P is for Promotion

Today at the Blood-Red Pencil, Maryann Miller and I discuss how difficult BSP is for authors and how the rest of us can help. It's all about liking each other. Go read what I'm talking about.

Rana DiOrio at Little Pickle Press has another effective tactic for promoting her blog. When LPP writes about other people, they not only include links to mentioned sites, but after the blog publishes, Rana emails the mentionees and asks them to stop by the blog and leave a comment. Here are examples of emails she sent for today's blog post:

Good Morning!

We feature you today in our blog post about the Santa Barbara Earth Day Festival:

http://bit.ly/g3QpFO

Please stop by and leave a comment!

Thank you,

Rana

***

Good Morning:

We just wanted you to know that we have a very favorable mention of your business in our blog today:

http://bit.ly/g3QpFO

Please stop by and leave a comment.

Thanks so much,

Rana

 ***

Good Morning:

Just thought you'd like to know that we extol your organization today in our blog post about the Santa Barbara Earth Day Festival:

http://bit.ly/g3QpFO

Please stop by and leave a comment!

Thanks so much,

Rana

It takes only a few moments to send these reminders,  but the benefits in the way of traffic and comments to the blog can be great. Don't miss an opportunity to gently encourage someone to read your post about them!

When to learn about blog book tours

If you have a book coming out in two or three months (or even later), you should learn how to plan your blog book tour now. That's assuming you want to launch a virtual tour right at book release to capitalize on all the buzz around your new book.

It's a lot of added work to plan a blog book tour. What you don't want to do is learn how to plan a tour right in the midst of all your other promotional efforts. What I suggest is learning how to plan the tour early on, doing all the preparation you can in advance (which includes getting to know potential blog hosts), and then launching a blog book tour on the heels of the book release.

Don't have a blog book tour while you're engaged in live public appearances. You won't be able to do your blog book tour justice. We cover these points and more in our blog book tours class which begins February 1 and lasts all month. If you have a book coming out in Spring or Summer, you might want to do your learning and start preparations now. Click here for more information and sign-up.

News from BEA and why you should blog

I've long proclaimed that blogs are one of the cheapest and most effective ways for writers to stay in regular contact with their readers. It's one of your best promotion platforms. More and more, book publishing specialists agree with that view. This comment is from a recent Writers Market eletter:

One thing that seemed obvious this year (at BEA) is that publishers don't think it's a big deal if potential authors have a blog, but they do think it's a big deal if potential authors do not have a blog or e-mail list or some other direct reach to their target audience. If you want to publish a book, you need a great hook or idea, but it's becoming increasingly important to also have an audience—before the book deal.

It's important to have a good blog. That means posting several times a week. The more you post relevant information, the more readership you'll build as is demonstrated by another blog I've been spending lots of time building, the Blood-Red Pencil. It's a group blog with daily posts, and the growth of readership has been excellent, thanks to the quality of the information provided by our blogging members.

Stay tuned for some tips and inspiration to keep you blogging over the summer, and by the time you're ready for your next book promotion, you'll have a blog that supports your efforts in a dynamic way.

Ebook Week

Coming up soon in March, so if you have an ebook to promote, check out their fantastic website and jump on this combined effort. Also grab one of these neat banners they've designed for free use on your blog and website:

There are more for various genres and various styles. Very cool idea.

Ping Alert

I make it a point to ping at least once a week. Try one of these multi-pinging services to notify servers about a recent update to your blog:

BlogFlux Pinger
BlogPingR.de
King Ping
Ping
Pingoat
Ping-o-matic
Poll-n-Ping!

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ping_(blogging)" - a must read if you don't quite understand what pinging is all about.

Twitter

I'm always on the prowl for new marketing tools that support blogging, and Twitter, a micro-blogging site, has become one of my favorite dailies. It's fast, easy, and effective. What more could you ask for when it comes to promoting your books?

There are tricks to maneuvering in Twitter. It doesn't work if you don't interact, post regularly, and communicate meaningfully. Once you "get it", it's fun. But, beyond that, there are benefits to participating that I didn't anticipate. Every single day, I find a links to sites that give me more information, ideas, and connections. They're useful sites that help me in my own work; sites I wouldn't have found on my own.

Today, I picked up this link at Twitter - http://www.sellingbooks.com/. Who doesn't want to learn more about Selling Books? I haven't explored it in great depth, but I will. It's a well-organized site, attractive, and loaded with the kind of added content that makes for many return visits.

What about the rest of you? Do you Twitter? What have you learned over there? Have you discovered any great new sites you didn't know about? What was the hardest thing about learning to Twitter? What's the biggest surprise now that you know how?

Give us a link so we can follow you on Twitter. Here's mine. You can peek at a few of my Twitter comments in the right column, too.

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Yet another day of no service from Blogger.com .... we are not spam!

The Challenge of Blogging Daily

The August Blogging Challengers are halfway through their contest of blogging every single day. Most of us are getting a bit tired of dreaming up exciting new posts, and are wondering whether we can keep this up after the month is over. The question is, do we have to?

A blog post per day is a good way to get some additional traffic to your blog, which is a particularly good idea before a blog book tour. But, it might not be necessary to keep your blog fresh quite this often as a normal practice. It's important to post at least twice a week, and three or four times is even better. But, unless you have a group blog and share the job with other people, it could become too much of a ... dare I say it?... drag to keep up the pace.

The point of this exercise is to develop a good habit over a period of thirty days. But, you can continue a very good habit three times a week, and that might work just as well. That's the number of posts that would work for me, especially since I like to pre-schedule several posts for the week on Monday.

What about the rest of you? Have you given any consideration to what your blogging schedule will be come September and for the remainder of the year? Do you have events or any special reasons that might make you increase your regular blogging? What are they? Give it some thought and tell us why and how you plan to continue your blogging practice when our contest is over.