Wednesday, 22 March 2017

How to Promote Your Blog Through Social Media

Allan Wang M.D., social media guru at Owerly.com, asked me to describe how I market my blog to build my business and get the word out about my Amazon No. 1 bestselling books.

Owerly.com teaches Internet Marketing strategies through live streaming videos.

For just $1, you can sign up for unlimited access to their training videos about affiliate marketing, followed by $19.95 a month afterwards. Through their library you will learn all about search engine optimization, Facebook pay per click advertising, Instagram, glamour photography, Google pay per click and much, much more.

I had the privilege of meeting Allan Wang in person at Social Media Marketing World in San Diego this week. We’re both here to learn from the world’s top experts.

In this interview, I reveal some of my top secrets for content marketing through my blogs that has allowed me to increase my main business as a medical intuitive healer 32 percent in 2016 over 2015.

Join our program at What Is Social Media Today 

Putting all this together takes time and is part of creating a successful social media strategy.

We’ve got four ways for you to learn:

  • Weekly webinars that you can join LIVE or listen to at your convenience
  • One on one coaching
  • Peer competition
  • A forum with resources where all your questions can get answered

Join Catherine Carrigan and Ramajon Cogan at www.whatissocialmediatoday.com and we will show you how! Call Catherine Carrigan today at 678-612-8816 or email catherine@catherinecarrigan.com or contact Ramajon Cogan at (928) 821-4553 or email wheresramajon@gmail.com.

 

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Friday, 17 March 2017

Guest Chuck Moran: How to Optimize Your Website for Social Media

Chuck Moran, owner and chief bad guy at Bald Guy Studio, offers some great tips about how to optimize your website for social media. For over 40 years, Chuck has worked in marketing, website design and social media. Here are his recommendations from a webinar he taught our entrepreneurs at www.whatissocialmediatoday.com.

Your Website Isn’t About You

“This may be hard to swallow but your website isn’t about you,” Chuch Moran observes.

“It’s really important that we flip the script and figure out what it is that our visitors want. That’s way more important than what we want to say.”

To find your customer avatar, Chuck recommends completing the steps at this link from www.digitalmarketer.com.

“Find the core person you are trying to speak to,” Chuck advises. “Then you can create content and directly attract that person to your website.

“Address pain points OR help people achieve aspiration.”

Your Home Page Should Help Your Visitor Relax

“Your home page is super crucial,” Chuck observes.

If, for example, your company sells roofing, you must recognize that your customer is stressed looking for solutions to their pain point, which is they have a damaged roof.

“You want that visitor to calm down and feel ‘I’m in the right place.’ As soon as she hits the website she’s going to feel better and relax.”

Chuck recommends clean minimalist design with brief text. Short blurbs can link to longer pages.

A great example is Chuck’s own home page.

“Don’t put a lot of content on your home page. People don’t have time for it.

“Use bright colors or ones that complement your brand or cook cover. Use big bold type for headlines.

“Body text should be 16 point and even 18 point is ok. I’s annoying for people to be stuck on a website we have to get up close to see.”

Make Sure Your Website Is Mobile Phone User Friendly

“About 80 percent of internet users own a mobile phone,” Chuck says.

“More searches are conducted on mobile phones than computers and tablets. The tipping point occurred three years ago.”

We have to make sure that visitors can pinch and zoom our website even from their mobile phones.

If you don’t make your website user-friendly for mobile phones, realize that Google will punish you in your search engine rankings because they want their customers to have the best possible experience.

Make Sure Your Website Loads Quickly

Your website should take no more than 6 to 8 seconds to load from a desktop, laptop or tablet computer and even less time from a mobile phone.

“We have to remember that we now have the attention span of a goldfish. We have no patience for websites that don’t load in 6 to 8 seconds,” Chuck says. “In 2 to 4 second somebody needs to see someone or they are gone.

“Research shows 61 percent of users are unlikely to go to a mobile site they had trouble accessing and 40 percent are likely to visit a competitor.”

To test how fast your website loads, you can turn to the following websites:

tools.pingom.com

gtmetrix.com

Google PageSpeed

Chuck likes the web hosting site siteground.com because it’s reasonably priced at around $3.95 per month and loads websites quickly.

Optimize Your Images

Your images should be as small as possible without sacrificing quality.

“Bigger images take up room on the server and slow down your load speed,” Chuck says.

Chuck recommends the following resources for images:

Free, do-what-you-want photos:
Beautiful photos: https://unsplash.com/
Fun and quirky images: http://gratisography.com/
Graphics:

Create shareable graphics: https://www.canva.com/

Infographic maker: https://piktochart.com/

File names, titles and alt tet are all part in improving your search engine optimization (SEO). The alt text is the field that gets read out to people who have visual impairments. Make sure you fill that out when you load images into your website.

Email Marketing Is Key

“Your website and your email list are really the only platforms are completely under your control,” Chuck says. “When you build your social media you are building platforms on rented land.”

Chuck recommends that we add email marketing to our social media mix to drive people to our website.

Make sure you have a box on your website to capture website addresses for your email list.

Give away what’s called a lead magnet in exchange for somebody handing over their email address.

Secure Your Website Against Bad Guys

Make sure you don’t use “admin” for your log in name or “password” for your password.

Be sure to check your website several times a week to make sure everything is up to date.

Chuck recommends Wordfence plug in for security on WordPress websites.

Authors and Small Business Owners Can Get A New Website for $3,500

Chuck Moran and his team offers what he calls an author starter kit for $3,500.

If you already have a website, he can update your current site for $1,000 to $1,500. Chuck recommends you update your website about once a year.

To see a great example of an author website Chuck and his team put together, you can visit JeffreyKwalker.com.

Get A FREE Analysis of Your Website

Want a FREE analysis of your website? Send an email to chuck@baldguystudio.com. In the subject line, please write “Let’s Do This!” and Chuck will be happy to give you a FREE 15-minute consultation about what needs to be improved on your current website.

You can also reach Chuck at (434) 825-8921.

Cooperate with Us and Win Even Bigger

Putting all this together takes time and is part of creating a successful social media strategy.

We’ve got four ways for you to learn:

  • Weekly webinars that you can join LIVE or listen to at your convenience
  • One on one coaching
  • Peer competition
  • A forum with resources where all your questions can get answered

Join Catherine Carrigan and Ramajon Cogan at www.whatissocialmediatoday.com and we will show you how! Call Catherine Carrigan today at 678-612-8816 or email catherine@catherinecarrigan.com or contact Ramajon Cogan at (928) 821-4553 or email wheresramajon@gmail.com.

 

 

 

 

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Monday, 6 March 2017

Guest Tim Lewis, Self Publishing Expert: Why You Need the Long Game in Social Media

 

Time travel author and podcast host Timothy Michael Lewis joined our webinar on Saturday, March 4, to share his insights about social media marketing.

Tim hosts Begin Self Publishing Podcast and has built up 90 episodes about every conceivable aspect of self publishing in 2017.

“After my wife died in 2011 (she had a stroke in 2009 and became severely disabled) I continued working for a few years but decided life was too short for doing a job I no longer found interesting,” Tim reports.
“I put my notice in 2013 and originally intended to look for contract work in IT.  However in my notice period I read the book Write, Publish, Repeat (The No-Luck-Required Guide to Self-Publishing Success) (The Smarter Artist Book 1) (by the creators of the self-publishing podcast) and I decided instead to write and self-publish fiction instead.
“In the three years that have followed I have self-published three time travel novellas (the Timeshock series) and two fantasy novels in the Magpies and Magic series.
“The final part of the Magpies and Magic series is coming out this summer and I will be switching into full marketing mode before its release.  It will be hard as the previous books in that series have never really sold well (unlike the first series that did sell well for a while) – I know the marketing struggle of authors all too well.
“Since summer 2015 I’ve recorded 90 episodes weekly of the Begin Self-Publishing Podcast, including interviews with Jay Baer, Mark Schaefer and Joanna Penn and a host of other people in marketing and self-publishing.

Some of Tim’s top advice about assembling a social media strategy:

  1. Adopt a long game. Don’t expect to just throw up a few posts on Facebook and Twitter and expect to get anywhere.
  2. Everybody needs to be in community.
  3. Twitter is fantastic for making connections. Create lists in Twitter of people you want to follow.
  4. Get over the idea in the beginning that nobody is listening to your podcast or reading your blog. You have to start building your content to become well known.
  5. Read the book Known: The Handbook for Building and Unleashing Your Personal Brand in the Digital Age by Mark W. Schaefer. 
  6. Be consistent with your blogging. Try to blog at least once a week.
  7. Tim typically takes three great quotes from his show and makes audio clips that he posts throughout his social network.
  8. He then goes to Canva.com and creates images from the quotes that he shares throughout his social network to build his audience.
  9. Analyze everything. Look at what you are doing in social media. Figure out what works and what doesn’t work and give your audience more of what succeeds.
  10. Live broadcasts on Facebook, Periscope and Instagram are becoming increasingly popular. “Live video is the way to go at the moment,” Tim observes.
  11. Get over your insecurity about putting yourself in front of a camera.
  12. In the old days, you would have had to go out drinking or learn how to play golf to make quality business connections. Now we can just connect to folks through social media.
  13. Don’t just use automated tools to broadcast your messages. Connect with people as much as possible.
  14. If you have a podcast, create a Youtube version of it to increase your audience.
  15. Tim gets the greatest number of listeners from his Facebook page which you can like at this link, however his favorite social media channel is Twitter.
  16. Follow Tim on Twitter at this link. While you are there, follow his Twitter lists. That way you can follow people who are influential in helping you build your career as a self published author.
  17. If he had to do it all over again, Tim would build his reputation as a blogger before launching his podcast, as he feels it’s easier to build your audience through blogging.

“In the beginning you kind of feel like you have walked out into the wildernesses and the sun is beating down on you and you don’t know how long you will spend wandering around,” Tim observes. “Keep going.”

You can listen to Begin Self Publishing podcast at this link. 

Cooperate with us and win even bigger. 

Putting all this together takes time and is part of creating a successful social media strategy.

We’ve got four ways for you to learn:

  • Weekly webinars that you can join LIVE or listen to at your convenience
  • One on one coaching
  • Peer competition
  • A forum with resources where all your questions can get answered

Join Catherine Carrigan and Ramajon Cogan at www.whatissocialmediatoday.com and we will show you how! Call Catherine Carrigan today at 678-612-8816 or email catherine@catherinecarrigan.com or contact Ramajon Cogan at (928) 821-4553 or email wheresramajon@gmail.com.

The post Guest Tim Lewis, Self Publishing Expert: Why You Need the Long Game in Social Media appeared first on What is Social Media Today.



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Benefits of Cooperation Among a Community of Writers

When I wake up in the wee hours to write, being alone is precisely the point.

The phone’s not ringing. None of my clients have started emailing or texting me yet.

In this quiet space I can focus on listening to my inner voice long enough to get words out of my head and into my laptop.

As much as I value this essential alone time, I also value the benefit of participation among a community of writers.

Wanting to be part of a larger group of people who do what I do is part of why I joined Tribewriters.com, why I have attended writer’s workshops like the ones organized by Tombird.com, why I’m a member of several Facebook and Google+ writing communities and why I enjoy going to lunch with fellow Amazon No. 1 bestselling authors like Maxine Taylor. 

Although I’m an INFJ, the counselor in Myers-Briggs types with the same personality profile as Plato, Mary Wollstonecraft, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Dante Alighieri, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Agatha Christie, Charlotte Brontë, J.K. Rowling, Carl Jung and Leo Tolstoy, you don’t have to be introvert to be a writer.

You just have to be alone to get the writing thing done.

For example, Tom Clancy is an ESTJ, Ernest Hemingway was an ESTP, Paul Coelho is an ESFP, Salman Rushdie is an ENFP, Johann von Goethe is an ENFj, Sheryl Sandberg is an ENTJ and Mark Twain was an ENTP.

Here at www.whatissocialmediatoday.com, a large portion of our clients are authors working to build the audience for their books and businesses.

Just as the world’s largest living organism, Pando the Trembling Giant, is a 106-acre single male quaking aspen, although we writers look like separate human beings we are in fact individual living breathing exemplars of the writer archetype.

As individual representatives of this writer archetype – just like Pando the Trembling Giant – we thrive more readily if we adopt an attitude of cooperation rather than competition especially in this digital age of social media, Youtube, movies, video games and multimedia.

Just as overgrazing from deer and elk threatens the quaking aspen, so do encroachments from multi media threaten the existence of books and thereby our very existence as writers.

The more we learn to band together – to act as one living breathing organism – the more likely our profession will continue to thrive.

A win-win attitude – an attitude of figuring out how I can benefit more than just myself – has long been part of my personal success principles.

When fellow Amazon No. 1 bestselling author Ramajon Cogan and I started www.whatissocialmediatoday.com, we incorporated this philosophy into our program to help people win what we call the Game of Social Media.

Here are the 4 C’s of cooperation for writers: co-creation, counseling, cross blogging and cross promotion.

Co-creation. It started all rather organically, but when I first began having lunch with my good friend and fellow Amazon No. 1 bestselling author Maxine Taylor we started giving each other great ideas.

“Maxine, you’re the one to beat,” I joke, pointing out that she has seven Amazon No. 1 bestsellers to my four.

“Oh honey,” Maxine will tell me, “that’s just because I’m older.”

Looking back Maxine set the example for me of how to be a generous author.

At one of our first lunches, she handed over the names of her Twitter guru, her editor and her Amazon marketing lady.

As our friendship progressed, we would get together and discuss the books we were working on. Maxine gave me plenty of good advice and has interviewed me on her show more than any other radio show host. 

As time went on Maxine asked my advice.

“What can I do to make more money?” was a question Maxine asked me that led to her producing a series of videos and articles that we collectively decided should be called the Trumpology report – astrological analysis of newly-elected President Donald Trump and his associates.

Soon enough Maxine asked me to do a series of medical intuitive readings about Donald Trump, Steve Bannon and Melania Trump with more to come. I wrote a blog about Donald Trump, another about White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon and yet another about first lady Melania Trump. 

Maxine and I have also worked together to develop the idea for the next book she’s writing.

Here at www.whatissocialmediatoday.com, we set up new clients with other people in our program because we recognize that co-creation with peers is part of how we get ahead.

You talk to your buddy during our live webinars and you share phone numbers and emails to encourage each other along the way.

Counseling. My Facebook friend Torin Sarasas is working on his first book. From time to time, he will email me to ask for advice.

Although it might appear at first glance that Torin would be the person most likely to benefit from these interactions, any time we take our time to reflect on what exactly is that we do as writers and how we get better, we study our own process and in doing so actually get better at it.

My fellow author Indika De Fonseka was stuck one day so he reached out to me through Facebook messenger. I subsequently wrote a blog about how I stay inspired to write, called “3 Ways to Go After Inspiration Other Than with a Club.”

Because there are so many ways to get stuck we can all benefit from counseling from time to time and nobody has the life experience to give you the insightful advice you need like a fellow author.

At www.whatissocialmediatoday.com our members have reported to us how much they appreciate the support they receive not just from fellow authors myself Catherine Carrigan and Ramajon Cogan but from other members of our program.

Cross blogging. I regularly and habitually encourage other author friends to cross blog with me. My rule is I will post one blog for you for every blog of mine you publish on your website.

The benefits of cross blogging are legion.

My fans learn about your books, your business, your world view.

Your fans discover my books, my business as a medical intuitive healer and absorb my opinions.

This is the epitome of win-win and nobody spends a dime on advertising.

This could be a seed of viral marketing, especially when we develop networks of authors willing to cross blog as I have.

Here at www.whatissocialmediatoday.com we encourage our members to give us blogs they have written that we post on our main website and we encourage our members to write not only for their own websites but also for each other.

Cross promotion. When Lynne Cockrum-Murphy launched her second book, she had the benefit not only of the knowledge she gained in our program of how to market through the social media, she also had the community of fellow authors to support her.

Unfolding the Mystery of Self reached No. 1 in one of her categories on Amazon even before the book launch officially started.

By the time it was all over, her new book had reached No. 1 in not just one but three categories.

Our community has cross blogged with her, shared her book throughout our Facebook friends and Twitter feeds and talked to each other about working through the nitty gritty details.

Not only had Lynne built her own tribe – she had our collective tribes to empower her to reach an even bigger market.

Cooperate with us and win even bigger. 

Putting all this together takes time and is part of creating a successful social media strategy.

We’ve got four ways for you to learn:

  • Weekly webinars that you can join LIVE or listen to at your convenience
  • One on one coaching
  • Peer competition
  • A forum with resources where all your questions can get answered

Join Catherine Carrigan and Ramajon Cogan at www.whatissocialmediatoday.com and we will show you how! Call Catherine Carrigan today at 678-612-8816 or email catherine@catherinecarrigan.com or contact Ramajon Cogan at (928) 821-4553 or email wheresramajon@gmail.com.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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