Tag | social media marketing
Book Marketing Strategy: Best Websites For Authors
Online is where it’s at, especially when it comes to the marketing strategy for your newly published book. Creating buzz and generating sales can be accomplished more easily than you think with the assistance of a few online sites geared toward authors. We’ve gathered some of the stand outs and are sharing them with you below.
FiledBy. Hands down this is the most comprehensive online marketing platform for authors. It provides simple to use tools that can be used to link, host and organize marketing activities and connect to online booksellers. The service is free to use and authors can claim their site immediately. Additional features are available through affordably priced premium services and include, additional links, multimedia uploads, blogging, customized graphics, event calendars and much more. Whether you have an author website or not, FiledBy can help expand your social media presence and is absolutely worth joining to claim a name for a basic site set-up.
Red Room. This is a social hub that focuses on writers and book lovers. It’s a full-service site that allows authors to express themselves, promote their writing and connect with other like-minded people. Well-known and undiscovered talent utilize this site to network with publishing agents, interact with literary icons and showcase samples of your work. Membership is free, but if you’re an author you’ll need a Premium Membership to market and sell your books. Current price plan is listed at $30 per month or $250 per year.
Goodreads. This is a great site that promotes book-sharing, reviewing and other various ways to showcase your book. Goodreads claims to be the largest site with 1.8 million members who have added 41 million books. Authors enjoy having their own profile pages that feature a short biography, background, pages for your books, review and interview links, comments and other social media aspects. What make the site unique? It has an online advertising program for authors who are interested in ramping up their marketing efforts.
LibraryThing. Geared more toward the reader, the site does allow authors to become members and highlights them as such. A total of 35 million books have been cataloged by 600,000 readers so why not add yours to the list. As a LibraryThing author, you can promote readings, events and participate in author chats, provide review copies and include photos and other information on your author profile page.
Author’s Den. Your book is bound and ready to for reading, now what? The first step is finding an audience. At the Author’s Den, readers and authors are brought together through book reviews, blogs, news, events and more. More than 1.4 million readers each month have access to 62 literary categories. Not only is site is free to join, but it’s evolving. Coming soon is a market place that will permit authors to go a step beyond the site’s current features, including public relations, marketing and publishing.
Other author websites worth taking a peek at:
Shelfari. An Amazon.com owned site that has become very popular among Facebook users. A great way to tap into your social media audience.
Nothing Binding. Directed toward emerging writers and authors.
Scribd. Known as the ‘YouTube for documents’, authors can upload excerpts, pages, reviews and other material to share with people to view.
Video editing for social media
MAKING YOUR VIDEOS DELIVER
Multimedia is an integral part of both our online experiences and real life too. Sharing videos with friends, family, customers and colleagues is one of the simplest and fastest ways to communicate with one another. As they say, seeing is believing.
Of course, using video to communicate marketing messages is not new, but using it as part of your social media marketing is. If you want to create one of those sought after viral videos, you need to deliver great content. But you also need to edit it just right. Since you wouldn’t sell your car without a good wash and wax, you don’t want to send videos without refining them for viewing. The results you want might just be a matter of details.
Well, finding a good video editing site just got a little easier.
SUGGESTED VIDEO EDITING SITES
First up on the online video editing list is Motionbox. Registration is required, but members have unlimited video storage, large file upload capability and easy-to-use online editing tools. A standout feature is Motionbox Pro. This is an affordable hosting solution for business and commercial users. Plans start at $24.99 a month and include HD video for large screen viewing and large file format playback for professionally produced pieces that may require more bandwidth to watch.
Another video editing site One True Media. Similar to other online video editing sites, One True Media has basic and premium membership options for members. What make this site different is that it allows members to edit video and photo montages with transitional effects, music and custom labels and cases for DVDs. This is worth checking out if you’re planning on sending out copies of your video to publishers or professionals for review.
With JayCut, online video editing can be conducted by integrating their application into your existing website or through JayCut’s community. An award-winning company, JayCut gives members the options to make videos public or private. Uploading edited videos to other platforms is made effortless with video tutorials to guide you through the process.
Next on the online video editing adventure is Intuitivlab’s MixMoov. The site lets you add elegant transitions, text and apply visual effect to imported media. It uses drag-and-drop storyboards to layout clips and assemble them into a final video. If you’ve ever used Windows Movie Maker, it’s similar.
Meet the ‘fairly’ new kid on the block, Pixorial. This is quickly becoming one of the most popular online video editing sites. At first glance, Pixorial appears to be a video version of Shutterfly. Making DVDs, sending videos via UPS, creating video cards and other features make this online editor robust and, quite frankly, fun.
Notable mentions for video collaboration: Photobucket and Stroome.
Social Bookmarking Sites For Social Media Marketing
You have a voice. You wield influence. Your voice reaches out to millions of others on the internet to give your approval, or disapproval. You tell us what has the value, what speaks to the tribe, and the tribe follows. That’s the value of bookmarking.
Social Bookmarking is now an integral part of any major social media marketing campaign. They are communities of influence, filtering through massive amounts of internet information; voting sites up or down, cataloging them with folksonomy, and allowing individuals to create their own “internet rolodex”. The community benefits by connecting to high value content. Ultimately if your site is bookmarked you can benefit by large amounts of traffic, higher page rank, and community support.
In order to benefit from Social Bookmarking, I would recommend using the following sites. Make note of the culture and values of each community regarding things like story submission, friending, and tagging. You can lose points in a community just as fast as you can win them.
Technorati- Save Your Online Content as “Favorite”
Users of Technorati have the option to save their online content and favorite links on the site so that other users can access them. The option “Technorati Favorite” allows you add the URLs of your own website or other URLs that you want to share with other Technorati users. Any visitor to your website can add your site to their Technorati bookmarks by clicking on the button.
StumbleUpon- Stumbling with What You Like or Dislike
‘Stumble’ your favorite link is the concept associated with bookmarking on StumbleUpon. With simple installation of StumbleUpon toolbar, you enable sharing of your favorite links with others on StumbleUpon. By clicking on the Thumbs Up button on the StumbleUpon toolbar and adding categories and quick tags to the site, you allow other Stumblers find the links that you want to share. While stumbling across the web, you can also narrow down your search by selecting categories or topics. The most functional part of using StumbleUpon is connecting with web searchers who have found useful sites and shared them with other users.
Reddit – Paint The Web Reddit
Reddit has its features and functions similar to del.icio.us. It allows the users to share links, content and quote for the links submitted by other users. The most popular post can find a place on the front page of the website. SubReddit, the subnetwork of Reddit helps you find the most appropriate category for your links.
Del.icio.us- Defining Social Bookmarking
Deli.icio.us has set a standard among the social bookmarking sites for its easy-to-use and functional features. It has been an excellent tool for people who are into research and data mining. As one of the oldest, densely populated sites with the most content of many social bookmarking sites, del.icio.us has a strong community. You need to install a standard button onto your web browser to bookmark your favorite links. Unlike the bookmarking process of other social bookmarking sites where you get a pop up window to enter info about the site, del.icio.us takes you to that particular site to provide information and again comes back to the original site.
Digg- All You Need is to Digg
Allowing anyone to summit a Digg, Digg is combination of RSS, blogging and social bookmarking. The site is popular for as a technology news website. Users can share their views on any Digg and submit stories and review. In fact, the Digg community is open about comments on stories and sites. The website is caters to technology related items.
Mixx- Connecting to the World Broad Web Content
User generated content being the most striking feature of Mixx, the site offers a wide range of bookmarkable content for the Mixxers. The social bookmarking site has simplified the process of submitting stories, photographs and videos for the users who can pick from a wide array of categories to post their content. You can also use features like tags, classes and exact users to increase the searchability of your content. Mixx users can find their required content and bookmark it by picking a category.
Propeller- Simplifying Social Bookmarking
Mostly, Propeller works as other social networking site like Digg or Del.icio.us. Users submit their stories, or find them, comment on other stories or vote for them. The most popular of the stories goes to the top. You need to register with the site if you want to join the propeller community. Otherwise, reading the submitted stories on the site doesn’t need any registration. Sharing your stories with the community can help them know your views on a particular topic. Also, you can access the valuable posts shared by other researchers. The most remarkable part is that Propeller is convenient even for the non-techie web users.
Y!buzz- Creating a New Buzz with Social Bookmarking
Like any other social bookmarking site, Yahoo!buzz has created a buzz among the users for social bookmarking through user interface. Apart from quality content, and better editorial control, the site is popular among its audience for its different user-friendly option like e-mailing favorite news and stories to friends. You can buzz your stories and share them on other popular social networking sites. The news that is hot among the audience gets high rank. Submitting to Yahoo!Buzz also has another great advantage. You can have the headline of your stories displayed on the Homepage of Yahoo.
Fark – Ethical Networking
Fark is a kind of social bookmarking site that accepts posts submitted by only regular users. The site can be found as a massive compilation of articles and news. TotalFark subscribers can submit their favorite links to share them with other users of the site. Links are evaluated by the administrator and the best stories get a place in the Fark homepage.
If you have any other suggestions, please comment below.
