E is for Email Marketing

I don't have to tell you that email marketing is huge right now.  If you are promoting anything that you want people to buy, I highly recommend it. It's very effective and cheap, if you know where to go. Let's talk about the basics.   

• Gather emails by asking people to sign up for newsletters from you on your blog/website. Purchasing email lists is very rarely effective. Get emails with permission.  If you haven't got a contract to pub yet, it is still a great time to start gathering emails.  Gathering emails is a lengthy process. Why not have a head start?
• You can't just email from your own personal gmail/aol/yahoo/etc. account. It's not professional, and, if you are sending a good deal of emails, your email carrier will eventually put a stop to it. You should sign up with an email service. Most cost a monthly fee, and for my clients I generally use Icontact, a very reputable and reliable service. But you can do what you need to as an author for free at Mail Chimp. Mail Chimp is very easy to use and you can do very simple emails to more complex without needing any design skills. Here's a sample email I created on Mail Chimp to show you ( If I were using a paid service, I wouldn't have to have the words "MailChimp" at the bottom.)

• Do not spam your email list! Be sure to only send out emails on a very limited basis. I find you shouldn't do more than one per month. More than that and people start to ignore you or unsubscribe. 
• Include a Call to Action in each email. That means you should ask the recipient to do something such as buy your book, enter a contest, or like your Facebook page. You don't have to say "Buy my book" outright, but you need to know what it is you want the recipient to do when you send the email and then make it easy for them to do it. For example, in the email sample above, the call to action is for people to follow me on my blog. Since this is just a picture you can't tell that if you clicked on the email it would take you to my blog. You can do the same thing with a coupon that's $1.00 off your book or whatever. Effective email marketing is never just news. 
• Always look at your statistics after you've sent your email to see if people opened it and/or clicked on links. This will help you to figure out what works and what doesn't for next time.

Well, that's email marketing basics. Are you scared of email marketing? Will you/do you use it?

D is for Depth

(This is a recycled post. An oldie, but a goodie!)

Let's talk about depth. When I say depth I am talking about pages on your website or blog in addition to your home page.


Why should we have depth?


Because there are critical pieces of information that should be easily accessible to readers. 

Critical information for an author includes:

1. Contact Information. Please give people an easy way to find you. If for any reason an agent or someone who could help your career is looking for you, don't you want them to find you easily? And what about later when you are published? Shouldn't your readers have access to you? They want to be able to connect - online media makes this possible. Do your part - make it easy for them. Yes, usually they can click on your profile and get your email (if you have it listed) but that takes more work. A contact page including an email is better. Even better than that is a contact form so people can leave you messages directly from your site. (This is different than being able to comment because they can talk to you privately.)
2. About Me Page. I don't have this info on my blog yet. I don't know why - maybe I haven't figured out who I am. Again, a blogger profile button can give this info, but a page dedicated to telling all about you is preferred. It's easy to find and is searchable. Include what you write and your FULL NAME or PEN NAME in a clear location. You'd be surprised how many people's blogs I visit that have their name hidden away. It's frustrating. Don't let your readers be frustrated!
3. A Link to Your Books. This is mostly important if you're books are on sale or on the way to being on sale. Make it easy for people to buy your books. That's critical. Also important is letting people know what you write for easy identification. If someone sees your name and book title and synopsis a lot, they start to say, "Maybe I should read that..." If you are published, make sure you have your cover posted.  If you aren't published, you should have writing samples. This gives people pre-agent buzz (yes, it can happen) and gives agents and publishers easy access to your work. Many agents research your blog on a query. Make sure they can find your material. (Again, I haven't done it yet. Ooh, I'm a slacker!)
4. Anything else you want people to get to easily. I want people to get to my blog critique info. Maybe you have appearances or events you want to notify people about. Or you offer editing services. Or you have good reviews of your books. Or you have won writing awards. Or you have a really popular blog post. Maybe its contests. Or photos. You get my drift.

One more thing - please make your navigation to these pages easy to see. Top of the page is best.

Any other things you want to see in on a separate page of a blog or website? Do you have depth?

C is for Contest

Who doesn't like to win? Exactly. That's why running contests on your blog is a great way to attract followers, reward readers, and draw attention to important announcements. Read back through my Savvy Sensation Series and you will read that many of them built their platform with contests.

To make sure you get the most out of running a contest, ask your entrants to do something such as tweet about the contest, like your Facebook page, blog about you, etc. The contest I held last month was to celebrate 300 followers. I had spent a couple of months in the 290s. The week I held the contest, I bumped up to 320 just from people tweeting and blogging and drawing new followers.

The most successful contests, of course, have prizes that people want to win. Gift cards, books (especially advanced copies, aka ARCs), and agent submissions always pull a nice draw. You can also offer critiques, editorial services, or other book swag. Be creative! Be unique! If you haven't tried a contest yet, I challenge you to try it.

This seems like a great place to run a contest of my own, doesn't it? Let me just say, there's one in the works. But you'll have to come back later in the month to find out about it. How's that for building up some interest?

Do you run contests? Have you found them helpful in building your blogging platform?

B is for Blog Hops

Blog hops are fun and challenging and you meet many people, so participating in them may not feel much like marketing. But exactly because you meet many people - people who are actively seeking new relationships - blog hops are an excellent way to build up your followers.

Now I must state that the number of followers you have does not actually mean as much as the quality of engagement you have with your followers. You can have a thousand followers who stop by one time and never again. That's not really useful for you as an author.On the other hand, you can have one hundred followers that will tweet, facebook, and blog on your behalf at the drop of a hat. Followers become great marketing tools when you know them well enough that they stop by often, comment often, share your news/posts with others, and are happy to guest on your blog or vice versa.

Just to be real clear, followers are people not statistics. They are opportunities for engagement. If you don't engage, the number of followers you have means nothing.

But because it is an easy number to monitor, we are going to look at my follower numbers to show how much a blog hop can change the opportunities I have for engagement. As I schedule this post to run, I have 331followers. Let's see where we are at the end of the month, shall we?

How have your followers jumped since you started this blogfest?

A is for Alert

Google Alerts, that is. Do you use them? I am very fond of them and think they are an absolute must for monitoring your internet presence - a big part of marketing. (This is essentially a recycled post, but I bet there's a bunch of you who haven't read it.)

For those of you who are unfamiliar with Google Alerts, here's a blurb from the Google website about what this nifty function does:

Google Alerts are emails sent to you when Google finds new results -- such as web pages, newspaper articles, or blogs -- that match your search term. You can use Google Alerts to monitor anything on the Web. For example, people use Google Alerts to:

• find out what is being said about their company or product.
• monitor a developing news story.
• keep up to date on a competitor or industry.
• get the latest news on a celebrity or sports team.
• find out what's being said about themselves.

If you aren't using Google Alerts, please do!  It's the best way to track your image through the web and find out what people are saying about you. You can track as many terms as you like with this tool, even your competition or things you just like to follow. I recommend you at least follow your name or author pseudonym and your book title(s). Maybe you also want to follow your agent or editor, up to you. You can specify how often you get the alert so you aren't inundated and you can end at any time. Sign up for your alerts here. 

How do you use Google Alerts? Has it been helpful for you?