Category: Promo Tips

Balancing Industry and Promo Research and Writing

Business of Writing, Promo Tips, Uncategorized

by Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraigDSCN9582

I have been seriously buried lately trying to research and learn effective marketing practices for writers.  First, it takes a while to find the information you need. Then you have to absorb it.  Implementation also takes longer than you think because sometimes you don’t have all the needed elements in place (I needed to design a landing page and set up autoresponders through MailChimp).

Sources for information on smart marketing practices.

Author Mark Dawson with his site (Self Publishing Formula), which is currently dealing with Facebook advertising.  He has a free video series that leads us through it.Continue reading

Keywords for Visibility

Business of Writing, Promo Tips

By Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraigcapture 1

There’s an adage that states potential customers must see a marketing message seven times before deciding to purchase a product.

I’m someone who has to hear about a promo technique seven times before finally deciding to experiment with it.

Except in the case of Amazon keywords. I’ve read likely a couple of dozen blog posts on Amazon keywords.  Only now have I finally scraped up enough time to work on it.

Amazon, of course,  is a search engine.  There’s metadata involved, there’s SEO involved. We need to make our books visible to potential readers.Continue reading

Audio as a Means to Connect and Learn

Business of Writing, Promo Tips

by Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraigBlog5

It’s taken me a while to come around to enjoying audio and podcasting. I prefer to read transcripts of podcasts.  I skim, pick out the wheat from the chaff.  And then I move on to the next thing I’ve got to do.

But when I had a back injury last year…from sitting…ha…I unfortunately ended up spending a lot more time at the gym as a result. Podcasts are lovely ways to distract ourselves from the unpleasant task at hand. That unpleasant task might be the frustration of a traffic jam for those of us in urban areas, the boredom of a transit commute, or the tedium of exercise. And podcasts are often jam-packed with information.

For those who are interested in completely forgetting about the fact that they’re exercising (as I am), here are some of the podcasts I’ve enjoyed (mixture of writing business and writing craft):Continue reading

Attracting Readers to Our Newsletters

Business of Writing, Promo Tips

By Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraigDeathtoStock_EnergyandSerenity2

I may have been slow to the email newsletter party. I believe, in fact, that I was the last guest to show up.  I’m finally making up for lost time.

I mentioned recently that I’d actually decided to subtly promote my reader newsletter.  This may not really qualify as promotion since it actually means I’m helping readers just locate the newsletter signup. It was almost secret before. If readers somehow found their way to my website, perhaps they could miraculously locate my newsletter signup in my crowded sidebar.

Realizing that this was (however accidentally) rather anti-reader in approach, I thought the whole thing through a bit more.  I started putting my newsletter signup in my email signatures, on my profile at Wattpad, on Goodreads, on Facebook, and other places that readers were likely to congregate or look me up. I also pitched my newsletter on this site on the reader-oriented pages (books, buy my books, etc.) This has resulted in over 30 signups since I started this drive in mid-March.Continue reading

Observations from Years of Curating Content for Writers

Promo Tips

by Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraigblog 3

Since 2009, I’ve been adding blogs to my RSS reader and curating and sharing the best content that I could find for writers. That content resides on the Writers Knowledge Base (which is a free and searchable resource for writers with over 30,000 links on it).

In that time, I’ve seen a lot of blog posts. A lot of things have puzzled me, delighted me, and frustrated me. Some of this is random but I’m sharing it in the hopes that it can help some writers here or that maybe I could hear y’all’s take on these things too. Am I the only one who’s seen or experienced this stuff?Continue reading

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