Getting Clever with Social Media

This weekend I went on a course with Les Squires on being social media savvy.  I was always active but felt that I was not good enough at it; too much time spent with too little results. I am sure that you know the feeling.

Grateful thanks to my friend Dawn Pilatowicz for arranging this. It was a somewhat different experience, at least to start with because Dawn is a part time fund raiser for the Guide and Service dogs, so in addition to the participants we had five dogs attending. Time had to be taken to keep them from attacking each other, but in the end they settled down.

At any rate I learned things I didn’t know, neat tricks to make your social media life more effective which I am happy to pass on here. Les tells us that it is all about curating the content, in other words selecting elements and puttign them together to get a “WOW” result. It is also about organisation vs fragmentation.

• Google Alerts: Go to Alerts and submit some favorite topics. In our case this would be something like “Healing” or “Weight loss”.  Google will alert you via your gmail account everytime someone searches for your Alert. The double inverted commas are important because otherwise you will get all the alerts for ‘weight’ and ‘loss’ separately and thus get flooded with inappropriate results. Chose your alerts with care. You can elect to get them as thye happen, once a day or once a week.
• Hashtags: are a device created by Twitterbut now also adopted by Facebook. They search all public groups for content appropriate to you hashtag such as #Weight Loss and report back to you.  You can make it more specific by adding a + in front e.g. +#weight loss. It is also a good idea to make your hashtags unique to you. For example we recently published a book called Aistiq Meditation so we will hashtag it +#aistiqkima.
• Organizing your bookmarks: On the Firefox browser one can categorise bookmarks into folders, so it is a good idea to place all your social media pages in one folder (private Facebook, business Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google alerts etc.). You then have an option to ‘open all’ which makes it really easy when booting up in the morning. I believe the same can be done on Chrome.
• Google Drive: is a good place to develop collaborative projects or documents. Everyone who is a member of the group may contribute, add or make changes. It makes for a much quicker process than emails going back and forth. Google Drive is also an excellent place to develop a “resumé”, by making a table of all the sites where you are active or are a part of your working life.

I hope that I was able to pass on some of Les’s wisdom and that you cabn use it to advantage inn your business life.

Love based copywriting

I recently came across a system called Love Based Copywriting developed by Michele PW.

It is something I have been looking for for years and I am convinced that you as an author (or even not as an author) will find that this fresh approach just what you need to get away from fear based marketing and into a love based approach.

As she says, most traditional copywriting uses a fear based approach, emphasising that you are disempowered, sick, useless and socially unacceptable, and that is why it so often has a taste that is somewhat sleazy, slimy and second-hand-car-salesman-like, leaving a sour and bitter feeling behind. That, in essence, is why most people hate selling.

By contrast love-based copywriting gives one a feeling of joy in service and invites a positive response from your fans and customers.

I downloaded both the Kindle book and the workbook as a PDF and have been doing the exercises and developing new skills. The two books work together, with the text content in the book and the exercises in the work book. Fortunately I have a little tablet as well as a Kindle, so I can have them both open at the same time. I will gradually be re-writing our descriptions and our web site using this method.

Michele says that our first task is to get to know our ideal customer, what her (or his) needs are and what ‘keeps them awake at night’.  As part of this exercise, and to get to know you better I invite you to complete a quick eight question survey. We offer a FREE e-book (your choice from our web site) just for completing the easy questions. So how about giving it a go? Here is the link

Once again, grateful thanks to Michele PW for special gift of service. Highly recommended!

Spreading the word

Nadine and I are constantly at work to spread the work of our authors as far and wide as we can. As you may know Nadine has been using the cover images to place on products on a whole range of shops, while I have been re-discovering Smashwords.

Smashwords has grown a lot in the last few years, with more options in terms of distribution and many more useful tools. I have to admit that in the early days it was not easy to get books accepted by Apple, mainly because of technical requirements for cross channel conversion, so I just gave up, using the excuse (partly true) that Apple e-book sales are only a small percentage of their business.

Getting e-books into acceptable shape for Apple is still complicated, but smashwords has provided all kinds of tips and tricks to get past the acceptance criteria. It has been a learning curve, but we now have a few books on Smashwords with a steady flow of more to follow. I started with authors that are most active in marketing.Here are some links for you to try:

Liesel Teversham

Nadine May

David Ash

Sharon Hamilton-Green

Smashwords also sells on the a number of other platforms including Flip Kart the biggest e-book retailer in India, which holds huge potential for our body, mind, spirit authors.

Baker & Taylor

gains access to libraries in the USA as well as their own selling platform.

Smashwords also has uselful tools to track the traffic on each book, views, sample downloads and actual purchases.

Please let me know if you would like your book enlisted in this program. It will require some support from you on the principle of “You help us. we help you”. We are excited about the prospects and hope that you are too.