A STEP-BY-STEP GUIDE TO SELF PUBLISHING A SPIRITUAL OR INSPIRATIONAL KIDS' BOOK
STEP SEVEN: SOCIAL MEDIA
Before you’ve even published your book, you need to be building up your social media networks. Make sure that you have a following before you publish, so that you already have a captive audience once you are ready to start selling your book.
You should already have a website set up and this is a good place to start. Get blogging! Once you get onto Facebook and Twitter, you need to be posting some original content, and this will come from your blog.
BLOGGING
Blogging can take various forms, but essentially want you want to do is produce one or two articles a week on topics that are of interest to your target market. Ideally you don’t want to just rehash someone else’s content, so think about what you have to offer – this may be skills (child psychology), life experience (calming a hysterical child), experience with a particular problem (eg raising a special needs child) etc. Blog about this - Something that comes from your heart and is relatively short (people don’t spend large amounts of time reading content online) and engaging. Every time you post a blog, post this to your other Social Media platforms like Twitter and Facebook. The blog is an essential tool in SEO as it means that your site is being constantly updated with content that contains relevant keywords, as well as creating external links from your Facebook, Twitter etc.
FACEBOOK
There is so much to say about creating a good Facebook page that I may have to expand on this at a later date. For now, just know that you must have one. If you have a Facebook profile, it is easy to create a page for your business or book. Once your page is up and running, start by getting your friends to LIKE the page You need 25 LIKES to get a personalized URL for your page that you can send out in all communications.
The next most important step is to create an incentive for people to LIKE your page. You don’t want people coming to your page and leaving without LIKING it. The research has shown that people rarely, if ever, return to a page – they will only interact with it via the feeds that come onto their wall, and these feeds only come to them if they have LIKED the page. There is a great App for FB pages called TabPress which allows you to create a Welcome page with different content for fans and non-fans – in other words, before people LIKE your page they will see a different message to those who are already fans. You can use this to create an inticing message to convert people to FANS. On my Facebook Page I have an image saying “LIKE our page and get a free kids’ book”. Once people LIKE the page they get taken to a link to download my eBook. I have an almost 100% conversion rate from people clicking through from one of my Facebook Ads to actually LIKING the page. You may need help from someone with some basic HTML programming skills to use TabPress - it is worth it.
You then need to make sure that you have some interesting content on your page. Post your blog posts to the page with a link to your website, post any interesting articles you find while browsing the web, put up inspirational quotes and sayings, and don’t forget to post pictures – pictures often have the highest response rate of any post, so if you have images of your book, pics of your launch or any other relevant images, put them up. You can even entice your fans to post images, and run competitions.
DO NOT, and I repeat, do not use your Facebook page as a place to punt your book non-stop. It is ok to occasionally mention that your book is up for sale, or you’ve dropped the price or whatever, but if you constantly try to sell your book people will UNLIKE your page as fast as they LIKED it. No-one wants a sales pitch bombarding their personal wall feed.
TWITTER
The same goes for Twitter. These are Social Media platforms, with the emphasis on SOCIAL. They are places where you can engage with your target market on a personal level – find out about them – what they like, don’t like, what they think about your blogs etc.
Similar to Facebook, you can post your blogs to Twitter as well as other interesting articles, sayings, quotes, etc.
Engage with people. If someone retweets your post or mentions you – send them a Direct Message and thank them for this, or return the favor by mentioning them. Follow the people who follow you. When someone follows me I always send them a Direct Message thanking them for the follow and directing them to my Facebook page to interact in more depth. DO NOT set p automatic messages to people. Again, this is a sure way to get people to unfollow you. If you do not have the time to interact on Twitter, don’t use it.
Ping FM
It is quite time consuming engaging with all this Social Media, so I use Ping.fm to simplify things a bit. From Ping you can post to all of your Social Media networks in one go. It is easy to set up, easy to use, and reduces your time as you don’t need to log onto each network individually to post the same thing. This does not mean, however, that you never need to go onto your Social Media sites – you still need to be available to answer questions, respond to posts and comments and generally make friends with your fans.
I would suggest setting aside half an hour twice a day for Social Media Networking.
EMAIL SIGNATURE
Once you have your Facebook and Twitter set up, don’t forget to put the links to these and your website onto your email signature. You are most likely emailing a large number of people in a week, so why waste all these good opportunities for people to see your website and social media.
Happy socializing!
You should already have a website set up and this is a good place to start. Get blogging! Once you get onto Facebook and Twitter, you need to be posting some original content, and this will come from your blog.
BLOGGING
Blogging can take various forms, but essentially want you want to do is produce one or two articles a week on topics that are of interest to your target market. Ideally you don’t want to just rehash someone else’s content, so think about what you have to offer – this may be skills (child psychology), life experience (calming a hysterical child), experience with a particular problem (eg raising a special needs child) etc. Blog about this - Something that comes from your heart and is relatively short (people don’t spend large amounts of time reading content online) and engaging. Every time you post a blog, post this to your other Social Media platforms like Twitter and Facebook. The blog is an essential tool in SEO as it means that your site is being constantly updated with content that contains relevant keywords, as well as creating external links from your Facebook, Twitter etc.
There is so much to say about creating a good Facebook page that I may have to expand on this at a later date. For now, just know that you must have one. If you have a Facebook profile, it is easy to create a page for your business or book. Once your page is up and running, start by getting your friends to LIKE the page You need 25 LIKES to get a personalized URL for your page that you can send out in all communications.
The next most important step is to create an incentive for people to LIKE your page. You don’t want people coming to your page and leaving without LIKING it. The research has shown that people rarely, if ever, return to a page – they will only interact with it via the feeds that come onto their wall, and these feeds only come to them if they have LIKED the page. There is a great App for FB pages called TabPress which allows you to create a Welcome page with different content for fans and non-fans – in other words, before people LIKE your page they will see a different message to those who are already fans. You can use this to create an inticing message to convert people to FANS. On my Facebook Page I have an image saying “LIKE our page and get a free kids’ book”. Once people LIKE the page they get taken to a link to download my eBook. I have an almost 100% conversion rate from people clicking through from one of my Facebook Ads to actually LIKING the page. You may need help from someone with some basic HTML programming skills to use TabPress - it is worth it.
You then need to make sure that you have some interesting content on your page. Post your blog posts to the page with a link to your website, post any interesting articles you find while browsing the web, put up inspirational quotes and sayings, and don’t forget to post pictures – pictures often have the highest response rate of any post, so if you have images of your book, pics of your launch or any other relevant images, put them up. You can even entice your fans to post images, and run competitions.
DO NOT, and I repeat, do not use your Facebook page as a place to punt your book non-stop. It is ok to occasionally mention that your book is up for sale, or you’ve dropped the price or whatever, but if you constantly try to sell your book people will UNLIKE your page as fast as they LIKED it. No-one wants a sales pitch bombarding their personal wall feed.
The same goes for Twitter. These are Social Media platforms, with the emphasis on SOCIAL. They are places where you can engage with your target market on a personal level – find out about them – what they like, don’t like, what they think about your blogs etc.
Similar to Facebook, you can post your blogs to Twitter as well as other interesting articles, sayings, quotes, etc.
Engage with people. If someone retweets your post or mentions you – send them a Direct Message and thank them for this, or return the favor by mentioning them. Follow the people who follow you. When someone follows me I always send them a Direct Message thanking them for the follow and directing them to my Facebook page to interact in more depth. DO NOT set p automatic messages to people. Again, this is a sure way to get people to unfollow you. If you do not have the time to interact on Twitter, don’t use it.
Ping FM
It is quite time consuming engaging with all this Social Media, so I use Ping.fm to simplify things a bit. From Ping you can post to all of your Social Media networks in one go. It is easy to set up, easy to use, and reduces your time as you don’t need to log onto each network individually to post the same thing. This does not mean, however, that you never need to go onto your Social Media sites – you still need to be available to answer questions, respond to posts and comments and generally make friends with your fans.
I would suggest setting aside half an hour twice a day for Social Media Networking.
EMAIL SIGNATURE
Once you have your Facebook and Twitter set up, don’t forget to put the links to these and your website onto your email signature. You are most likely emailing a large number of people in a week, so why waste all these good opportunities for people to see your website and social media.
Happy socializing!