3 Dangerous Book Marketing Ideas which Drain Your Bank Account

Bookmarks...jewelry...spa items...promo items in general...

You can put your book cover or author name on anything nowadays and though these items do get a lot of attention (Who doesn't like free stuff, huh?) are they a worthy investment? Are you wasting your money on these items and not seeing a large return on sales?

Here are 3 Dangerous Book Marketing Ideas which Drain Your Bank Account...followed up by suggestions on how to better invest your money, get more attention for your books and still get the write-offs.

Attn: Bloggers - Please Put a Search Feature on Your Site

Blogging Tip: Search Feature

This post is primarily for bloggers, but this can apply to authors, too, because they usually have their own websites and blogs as well.

I'm going to get to the point immediately: PLEASE PUT A SEARCH FEATURE ON YOUR WEBSITE or BLOG.

Why? Because the next question will be a mute point and make everyone's life easier.

Is Your Blog Easy To Navigate?

That question is SO relative, it's insane. Everyone is used to whatever websites they visit and if something isn't in the same place as the websites THEY visit, they're going to get frustrated and leave. So, you can do all the research you want to on what's commonly found on websites similar to yours--and you'd do yourself some service (and your visitors) if you did such research--but someone will inevitably have a hard time finding something on your website.

So what do you do as a fail safe for any visitor?

Include a SEARCH feature for your site. On WordPress, it should just be an easy drag-and-drop widget you can load into your sidebar. On Blogger, it's in the design section. Admittedly, I have one on this blog but it doesn't seem to be working as of late. Not sure why. I'll have to investigate, but it sounds like a Blogger.com issue, not an Arial issue.

As an author, when I've been featured on someone's blog - either a review, a cover reveal or a book tour - it is so difficult to refer people to the blog where I've been featured if all I have is the main address. Since I know many bloggers publish a lot of posts in one day, I can't expect them to put my post at the top where it's easy to find. And if I don't get the permalink for the feature, I have to go to the website and search for it...if there is a search feature. If I don't have a search feature, it's a lot more work on my end to go to Google and HOPE it shows up on the search.

If you don't have a search feature, you lose that extra traffic to your site...and isn't that part of why you're featuring an author? To drive traffic? Help yourself and do this one thing...PAH-LEEZ!

Social Media Information

PLEASE make your social media information easy to find, too. If you don't know how to create buttons for the various platforms (e.g., Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, etc.), then you should be able to create a hyperlink easily enough. Put it on your CONTACT page or in your sidebar.

Okay, I'm done ranting.

That's my two pence...

How to Do an Automatic Tweet Campaign - Part 3

Hopefully, this will be the last in this series. I'm also hoping the headings of the articles make it easy for you to skip parts you might already know. Here are the other parts of the series if this is your first stop:

• How to Do an Automatic Tweet Campaign - Part 1
• Twitter Works and tips as to why
• Adding a personal touch to your tweets
• Introduction to Hootsuite (and how to use the Bulk Scheduler for FREE)
• An overview of bulk scheduling
• How to Do an Automatic Tweet Campaign - Part 2
• How to Schedule a Tweet in Hootsuite
• The Rules of Bulk Scheduling in Hootsuite

Creating Your First Campaign

I'll recap the 50,000 foot view mentioned in Part 1:

1. Create a Hootsuite account (Hopefully, you've done this by now)
2. Populate an MS Excel spreadsheet with your tweets (template below)
3. Upload the spreadsheet into Hootsuite's Bulk Scheduler
4. Sit back and relax, feeling accomplished *sigh*

Finding the Original Spreadsheet Template

As I stated, Hootsuite provides a template, and I'll show you how to get to that template. DO NOT follow these steps unless you're ready to actually start your 7-day trial. For now, just check out these screenshots and instructions. I have a modified spreadsheet you'll use instead (linked below).

Twitter Hashtags and How To Use Them

Twitter Expert? Hardly!

(This is a republication of the article I posted on my reader blog.)

I'm going to state right up front...I am no Twitter expert. I will say, however, having just recently come to finally understand the concept of how Twitter works AND how other people use Twitter, I'm able to grasp the concept of how it can help me communicate with readers. With that said, if anyone else has anything they can add or correct me on, please leave comments. We can all be better at using this amazing social networking venue if we all pitch in.

Since I'm a fiction author, I'll be sharing this information from the perspective of novels and that portion of the publishing industry, so this article is probably more geared toward the fiction author who wants to learn how to use Twitter to get the word out about their novels, but the concepts covered here can be applied to almost anything, so read on. This article is long, but covers the following topics (click topic to go straight to it, BUT click the MORE button below if you're not in the actual article.):

• The Purpose of Twitter
• How to Use Twitter - The #Hashtag
• Hashtags for Author, Readers, Writing and Publishing
• Leveraging Mentions and Twitter Names
• How to Run a Twitter Campaign (which mentions some Twitter Clients that make using Twitter easier)