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THE BOOK MARKETING EXPERT NEWSLETTER!

A newsletter all about SUCCESSFUL publishing

and POWERFUL promotion.

December 23, 2010 Issue #236

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in this issue

— Note From The Editor

— Six Quick Tips for Twitter Success

— 50 Powerful Social Media Tactics to Use on YouTube

— Radio Pitch Helper

— Research Trends in Your Topic

— Three Quick SEO Tips for Optimizing Your Site

— 5 Things to Implement To Build Your Brand on Facebook

— Picture This!

— Headline Helper

— Six Steps to Finding a Literary Agent

— 50 Powerful Social Media Tactics to use on Squidoo

— Join The Publishing Insiders in 2011

— Red Hot Internet Publicity BootCamp Jan. 29, 2011

— Maximize Google Alerts

— Six Powerful Ways to Use LinkedIn

— Get Listed, Locally

— See What Your Web Visitors See

— Book Peeps to Follow on Twitter

— Reader Tip!

— WHO ARE WE

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Penny C. Sansevieri, Editor penny@amarketingexpert.com

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Welcome to another issue of the Book Marketing Expert Newsletter!

Dear Author,

Well, here we are – the last issue of the year. It’s been great being with you this year, and I hope it was a good one for you.

AME has seen many changes, and all of them have led to an exciting end to 2010. We have added some new staff, and we were able to market a lot of exciting new authors this year. We remain grateful that you keep reading this newsletter, and to those authors who chose to work with us this year, we say: Thank you!

As one year passes into the next, I am always reminded of a passage in a book I once worked with called: What I Learned on the Way Down by Jac Flanders:

“Not knowing what’s coming next is the New Year’s secret ingredient. We can’t imagine, so we party – usually the biggest and loudest of the year. We cover our anxiety with a lover’s kiss at the stroke of midnight, blow paper fizzy things at each other and drink champagne. We wish each other luck and leap into the New Year like base jumpers and sky divers, not knowing for sure who packed the chute. As the televised thousands cheer in Times Square and the ball of crystal lights blazes overhead, we look for someone to hold onto, someone we trust, someone who loves us, we close our eyes and pray – for a gentle landing.”

Wishing you all a wonderful 2011 and a very gentle landing,

Penny, Paula, Susan, Sherrie and everyone at Author Marketing Experts, Inc.

P.S. – We appreciate your support of our newsletter, blog, Facebook Page and more, and we truly enjoy offering you publishing and marketing tips and inspiration year-round. We do have a request:

Every year Writer’s Digest magazine publishes a list of the “101 Best Websites for Writers.” If you enjoy our work, we’d be honored if you would vote for us to be included on this list. Full instructions appear on our blog: http://amarketingexpert.com/seeking-your-vote/. Thank you!

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1. A bio is a must. A recent Harvard Business Review study showed that 82% of unsuccessful Twitter accounts have little or no bio information.

2. You should provide more than 3 links per 20 tweets and you should update more than once a day.

3. If you don’t provide links in your tweets, you should plan to post more often (studies suggest as much as six times a day). You should have no more than 15 updates a day.

4. Twitter names are becoming like URL’s were in the early years of the Internet. Make sure and grab all your branding and your name.

5. Don’t use underscores_ when you’re creating a user name. Not only does it look amateurish, but a number of spammers have hacked into Twitter that way. You don’t want to look like a spammer.

6. Always engage and reply to the @reply responses on Twitter. Why? Well, first off it’s important to engage your followers, but second, those @replies help with your Twitter ranking.

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1. Make the videos viral, and spread them to as many websites as possible.

2. Use other social media sites like Twitter and Digg to post your videos.

3. Create well thought out, professionally styled videos that are edited properly.

4. Make sure the sound on your videos is clear and mixed and edited well so users can clearly hear it.

5. Keep content funny, engaging, and informative so viewers will watch it from beginning to end.

6. Try to keep the videos you create clean without too much controversial material.

Want to read the additional tips? Go to: http://www.susangilbert.com/50-powerful-social-media-tactics-for-youtube/.

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Looking to pitch yourself to radio? Try radio-locator.com, which provides contact information for US and Canadian stations.

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If you’re wondering what the world’s interest is in your topic, there’s a quick and easy way to find out. Head on over to Google Trends: www.google.com/trends, and plug in your keywords to see who’s been searching on your keywords. This system will also show you news stories that have run on this topic as well as top cities and regions that have used these search terms.

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Social content: make sure that you have something “social” on your site, whether it’s a blog, forum or even your very own social networking. The easiest and best of these is a blog in my opinion.

Update often: always provide fresh content. Update the social aspect of your site often. This will really help you with ranking.

Share and share alike: make sure that your content is easy to share. If you don’t have sharing widgets on your site (Upload to Facebook, Tweet This!, etc.) then get your designer to add it to the site asap. Most blogging software comes with this all ready to go.

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At the Word of Mouth Marketing Summit last month, hundreds of brands covered a variety of topics including best practices for engagement strategies, measurement, brand ambassador programs and ROI. They have shared a few takeaways on building your brand on Facebook:

1) When engaging with Facebook fans, focus on the art of ‘un-copywriting.’ Post like a friend, not like a company.

2) Keep posts SHORT! One sentence works the majority of the time. Employ the ‘less is more’ principle. Overall, the fewer words you use, the more interactions you see.

3) Quantify your approaches wherever possible. It’s great to have x amount of fans or x amount of interactions, but what does that mean? Create benchmarks. Quantify the results to show what those fans and interactions are doing for the brand.

4) In looking at fan and follower growth, lots of companies leveraged every touch point possible. Buffalo Wild Wings has 3.4 million fans on their Facebook page and they employed their concept of “POEM” to drive fan growth – paid, owned and earned media.

5) A lot of brands listen and monitor, but it’s important not to just HEAR what consumers are saying, but to USE the information you’re hearing. Maybe it’s product feedback. Maybe it’s a suggestion for an upcoming promo, event or store opening. Maybe it’s a trend in customer service complaints. Maybe it’s a common theme or shared passion among fans to help in targeting ads or developing programs. Regardless of what they’re saying, the truth is they ARE talking and they’re your customers. Are you/we truly listening? And what are you/we doing with the information?

And since you want to protect the valuable property you have created on Facebook, be sure to learn how to back it up: http://www.susangilbert.com/time-to-backup-your-facebook-profile-and-pages/.

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Increase blog traffic with pictures! Try adding a picture to your posts, relative to the topic, of course. Consider adding book images, company logos, etc. It’s a great way to get additional traffic to your site, pulling in people who are looking for images as well as content.

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Advanced Marketing Institute has a free Emotional Marketing Value Headline Analyzer for analyzing the emotional marketing value of a headline. It’s great for finding good fit alternatives for speeches, blogs, newsletters, and articles. Just type in your headline, and it will give you an “emotional rating” for the title based on your word choice. It takes just a few seconds, and has proven helpful for crafting a good title: http://www.aminstitute.com/headline/.

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1) Almost all literary agents are listed in The Publishers Market Place or LMP, a huge, expensive, 1,229 page volume which you should be able to find in a public library. It contains their actual and email addresses, and a brief description of the kinds of book they represent as well as titles recently placed.

2) Approach an agent with both an email and letter that cogently describes your book – the description should not take more than a paragraph or two – followed by a brief bio that makes clear why you have the authority (called a platform) to write the book if it is nonfiction. Or a brief description of your novel in which the premise shouts, “Yes, I would like to read that manuscript.” Whatever you do, skip the hype. Big turnoff.

3) You need to able to send the agent a proposal that includes an overview, a table of contents in which you include a paragraph or two describing the contents of each chapter and two sample chapters if the work is nonfiction, or at least one hundred or more pages if a work of fiction.

4) Conduct a thorough search and list and describe the competition for your book, especially nonfiction, and spell out how your book is different. For fiction, name works similar or genres that were and are successful.

5) A way to find a potential agent appropriate for your work: cruise a book store, select a volume similar to yours and check out the acknowledgment page that often lists the name of the agent for that work. Then in your email and letter write that the recipient represented such and such work which you enjoyed reading and that your work is of the same genre and might be of particular interest to the agent.

6) Provide an estimate of the number of words of the work and length of time it would take to complete it.

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1. Make sure your page on Squidoo looks its absolute best. A polished page gets more results.

2. Don’t be afraid to promote and market your business and website through your profile or content.

3. Title your lenses effectively and use keywords to get attention.

4. Make the introduction and description captivating and helpful so people want to read more.

5. Add photos for visual interest in the description.

Want to read the additional tips? Go to: http://www.susangilbert.com/50-powerful-social-media-tactics-for-squidoo/.

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Be in the know and hear what the publishing insiders: Penny Sansevieri, CEO of Author Marketing Experts, Inc. – and her guests – have to offer in terms of tips and insights into the industry! Listen here. Publishing Insiders is now available on iTunes, so you can keep up with the show wherever you go! 2011 will kick off with a bang, with great shows full of tips:

* Branding: The Secret to Selling More Books – This show will air 01/11.

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So now you’re online and being “social” – what’s next? Well it’s time to gather your followers back to your website. Not online yet and wondering how to get there? This daylong session held Saturday, Jan. 29, 2011 in Denver will teach you all that and more!

· Would you like your book to be known all over the Internet?
· Would you like to sell more books online?
· Would you like to know how to maximize your book’s exposure on Blogs?
· Would you like to get higher rankings in Google?
· Would you like to Maximize and Monetize all of your social media efforts?

The presenter is Penny Sansevieri, the author of Red Hot Internet Publicity and From Book to Bestseller. She’s the CEO and founder of Author Marketing Experts, Inc., on the Advisory Board of AuthorU and is an internationally recognized book marketing and media relations expert. Penny is a sought after conference speaker and will answer any questions on current day marketing and publicity strategies for your books.

Learn more and register at http://www.meetup.com/authoru/calendar/14062933/.

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If you’re using Google Alerts to keep track of your mentions online, you might want to consider these tips. First, make sure that you’re using *all* keywords possible. By this I mean are you searching your book title(s), industry keywords, last name, website, and blog URLs? If you’re not, you should be. Also, when inserting URLs don’t use the www, just the address. So for example, if I’m using www.amarketingexpert.com, my Google Alerts will use the following keywords: amarketingexpert.com.

Here are a few keyword tips to help you narrow your search:

* If you’re looking for a specific pairing of words, you can either use the + sign or quotes.

* To identify a single word only, use the + sign before the word. So for, let’s say Twitter, you would use +twitter in your search box.

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Useful tips for an important social networking site that many have yet to take advantage of: http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/6-powerful-linkedin-marketing-tips-for-small-businesses/.

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We all think of the Internet as this global search tool and the importance of being listed “everywhere” – this is true, but have you ever checked your local listings? If you aren’t sure what sites you’re listed on try looking at getlisted.org. This site will tell you where you’re listed and how your listings are posted. You can also use the site to list your business, it’s free for the basic listing and around $30 a year for the enhanced version. You can also go to Yahoo local http://local.yahoo.com/ as well as Google local http://www.google.com/local/add/analyticsSplashPage?gl=US&hl=en-US and add your company.

So why do you even care about local search? Well, getting a good local listing can also help give you another opportunity to appear in your favorite search engine. Even if your company is “global” as many companies are these days, this local search is still a good thing to have.

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Want to know what your website visitors see on your site? Take a look at Google’s new tool, the “Above the Fold” look at your site. Go to http://browsersize.googlelabs.com/ and enter your URL. You will see your site overlaid with areas that represent 99%, 98% and so on of the browser sizes used on the Web (based on Google tracking). You might be surprised to find that half of what you think your visitors see goes completely off the page!

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Book Authors, book publishers and other book peeps on Twitter: http://www.highspotinc.com/blog/2009/02/a-directory-of-authors-on-twitter and here: http://www.highspotinc.com/blog/2008/12/a-directory-of-book-trade-people-on-twitter.

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If you’ve got a Reader Tip you’d like to share, please send it to penny@amarketingexpert.com with the subject line “reader tip.” Submissions should be 75 words or less.

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Author Marketing Experts, Inc. is a full-service book marketing, promotion, and publicity company. We serve authors at all stages of marketing and promotion. We offer a full range of packages and services to choose from.

To see a price list or schedule a free consultation, send your e-mail to penny@amarketingexpert.com with the subject line “Author Services Info.” You can also visit our website at www.amarketingexpert.com.

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Reprinted from “The Book Marketing Expert newsletter,” a free ezine offering book promotion and publicity tips and techniques. http://amarketingexpert.com/

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—– Copyright 2010 Author Marketing Experts, Inc. —–
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Contact Information

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email: penny@amarketingexpert.com

web: http://amarketingexpert.com/

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