Once you’ve taken the time to sketch characters and a plot, weave a story around it all, and come out the other side with a completed masterpiece in hand, you may feel like your job is done, leaving you to take a well-deserved break from the pressures of writing fiction in favor of a vacation.

Unfortunately, if you plan to self-publish your work, you’ve got one major task ahead of you before you do: marketing your work to the world at large.

Luckily for you, the sheer power of social media makes it possible for even those writers entirely new to the idea of marketing to reach millions of people – you just need to know what you’re doing. To that end, check out these five tips for effective social media promotion for fiction writers:

1. Make Full, Informative, and Interesting Profiles

When you make the leap from fantasy writer to social media marketer, you’ll need to bring the same thoroughness that makes you an effective creative writer with you, allowing you to create the kind of social profiles that people are intrigued by and encouraging them to stay and explore you and your work further.

To achieve the desired result, make a point to weave hard facts with the same imagination that allows you to write fiction, ending up with an exciting profile that gives visitors the information that they need to understand you and your craft, even while you entice them with the potential enjoyment of your stories.

Use link in bio tools to create an effective digital business card and turn your followers into buyers and subscribers.

2. Let Your Story Do the Talking

Painting yourself as a real human being with worthwhile art to share is one thing, but, as a fiction writer, you know what readers really want, and that’s a story that encourages them to enjoy late page-turning nights. With that in mind, don’t underestimate the power of your stories, including settings, characters, and plots, to win over visitors and turn them into new fans and followers.

No matter what platforms you tackle, utilize the soapbox you’ve been given to give visitors a strong taste of what your work has to offer them, outlining highlights of your work, discussing your creative process, and dropping just enough tantalizing hints to keep them coming back for more.

Forbes lists some benefits of using story telling for marketing.

3. Use Your Imagination

If you’re lucky enough to have the kind of mind that can come up with intricately detailed lands, mythical beasts, and intriguing storylines, then you’re lucky enough to have the kind of imagination that can take you outside of the realm of the obvious when it comes to social media marketing. Besides making you instantly savvy where advertising is concerned, that imagination will also lead you to the types of social media tools that you may not otherwise think to utilize.

For example, Viral Content Buzz, a tool that brings social media users together in order to provide an extra push to their content, is a very useful tool that you may not come across if you’re not creative with your web searching.

In order to take advantage of each and every aspect of the social web so that you can effectively promote your work, be sure to let your imagination play a role in even the most mindless of tasks; the results are sure to surprise you! Mind these social media marketing rules by @PakWired

4. Engage Your Fans and Followers

With useful, intriguing profiles and pages setup, and tools at the ready that promise to help you to be the most efficient social marketer possible, it’s now time to get down to the nitty gritty of social media: engaging your new fans and followers.

Make a point to treat each and every one of them as well as you would a beloved character.

Make sure to create a separate site for your book. It’s much easier to market a book that has a dedicated online presence. Unitedseo.ae (a company providing SEO services) has a cool guide on how to use content marketing to reinforce your digital marketing efforts.

5. Keep the Story Flowing

Even with all of that work done and in place, your job doesn’t end here – in fact, the fun is just beginning. With strong profiles established and new fans and followers beginning to find their way to you, the true social aspect of social media is just beginning to show itself, giving you the opportunity to connect with your readers, both existing and future, on a meaningful level.

Besides helping you to sell more copies of your work today, staying on the ball and continuing to spend time engaging your social fans every day will help you to build a platform to carry you into the future, keeping you covered when it comes to sequels, new projects, and everything else that you put your hand to in the days to come.

Image source: Pixabay

With countless marketing tools of varying degrees of value and price, it can be difficult to choose which one(s) is right for you. And let’s be honest, not every tool is right for your company.

For instance, some tools might really work well for some companies, drive more relevant traffic, generate leads and all but when you try to use the same tools for your company, the results are disastrous. So, what I’m trying to say here is, getting the RIGHT marketing tool for your business in key.

Sometimes it just takes the right tool to take your business to the next level.

These tools work. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. And their performance is usually excellent if you get the right one. That you can take to the bank.

Here are some useful tools that can help improve your business without necessarily busting your budget.

Facebook

This comes as no surprise at all. Social media has become a force to be reckoned with, particularly Facebook. With over 1.8 billion monthly active users, Facebook is a valuable tool for marketers.

If you want this tool to be effective, choose wisely where you want to spend your money. You can use the money to create Facebook video ads or boost a post for your page that has a video as well as give your (photo) posts an extra boost.

But you should know video ads are more likely to reach audiences according to Socialbakers. In fact, it has a 135% organic reach.

So, it’s a pretty good idea to invest your money on video ads.

Nextiva

Nextiva manages all conversations and engages with your customers and teams with one powerful easy-to-use solution. It offers strong contact center solutions that are small-business friendly and allow them to streamline their customer support and focus on marketing.

Ahrefs

This is one of the most valuable and helpful tool in the world of marketing.  It not only tracks your backlinks, but also, tracks your competitors’ backlinks and alerts you when it’s mentioned online and checks your SEO.

It practically does almost everything relating to backlinks. If you want to improve your SEO, this marketing tool is for you.

GetResponse

This is an email marketing tool that you simply can’t compare it to any other out there. GetResponse is in a league of its own.

It has amazing, easy to use features and it’s super fast. This tool can increase your conversion rates with a drag-and-drop email editor, autoresponders, advanced optimization tools & integrations, automation segmentation and so much more.

Namify

Namify is a branding tool allowing businesses to generate a brand name, find a logo and define their whole brand identity.

Buffer

If you want to keep your social media presence in check, buffer is the way to go. It has this amazing feature that allows you to schedule your posts in advance. This of course helps you get the most value out of your social posts.

And it’s available on all social networks, how cool is that?

Optimizely

Want to improve your customer experience? Try Optimizely and you will not regret. If your company fully recognizes and understands the importance & power of providing a great customer experience, you simply cannot ignore this tool.

Optimizely has ways to get your user WOW’d by the experience which is crucial in customer satisfaction. You can as well create targeted content, keep track of your conversions, split test ideas and a whole lot more.

Crazy Egg

The name sounds quite hilarious, but it’s an effective tool. It distinctly paints a clear picture of what your audience/ visitors are up to. It lets you know where people are clicking from, how many people scroll down your page and how far they go.

It’s so easy to set up and quite affordable compared to other methods. For a good strategy in your SEO presence visit Linked website – Linked.ie.

F. Aldea is definitely a Digital Marketing communications consultant and blog author who loves to explore the hottest trends in business, technological know-how and marketing techniques and creates about a variety of stories.

You have a blog, you have your first posts up, and you are just waiting for the traffic to start rolling in. You share the links on social media sites, get your friends to visit, put the link to your site in signatures… why isn’t your website being launched into internet fame? Where is the glory your genius so richly deserves? You are are your content is high quality, and that is what everyone says it takes to get noticed. Why isn’t your blog generating income? What gives?

Every time I am advising someone on a new blog, I give them one fact that none of the alleged “traffic gurus” will admit: popularity is going to take time. In fact, I tell bloggers not to expect enough traffic to monetize their blog for about a year. Yep, that is a full twelve months. Though you will be steadily growing in the meantime… hopefully.

Why does it take so long? Well, just having good content isn’t enough. You have to have a lot of content, have that content optimized, be working a good marketing strategy and plenty of patience while it all comes together. No one just becomes popular over night. It is going to take time and work.

Here are a few tips to help you to make your blog popular.

Keep At It

It might seem cliche, but you just have to stick with it. No matter how frustrated you get by the numbers, keep writing high quality posts, and do so often. I recommend three or more times per week, but five times a week is better.

That means you will be continuously publishing, and so up your chances of being seen.

MyBlogU

A quick way to get popular is by writing posts for blogs that already are. While it helps to already be friends with these websites, affiliations don’t grow on trees.

Try a platform like MyBlogU, which will allow you to post articles you have written that you would like to see published elsewhere. These can be published on up to ten different sites, with a byline linking back to your site. This is a very easy way to get noticed.

Don’t Forget The SEO

You should be optimizing all content to the very best of your ability. Too many bloggers mistake SEO for spam, which is not at all the same thing. After all, you aren’t injecting keywords into badly written content.

You are providing quality posts that use SEO the way it is meant to be used. You are just utilizing a beneficial tool. If you want guidance, and you have a WordPress blog, pick one of the free WordPress plugins.

Check Out What’s Trending

A good way to attract attention – on a short term basis – is by following trends. For example, an occasional post on a bit of news relevant to your niche can really go far. Try checking out Google Trends, or see what people are posting about on social media.

It won’t work for long, but it will at least get people to your site. The rest of your content will be what keeps them there.

Use Social Media

Your blog should have its own social media profiles…that is pretty much a necessity at this point. Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, they are all useful. Update them regularly, and engage with your followers. Having a more personal touch, and showing your appreciation to readers one on one, will boost your popularity quite a bit.
Interlink Your Posts

Every post should have a footer that gives other relevant or interesting blog posts on your site. You should also link within the text of your post if possible. For example, don’t be afraid to reference something that has been published in the past. A link to another article can bring it back into the limelight.

What are some of your tips for making a blog into a hotspot? Let us know in the comments.

Image by Rudy and Peter Skitterians from Pixabay

Upon getting started in an online marketing campaign one of the first considerations is the targeted audience. What does the business provide a service or a product?

Therefore, we must find out what the keywords are that potential customers use when searching the internet for similar products or services. Four general categories provide some insight.

They are the following, city + service, zip code + service, local terminology + service and local landmarks + service. Naturally, replacing the service with the product gives us similar results.

It All Starts with the Best Keywords

Keyword searches are what drive a search engine to find the items queried by a user. Thus having knowledge of the most common associated with your product or service is pertinent when beginning an online marketing scheme.

Now there are other factors to consider in addition, however, using a technique called “search engine optimization” of SEO is what will enable a search engine to find and index your webpage in the top ten to twenty search results. If you are running a local business, you must understand what and how the competition is going about the same thing online as you are attempting.

Keywords should be used on all stages of your blogging strategy. From domain naming to content ideation, planning and writing.

Make A Successful SEO Campaign

Business blogging can be a success if a creative and focused SEO campaign is part of the design for a marketing strategy. One term to become familiar with is NAP or “name, address, and phone number,” it is essential that whenever this information is entered it is consistent.

The reason is when Google searches it is looking for the NAP listed for other businesses that are relevant to the one queried ranked by popularity.

One way to build popularity is by creating “backlinks” these are having a link to your webpage located on another similar site. This provides the search engine a reference and thus turns your site up in the queries. Using email marketing is another great way to make the most of your business blogging efforts.

Keep Updated

Along with keeping things like the NAP consistent, your other business data needs the same attention to detail when it comes to business blogging. This is important when optimizing for the local search engines like Localeze, Infogroup, D&B, and Acxiom. This is why webpage optimization is an important part of online marketing.

By staying up to date on any changes that occur with your business your webpage will never lose its place. There are services that offer help with SEO, however there are plenty of online articles that offer help in addition. The suggestions presented in these articles turns out to be quite useful and relevant for the purpose of optimization.

Nevertheless, business blogging is a full time endeavor and should be part of any marketing scheme for improving visibility and industry credibility. Become the expert in your field and promote your business through networking with other bloggers in similar businesses.

Naturally, becoming familiar with SEO techniques is the wisest choice when beginning a blog. Just like finding your targeted audience, some typical factors for SEO are domain authority, site structure, keyword use and the amount of backlinks in addition, quality of the backlinks.

Image: Pixabay

Like love, the course of running a successful business never did run smoothly.

Chalk it up to the sheer number of variables – on both a macro and a micro level – that a business has to deal with. Regardless of how much time and effort you pour into planning things out, success is never going to be linear. Instead, it’s dotted with peaks and troughs, twists and turns. And those peaks and troughs can seem magnified unless your business is agile and flexible enough to handle change with aplomb.

That flexibility and agility is rarely a happy accident, but rather the result of hiring a freelance risk management consultant and a concerted effort to build a foundation that is able to adapt as circumstances change and your business grows.

Here are three essential skills you’ll need to ensure your foundation is one that can grow as your business does.

Take your brand identity seriously

Your brand is your biggest asset. Creating a recognizable brand identity is key to everything: Rankings, conversions and sales.

The first step is investing time and effort into finding a name that sticks in mind, creates niche associations and is fun to brand. From there create a cool logo, color scheme and design. This company name generator will help with all of that:

Learn how to build the right team

We all know that finding the right talent is a crucial aspect of building a successful business. However, when you’re starting out and don’t have the resources and skills of an immense HR department at your disposal, it can be difficult to know how to find – and retain – the best of the best.

One thing that tends to trip up small or new businesses is the belief that the only way to attract top talent is with top dollars – something that your business just might not have yet. However, a survey by Flexjobs found that, of the 1500 people surveyed, 20% of those would be willing to take a 10% pay cut in favor of flexibility in working conditions, and 22% would be willing to forego health benefits.

Ultimately, building a great team doesn’t mean hiring those with the most prestigious qualifications, or spending big on salaries. Instead, place your energies into two areas: building flexibility into the roles you create so you can be sure to attract great talent, and hiring staff who are a good personality and culture fit. Adopt a virtual phone system to keep your team always connected, even if they are on the move. Use collaboration platforms to foster knowledge exchange.

Learn to compartmentalize

In the early days of your business, you’re probably going to be wearing a lot of hats. Depending on the nature and scope of your business, you may be salesperson, bookkeeper, marketing manager, customer service rep and director, all at once. And when you’re performing multiple roles at once, it can be hard to separate them out once the time comes to hire help.

What you need to do is compartmentalize. For each role you’re performing, determine the core activities and tasks that define that role. As your business grows, you’ll add more and more tasks to that list, which will make writing position descriptions when you’re ready to hire staff infinitely easier.

This advice also comes in handy when you, inevitably, need to work on separating your work and your personal life. If you’re juggling, say, being a parent and running your own business, you may want to take the time to write out the tasks you perform as a parent, and those you perform as a business owner. That way, you can assess whether you’re focusing on the right things at the right time.

Learn to document your processes

In almost all fledgling businesses, there’s a great deal of tacit knowledge – that is, information, processes or procedures that are undocumented. For example, you may know how to update your website, or change the outgoing voicemail message, or which suppliers can deliver at short notice.

Relying on tacit knowledge, however, leaves your business vulnerable. The director of a company I used to work for was inordinately fond of asking his employees, ‘What if you get hit by a bus tomorrow? Will anyone know how to do your job?’

It’s a valid – if morbid – point

Documenting processes, while time-consuming and frankly a little dull, is crucial to the success of your business. Keeping in-depth, up-to-date documentation on processes and procedures (you can find an easy 10-step method for documentation here) makes coping with change and growth a far less stressful experience.

It also means that, when things go wrong, you can easily backtrack and ascertain where things went wrong.

Image: Pixabay

Whether we like it or not, the U.S. Government is hell bent to protect us from the bogeyman. From head to toe, food, drink and other enjoyable vice is under incessant attack from foundations and organizations to keep us safe. Smoking (and you thought it was sex?) is the most prevalent evil of all times, vilified for the last 40 years, and the sustained epitome of warning labels.

Warning labels are thought to be effective, maybe most effective in stopping a perceived well-being transgression, safety hazard or health risk. No matter if this is true or not, labels continue to be the trusted means of halting sin. With this in mind, I find it outrageous that computers and computer related products do not have warning labels.

Consider people who use computers, from the seasoned IT professional to the proverbial one-foot-on-a-banana-peel and the other in the grave, and the range of security knowledge about computers and the Internet. The only people who understand the importance of Internet security and identity theft protection are those who work in the field of Internet security.

If you think your child understands security by virtue of “all kids are de facto techno geniuses”, why do parental controls exist? Kids are less safe on the Internet than many adults. Adults are not safe because, in the words of Ron White, “you can’t fix stupid.”

Internet risks include identity theft, job loss, total loss of privacy, scamming, theft of personal documents and acne on the low end. For the absolute tech-challenged ham-handed dweeb, risks could be stalking, murder, rape, suicide and addiction. There is hardly anything in the real world that cannot be duplicated in the virtual world, in fact exacerbated online.

If this household item was a lawnmower it would be illegal. If it was thought to drive up the cost of your insurance, there would be outrage, and demand for government intervention. Yet priorities are set with little thought to the most dangerous appliance in the home.

Questions:

Like CNN, FOX and The Comedy Channel we want to know what you think. And like them, no particular reason, we just like comments.

1. Should computers have warning labels?
2. Should a license be required to operate a computer?
3. Should a safety class be mandatory before buying a computer?
4. Should safty glasses and hearing protection be required to operate a computer?

Please, practice safe computing. Tweet this, DIGG it, Facebook it, email it to everyone you know. Stop the carnage. Stop ruining my computer experience and costing me money. Call the president of the U.S. The number is 202-456-1414 This is a real phone number for the White House. They will listen to what you have to say. Keep this in mind before you call.

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