Starting today, every Wednesday we will host Book Marketing Experts who will share their knowledge and views with our BookBuzzr authors and readers. Through this new section they will share marketing tips and techniques. We will also have authors sharing their learning and experience in book marketing.
Without further ado let me handover to our guest Book Marketing Expert – Tony Eldridge.
Creating A Marketing Hub
I want to thank the people behind BookBuzzr for inviting me to share some thoughts with you about marketing your book. There are a number of things you can do, as I’m sure the line-up of writers they have on tap will share with you. Today, I want to discuss something that many authors don’t consider when creating a web presence: creating a marketing hub for your online presence.
Once you are online, it’s not long before you branch out to other online sites. You may start with a blog, but then you add a website, an Amazon author profile, and of course a Twitter account. Within a month, you are managing 30 profiles, all as distinct entities.
My advice is to choose a hub that you want all of your online marketing efforts to flow into. This will help you structure your online presence and deal with each one efficiently. The hub does not have to be a website. For example, my hub is my blog. I flow everything to my blog, and from there, I redirect everything back out to my other sites: Info about my newsletter, novel, my Twitter course, etc…
When deciding on a hub, ask yourself these questions:
- Where do I want to focus most of my attention: A blog? A website? A social networking site?
- Where do I want to drive the main conversations around my book: Blog comments? Twitter? Facebook?
- What do I want to be the first impression of my brand?
- Does the site I am considering as a hub have the ability to for me to send out messages to all my followers/subscribers?
- Does my hub have the ability for people to easily message or comment to me?
- Is my hub a natural interactive home?
Once you decide on a hub, you then need to think of your other sites as spokes, or spurs leading to your hub. For example, most social networking sites let you display your URL. As much as possible, this should be your hub site. You are building a lot of tributaries that you want to flow into your massive, raging river.
If you try to communicate to each of these spur sites with the same message, you will be setting yourself up for a lot of duplication and work. But once you have your network in place, you can then look for ways to automate your messages. For example, when I post a new blog, the title goes to Twitter automatically. The post also goes to my FaceBook page and to all my Ning groups automatically (thanks to FeedBurner). Even my YouTube profile allows me to push messages to my other sites when I post a new video. (By the way, feel free to visit my YouTube profile to see many of my old video Marketing Tips, including how to set up a FeedBurner account.)
Of course, choosing a hub does not mean that you totally ignore your other sites, or that you never directly interact with the spur sites. What it does is bring some sort of structure to what could be a very chaotic presence if you just start to add social sites with no planning.
One thing I love about BookBuzzr is that it makes sharing your book excerpts with other sites so easy. You can post the widget on your hub and then with a few clicks of the mouse, send it down to all your spur sites in seconds. Of course, when you set up your BookBuzzr profile, you will want to point it to your hub.
I hope that this helps give you a “big picture” of how you can organize yourself on the net. With a little planning, you will be surprised at how many people you can touch base with by exerting minimal effort. All this frees up more time for you to do what you do best… write more books.
Tony Eldridge is the author of the award winning action/adventure novel, The Samson Effect, which Clive Cussler calls a “first rate thriller brimming with intrigue and adventure.” He is also the creator of Marketing Tips for Authors, a site that publishes free tips and videos to help authors learn marketing techniques for their books. You can read Chapter 1 of his latest book, Conducting Effective Twitter Contests on BookBuzzr. You can also sign up for his free video tips newsletter and get access to over 45 minutes of free video tips instantly just for signing up now.
