for the interview than I would have liked, however, it was great to receive notes back from the folks who did respond. A few people took the time to listen to the interview, then call me and chat. Others sent notes which I was just as happy to read. There were several people I had not contacted in quite a while and I loved hearing from them. I asked a few people if they would review the book – so that others would have some other information than promotional material to make purchase decisions.

The plus side in today’s environment is that interviews for the digital marketplace are archived long term. So, even if I could not get the word out fast enough this weekend, I can continue to keep telling friends about the interviews, my new website and, of course, Rainbows Over Ruins.

I’m also being told that I will need to increase my You-Tube presence. Thankfully, I have a friend who will help me shoot a few in the beginning and help me get comfortable with setting up and recording short snippets, but that will be for another week.

All of this is the first stage of what is described as a 3 year process. Promotion takes time. We give it as much as we can carve out of our lifestyle demands and then figure out how to make more effective use of time. So far, I’m having fun.

May you find the things that give you the feeling of fun too.

To Your Success,
Susan

Adventures with a Smart Phone and Social Media

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It’s been very interesting watching my husband Peter learn to use his smart phone. I gave him his first upgrade from a plain cell phone about 14 months ago. He had come to the conclusion that I didn’t have the time to post photos for him for clients to review. He was right.

So when the holidays were over, Peter was struggling with the alien technology. There were so many times he wanted to throw the phone against the wall. Large fingers on small keys, screens going dark in mid thought and misspellings tortured him. For someone who had never learned to use a traditional computer or send an email, the phone was a giant leap for mankind.

Over the past year, he mastered sending photos and discovered Facebook. It was liberating for me as I set up his personal email account and relinquished control of his page. Within only a few months, I chuckled as I saw him hunkered over the cell phone, scrolling through posts, sharing a few with others, reading jokes, and watching videos. I commiserated as he complained about people posting too many times in a day about nothing at all while quietly relieved that I didn’t need to read them anymore.

Like everyone else I suppose, Peter enjoys receiving photos and posts about himself and the projects he does. Last week, we happened to look up his IMDB account as well. His ranking numbers were down so I mentioned that they were somehow tied to social media activity, i.e., Facebook. With that, Peter was on a mission to see if he could improve his rank by using posts. He wrote three posts in rapid succession.

“Whoa.” I said. Facebook has an algorithm. If you post too many times in one day, it will suppress the number of people who receive your posts. It’s better to wait a day or two. So Peter waited and quite by accident, someone send him a message about his page on his book, “Tombstone: The Guns and Gear.” He had an opportunity to ask people to like his page and he did. “Likes” began pouring in. Whoa. That was awesome.

So when we sat down this weekend, we went back to IMDB to see if there had been any change in his rankings. He was really enthusiastic when he saw that his numbers were up over 1600 points. Perhaps if he asked for likes on his other book page, “The Fringe of Hollywood: The Art of Making a Western,” something similar would happen next week. It’s still not simple. It took a bit to figure out how to ask for likes on the book, but he eventually figured it out. His request went out and many more likes arrived in return.

Peter is seeing the power of social media first hand, but he still needs to learn the best ways to post. From my vantage point trying to build an audience using social media, we face the same questions every day. What posts interest an audience? What posts help build the brand? Why do people take action on some posts and ignore others entirely?

Neither of us will know that answers to these questions overnight, but we are curious enough to keep trying to understand it. We look forward to seeing future results.

Coming soon: The Let’s Make Money Success Conference

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Have you ever been so busy that you are not quite sure what is the most important thing to do with your day? That’s where I am right now. I am hosting and producing several projects right now. We are planning the Let’s Make Money Blogtalkradio show, have just begun to shoot the preliminary footage for The Think and Grow Rich Experiment and it’s only a couple weeks until my Let’s Make Money Success Conference event on October 5th, in Valencia, CA.

The big question is whether I can reach out to enough people to let them know the conference is happening. Viral social media is great if you catch the wave, but I feel as if I am struggling to stand up on the board, let alone ride all the way to shore. I have so much to learn.

However, even though it is challenging, if we want to succeed in today’s marketplace, it’s important to embrace the new ways of reaching other people. The consumer has changed. No one wants to be interrupted by telemarketers, wade through piles of mail left for the day when you have any ‘extra’ time to go through it. In fact, we don’t generally want to deal with sales pitches of any kind.

And the solution might be? It would be nice if I could hear you ask it. The solution is to really understand your client’s problems so that you can provide them some piece of information, some solution they want, as a gift. Then they are more likely to ‘lean in’ to your offer.

That’s why I will be spending the next couple weeks scouring resources to find information that will be valuable to the people I’d like to attend my conference. Such as referring them to Felix Hung’s blog “Babyboomers Without a Retirement Nestegg: Build a Business.” Building a business is one of the ways that I want to help people find to Make Money. The great revelation is that opportunities are everywhere if people will change their mindset.

That’s the theme of the Let’s Make Money Success Conference. We can create our own economy. We don’t have to listen to the news. We can create our own jobs, rather than waiting for someone else to decide we are good enough to work for them. We all have infinite potential to accomplish great things if we will just let go of the habitual thoughts that hold us back. There’s so much more to share. I’d love you to come to the conference and hear more.

Here are the details: Let’s Make Money Success Conference at the Hilton Garden Hotel opposite 6 Flags Magic Mountain in Valencia, CA on October 5th. I will be joined by Rusty McMillen, ICR, Numis Network speaking about multiple streams of income and network marketing, as well as Kim Barbieri, managing director of The Martini Factory who is an expert in visual marketing solutions for the Internet and Mobile. It’s a day to network and be part of a business expo.

If you’d like more information, please go to the website, www.let-us-make-money.com. And seriously, Let’s Make Money!

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