Building Media Lists for Book Reviews

When it comes to promoting your book using public relations as a platform to extend your reach is a solid way to go. One of the most simple ways to generate buzz and create awareness is through book reviews. By developing a list of media outlets and key influencers you can appeal to targeted journalists and bloggers that have the ability to offer insight and feedback to others about your newly published body of work. Here’s how you can get started.

Begin by building a customized list of potential contacts. The recipients should be a blend of general and well-known book critics, as well as off-the-beaten-path reviewers that are more prone to reading and writing about niche authors. Beyond building a database of reviewers consider including bookstore owners/buyers, trade associations and specialty stores too.

Good places to look for contacts are the National Book Critics Circle and BookMarket.com’s list of review editors. You can tailor your list of well-known reviewers and also dig around on the net for some of the lesser known critics to fill in any gaps on your list.

Send out a letter, or email, of introduction that briefly describes who you are and what you book is about. Like most book-related correspondence don’t forget to include a hook that will entice the recipient to yearn for more. Explain how they can receive a complimentary copy of your book and about how long it will take for the shipment to arrive. Some outlets will only review galley copies, or early manuscripts that have yet to be edited. Be prepared to accommodate these requests if necessary.

Another group that can be tapped to solicit reviews from are the mentions within the book itself. If your book talks about companies, businesses, locations or specific people you can reach out to them and let them know that you’ve created free PR and would appreciate reciprocation. Use this opportunity as part of your PR efforts and to generate backlinks to your online book page.

Since it’s often difficult to know who’s reviewing and what they’re saying about your book, youo’ll want to use Google Alerts to set-up notifications based on chosen keywords. This will help you monitor links and coverage about your book so that you can collect and use as testimonial and reference on your book’s website.

Squidoo: Social Media Promotion For You & Your Book

Squidoo is an excellent and free way to promote yourself as an author, as well as the books that you’ve written. Create by Seth Godin in 2005, Squidoo is a social community that allows users to build lenses, or single online pages, to showcase a particular subject. Squidoo is like having a one-page website that will share images, links and other details on just about anything that you can think that’s worth promoting. 

Getting started is easy. Sign-up for a free account and you’re off to the races. Squidoo recognizes that the majority of its audience aren’t tech-savvy and a simple content management system has been implemented to walk you through the ‘lens’ set-up process. If you’re new to the community, it might be in your best interest to take a look at other lenses to get a sense on how they’re used and built. This will make it easier to determine how to create our own. 

So, what’s the point of having a Squidoo lens? First, Google loves Squidoo and values it as a highly credible source of content and information. This means that even if your personal website is buried somewhere on page 25 of the Google search engine results pages, you still have an opportunity to nab a piece of the limelight via Squidoo. Most lenses appear in the top 10 of Google searches and that’s a great thing for those of us who are just starting out. 

You can build a Squidoo lens for each one of your books and even for yourself and then link them altogether for a collection of lenses that are all about your body of work and expertise. Pretty snazzy. Many authors feature downloadable ebooks, upcoming book signings, future speaking events and other details about where they’ll be and what they’re doing. You can even use your lens to help drive traffic back to your blog and website. 

There are plenty of Squidoo resources available to help you get things going. The best sources tend to be from the Squidoo lensmasters themselves. Explore and enjoy.

Measure Your Degree of Influence

Knowing what your ROI is on the efforts that you put forth is important because it helps you gauge what’s working and what’s failing. Making subtle adjustments allows you to focus your energy in the right direction and it can produce amazing results. Measurement as it relates to social media is a tricky thing because there isn’t necessarily a direct relationship  between a gaining a new fan or follower and a specific monetary value that impacts a brand’s bottom line. So, instead of trying to equate each brand loyalist to a dollar sign, let’s look at measuring your degree of social media influence by examining other areas. 

Retweets

Twitter users know that retweet (RTs) are one of the most powerful methods of extending their social reach. When you create a tweet that has sticking and sharing power, other tweeps are more likely to pass it along to others in their own networks and those people will pass it on to theirs and so on and so on. In this manner, a RT has the power to exponentially to spread your message and drive traffic back to your profile and your site or blog if you’ve tweeted a link. 

Link

Speaking of links, they are an integral part of your social media presence. Links are easy to shorten and share with others and they’re very easy to look at the type of traffic they’re producing. If you use a link shortener like Bit.ly you review how many clicks a particular link has received. You can also set-up Google Analytics for a particular page via link to get a better understanding of bounce rates, visitor habits and a slew of other data. 

If you actively participate in leaving blog comments you can include a link, as long as it’s relevant to your comment, back to your site or blog post. External links carry more weight and influence in the eyes of Google and therefore will help boost your site’s exposure on the search engine’s results page. The more links you have, the more easily you can be found because you’re viewed as a credible resource. 

Pings

Without getting to technical, pings are essentially communication methods that are used by computer networks that send out alerts when something new occurs. Pings are an effective way to promote your site/blog and you measure site traffic related to a ping to estimate your the level of influence that you have.

Facebook Page Marketing

Facebook Pages are similar to user profiles, but instead they offer a way businesses to showcase their brands, services and products, plus give people an opportunity to connect with them. As an author, having a Facebook Page for your book is a wonderful way to let your readers share feedback, provide praise and engage with you as a writer. Just like it’s important for your book to stand out from others within your genre, knowing how to make your FB Page a cut above the rest is important too. 
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Social Media Can’t Replace Marketing

When you think about social media, think about it in terms of pizza sauce. Sounds absurd, but hear me out. Pizza is a delicious and wonderful thing to eat, you’ve got warm, fresh dough, sauce, cheese a a variety of toppings to choose from. Now if you take away cheese, toppings and dough you’re not left with much. Just a bunch of pizza sauce. This is exactly what social media is. It’s not bad on it’s own, but it’s not the complete package without other components, namely marketing, public relations, SEO, advertising and other related branding factors.

If you’re going to launch a social media strategy, you’ll need to consider how it can fit in with your overall marketing plan. Use it as a tool to build your brand and elevate conversations about it. It’s misleading to think that social media alone will transform your brand into an overnight success that generates ridiculous amounts of revenue. It is simply a good marketing option that can augment your existing efforts.
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What Story Does Your Campaign Tell? Common Newbie Social Media Mistakes

The biggest challenge that many social media beginners face is having a clear understanding on what a campaign actually is. Your campaign should understand exactly what your audience wants and needs, as well as where they gather. Dissemination of good, free material and monitoring results with measurable goals is also part of what a campaign is. A campaign should be wrapped with good messaging, a clear call-to-action and feature a simple way to share with others.

If you’ve read the above and feel like you’re read to take the next step into the social media spotlight, you’ll want to make sure that preserve the integrity of your campaign by avoiding some of these common mistakes.

1.  Dormant accounts. Opening social media accounts all over the place isn’t going to win you a ton of fans and followers. Each account that you have should be one that connects to your audience (i.e. where they frequent, where they like to connect). For each account that you have you’ll need to play an active role. If you haven’t sent a tweet in six months or posted fresh content, people will wonder where you’ve gone to and eventually move on.

2.  Self promotion. Although it’s exciting to start a campaign, it’s also important to remember that it’s not all about you. Tone down the ‘me-me-me’ and focus more on what you can do for others. People will appreciate that you’re using your expertise and skills to point them in the right direction instead of just shoving a sales message in their face. First build your flock and then share information and update about your brand.

3.  Tuning out. The whole point behind a social media campaign is to engage yourself in conversations with other people. Discuss what they think, what they want and what they know. The worst thing you can do is not listen to what’s being said. Don’t let conversations and exchanges fall on deaf ears. Take the time to reply and respond quickly. You’ll be amazed by the results you’ll get from such a simple action.

Social media takes time and it’s not for those lacking in patience. Slow and steady wins the race in this realm.

Social Media Marketing And Your USP: Tips to Craft a Key Message

A USP, or unique selling proposition, is a core component to any good marketing and business plan. Your USP is what identifies and sets you apart from your competition and its used to help you position your brand as the best choice among all others. Whether you’re an author, a speaker or an entrepreneur, your USP needs to become synonymous with what it represents and stands for. Developing a USP with social media staying power is not as tricky as it might seem. Here are a few tips that will make tackling your USP easy as pie.

Since you’re writing a USP that will be shared via social media you’ll want to remember to use the ROAD model. An acronym, ROAD stands for: researching who your audience is and your competition, objectives that are defined and aligned with your target market, actions that include a  well developed strategy and plan to execute your brand via social media and devices that are the best social marketing fit based on your brand needs.

A USP needs to contain some basic parts in order to officially call it a USP. First, it should state what your brand is and what someone will get from it, in other words, the benefit. Next, it needs to be completely original from your competition. Your USP should differentiate your brand beyond just a benefit. Lastly, you ultimate goal should be to create a USP that is so strong it will compel your audience to take action and choose your brand over any others.

True, that’s a tall order to fill with USP, but no one said that this was an easy assignment. Writing a USP is a tough job and it shouldn’t be taken likely. If you feel like you’re grasping at straws before you’ve had a chance to put pen to paper try to find USP examples for inspiration. FedEx: “When your package absolutely, positively has to get there overnight” and Avis: “We try harder” are just a couple of USPs for you to chew on.

Remember that when you’re putting your USP together that you want to begin with the end in mind. Think about how you’ll use the USP and where you’ll share it. Keep it simple, but succinct and most importantly, make it your own.

Social Media Analytic Tools

One of the most important and, unfortunately, often overlooked aspects of social media is measurement. Knowing how successful your efforts have been is important if you want to continue to build awareness among your target segments. Analyzing the return on investment doesn’t require a degree in statistics. With so many free social media analytic tools available on the web any Joe or Jane can login to get a snapshot of their marketing performance. Here are a few tools that to help with monitoring:

Google Alerts

This is an excellent (and easy) way to track specific keywords that relate to you and your brand. For instance, as an author, you could designate the name of your book and your own name as search terms for Google. Each day, you’ll receive an email notification with a summary of mentions. Google Alerts makes it very easy to identify who’s talking and sharing information about you. It’s free and effective.

Bit.ly

As most tweeters know, Twitter has a 140 character limitation which includes URLs. The Bit.ly shortener allows users to condense long links into compact versions. Optimizing URLs through Bit.ly also gives users an opportunity to track how many times people are clicking on your shared links. This provides you with a number of impressions so you can gauge what content links are performing better than others and make adjustments as needed.

Xinureturns

This is a very hand all-in-one tool that gives you an overview of PageRank, backlinks, quantity of indexed pages and much more. Simply type in any URL that you wish to see stats on and they instantly appear. Xinureturns is a quick way to look at how your multi-metric performance. The only drawback with Xinureturns is that there is a slight discrepancy with the data that it pulls. Check carefully to insure that what you’re seeing is current.

There are many free tools available. Hunt around and you’re certain to find some freebies that will make analyzing and measuring much easier.

5 Reasons Why Authors Need Blogs

Blogging is more popular than ever and despite the fact that the majority of bloggers launch with a bang, many discover that there’s a considerable amount of work and commitment involved to prevent their blogs from fizzling out. If you’re an author, having a blog can be a powerful way to promote yourself and your published work. Here are a few reasons why authors need to jump on the blog bandwagon.

1.  Build a cyber sales channel.

Blogs are actually quite flexible in terms of content and functionality. For example, you can integrate e-commerce so that blog readers can purchase books directly from your site. You can tie-in your blog sales outreach to services like Clickbank and even Amazon.

2.  Connect with your audience.

You audience is much broader than just readers and fans. Through a blog you can meet publishers, literary agents and other authors to exchange information and build a social network to support your book.

3.  Boost book sales.

As an author you have the advantage of never running out of great ideas for blog posts. You can use our book to generate hundreds of topics for posts. Try using an excerpt from you book and expanding upon it, touch on something unique about one of your characters, discuss plot or print out a teaser page to encourage sales. Endless opportunities exist for blogging authors.

4.  Become search engine friendly.

The primary search engines, Google, Yahoo! and Bing, continually crawl the web looking for new content that is regularly updated. Every time you submit a post a search engine bot will come along and index it on the internet. That makes you more searchable and increases your exposure. People will have an easier time finding you and connecting with the material that you’re producing.

5.  Develop conversations with readers.

Blogs aren’t a one-way street. Commenting systems enable readers to share feedback and thoughts and regardless of whether they’re positive or negative, participating in a dialogue is an excellent way to learn how to improve and expand on things that are disliked or favored.

If you don’t have a blog, there’s no time like the present to start one today. Give your fingers a run for the money and start typing.

Measuring ROI in Social Media

Social media is a powerful tool that can quickly generate brand awareness and increase overall exposure to large market segments. For instance, if you’re an author that is beginning a social media campaign to promote your newest hardcover release connecting with your online community is only part of the process. Beyond numbers of fans and followers, you need to know what people are saying about your brand, what’s the depth of conversation regarding you as an author, how engaged are readers with your books and more.

There are quite a few ways that you can measure how your readers are interacting with you in the social media sphere. Some are costly, but they deliver robust data that can be used to adjust your campaign as needed. On the other hand, there are some fantastic free tools available that do a fair job delivering snapshots of your fans and their sentiment toward your book, or brand. Do some digging to find the tools that will work best to meet your needs and fit your budget.

Don’t be overwhelmed by the data that you start pulling. If you’re a writer, words come easily, whereas numbers may seem more challenging. Focus on identifying trends in your data and ignore  information that isn’t relevant. Spot increases and decreases over time to give yourself a benchmark to help gauge whether your social media efforts are succeeding or failing.

Make sure to overlay sales numbers with your social media data. If you’re using Google Analytics to measure conversions on your book’s landing page, check for spikes and dips and then compare how specific social media efforts may have effected those outcomes. Watching sales and measuring the ROI through social media will be determined by the set of metrics that you define. For example, if you are more concerned about sales instead of site registration then you’ll need to shift your measurement and focus accordingly.

However you choose to evaluate your book’s or brand’s social media investment just remember to be open-minded about the numbers. They can be your friend and help you find opportunities, identify mistakes and tell you what to continue or abandon.