Build a Platform Without Steroidal Fluff

#blogging #platform #social media

Building a platform often includes creating a blog. First time bloggers are usually overwhelmed and have no clue where to start. Let’s take a look at a few ideas that will get you successfully started on building your platform.

First, you need to ask yourself a few questions:

• Do you have time to create a blog?
• Are you committed to maintaining a blog?
• Will you bring something new to an already over-saturated market?
• Can you adapt to market trend changes?
• Do you see blogging as a burden?

Social media is booming and everyone feels like they need a platform. Blogs and podcasts are all over the web and it seems like everyone is concerned with content. People think beyond words when it comes to blogging. Content includes videos, images, and podcasts. In order for your blog to attract interest, you must provide information that people want. Merely creating steroidal fluff will get you criticized and ignored.

Your blogging content needs:

Valued Information – Share content that you have learned and are knowledgeable. Teach others what you know. Try not to sound like everyone else. This will help establish credibility, trust and likability.

Creative Mixture – Your blog must keep visitors interested and entertained. Utilize images, photos and videos to get your points across in an exciting and creative way.

Distinction – Separate yourself from others by approaching your topic from different angles. Don’t be afraid to allow other knowledgeable colleagues to guest post on your blog. This will help you gain access to new patrons that might not otherwise visit your blog.

Consistency – Blogging once a month is unacceptable as readers will forget about you or lose interest. Most readers have a reading schedule, so post a schedule for your blog and stick to it. Blogging 2 to 3 times a week should be sufficient.

Organization – Readers who find your blog for the first time will want additional information similar to what initially landed them on your blog. Creating static web pages with your best posts in various categories is an excellent way to organize an archived system. Have a search feature in the sidebar to make it easy for readers to find what they are looking for.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – While it is important to get your pages ranked higher on a web search, steroidal fluff stuffed with multiple keywords in your titles and posts could backfire on you. Google may drop your site in the rankings and you and your site could be labeled unreliable and untrustworthy. The best SEO is creating original content that is relevant and helpful with a few select keywords.

Using Hashtags to Sell Books

#hashtags #socialmedia #SMM

If you are trying to sell orand promote books, or any other product or service, you need to be using hashtags with every promotional tweet and social media post. 

What is a Hashtag?

Even if you are not on Twitter, you may have seen the little hashtag symbol with the pound sign (#) in front of a word or a combination of letters and numbers such as #ff, #news, #jobs, #icarly, #glee, etc. These hashtags are used to identify and keep up with conversations and news about specific topics. Think of hashtags like the tags used to identify articles, blog posts and Amazon products for topics or items in a search. While hashtags originated on Twitter, it is no longer the only place where hashtags are used. Hashtags are now used on Facebook, Google+, Pinterest, Instagram and LinkedIn.   

Building an online platform is hard. You have to be creative in order to be heard above the noise of your competitors and all the nonsense conversations on social media these days. Lets face it, now that people can self-publish so easily, it seems like there are more authors than readers. 

Readers only have so much time between working, raising a family, and living. No avid reader has time to read all the books on his/her TBR pile. They have to pick and choose due to finances and time. As a result, some books and authors will never be read as often as others. Therefore, you have to use every available resource and tool to increase your chances of being noticed by readers searching for books. Hashtags can help you beat out some of your competition, especially those who aren't using them. 

How to Use Hashtags

1) Put hashtags above the first line of text or in the first sentence. Do this because when the blog post is shared on social media sites, it pulls the title of the blog post and the first line of text. See the examples at the beginning of this blog post. It may seem strange, but it works. 

2) Register your personal hashtags. While you can't buy or own hashtags like a domain name, you can register it with Twubs.com or Hashtag.org to better manage your personal hashtag related to you or your books. Use a term to represent your author name and/or each individual book you write or even a series. This will help you keep up with the flow of responses and discussions around your books during new book launches and/or campaigns. Here is an example of a hashtag I created for a series of books #MacGregorLegacy. 

3) Use common book related hashtags.While it's a wonderful idea to create and register your own hashtags, some common hashtags will also bring readers to your blogs and social media sites. For instance, bloggers who post on the CFBA Blog Tour, include hashtags such as #christianfiction and/or #christianromance. This allows them to promote other authors' books, and at the same time, lure reads to their site to discover other books as well. For a list of book related hashtags, click here. 

4) Use the #SampleSunday or #TeaserTuseday hashtags to post short excerpts to introduce your work to new readers. The Sample Sunday idea originally came from David Wisehart, but it took off with other authors. Since then Sharon Rose created a Sample Sunday Facebook page. You can read more about the idea here. Some authors post first chapters to promote their books. Why not take it a step further and post sentences or paragraphs each Sunday or Tuesday, leading up to and through a book launch for the first chapter? 

Are you using hashtags? Have you ever registered a hashtag? 

The REAL Deal with SEO Marketing

You've probably seen the online articles and Twitter tweets about improving SEO performance, but what does it REALLY mean beyond the acronym of Search Engine Optimization?

It's improving the visibility of your website through a natural, organic process that doesn't cost money, but be assured, it WILL cost time.

Marketing is an ongoing process and you'll never be able to do enough of it. Therefore, unless you have unlimited funds to spend on buying top search engine placement, you'll need to spend some time improving your site's rankings and page algorithm. When people search for a term, they aren't going to click on hundreds of pages until your site pops up in the listing. This is why you want your site to come up as high as possible in the rankings, hopefully the first page or the first few pages.

However, don't get too caught up in "rankings" since it is only one algorithm used to upload pages to key search words. If you have enough "quality" backlinks linking key search terms to your page or site, it's possible for your site to beat a higher ranking site on that particular key search term. You need to consider the top search words and phrases people will use to find your site. Incorporate them into your html, your blog posts, headers, tags, etc.

Here are a few techniques to improve your site's rankings and algorithm:
1) Cross Linking - This is linking pages within the same website or blog. Examples of  this would be creating a sitemap, a resource center of links to previous articles, archives, top visited posts, etc.

2) Multiply Incoming Links - You want to get as many "quality" sites linking to your website/blog as possible. This is sometimes called Deep Linking. It tells the search engines that you have a lot of worthwhile content. Ways to improve this are offering guest posts to other blogs, uploading your archived articles to other ezines and allowing your articles to be reposted by other bloggers as long as they use your byline and link back to your page.

3) Write Good Content - Make sure blog posts and/or articles contain frequently searched keywords and phrases, but don't overdo it to the point that you get your site banned by the search engines. Just make sure each page contains your key search terms for that page at least twice.

4) Update Content Often - This lures the search engines back to your site to crawl over your content and re-index it. It also builds traffic. This is another reason why it would be better to blog at least 3 times per week.

5) Multiple Domains - Search engines only list one page per domain, therefore, if you have several topics that are strong enough to support their own site, go for it. Examples of this are ministries, author sites, homeschooling pages, and side businesses. I own two author domains, www.jenniferhudsontaylor.com and www.authorjenniferhudsontaylor.com. Also, I own a few more business domains. They all link into each other.


6) Strategize Anchor Links - It may be tempting to anchor as many links as possible to your url, but to the search engines it may look like automation and could result in getting your site banned from search engines. Therefore, use your url, but also link to various pages on your site. Include links to your individual book page, speaker page, bio, and archived articles where appropriate.

7) Use Text Links - Even where you've used an image to link to another page or site, be sure to include a text link above the image as well. Spiders and webcrawler search engines pick up text links first, so list them above the image, not below.

8) Use Frames & Flash Sparingly - So many people have switched to using frames and flash to develop their sites, but they don't allow links to individual pages. It's all or nothing.

9) Truth About Paid Links - Unless the paid link is embedded in the body text and not obvious sponsored links, it does nothing to improve your SEO. It only provides a few clicks to your site. So if you pay for a link, be sure to place it on a quality site and have realistic expectations.

10) SEO is Daily - Be aware that the landscape for search engines changes daily, therefore, you must expect to work on your SEO daily. At least keep it in mind for each blog post and each time you update your site/blog.