WOW! Are you as busy as I have been lately? I am sure you are! But on the road to success, you need to implement action to get there. Cheers to taking action!
Now that I have you all revved up and motivated, time to get this week’s post started.
If you had a chance to read my last post, you know that the next few posts are all about building and marketing your author platform (artist platform, business platform, etc. etc. – you can easily replace my “author” for what fits you).
Believe it or not, I am Marketing student and I truly love this stuff. There is so much I have learned from the classes I have taken and just researching and reading various articles online on my own.
But I am definitely the giving/sharing type, so I really hope you find the information I share with you not only helpful, but useful.
That said, let’s get started!
This week’s post is all about creating a positive online footprint. Whether you realize it or not, just simply being online right now, you are creating an online footprint. From leaving a comment on my blog posts, to creating profiles on social media, those are all forms of online footprints.
What I want to share are 4 tips that will help you create a positive spin on that footprint.
1. Determine your plan of action. With anything you do, you want to develop a plan of action laying out your goals and how you plan to reach those goals. The same strategy will not necessarily work for everybody, so you want to tailor yours to what you hope to achieve and what works for you. Point in case, I ultimately would love for my novel to have great sales and achieve #1 status for my literary niche. To do that, I may or may not need to create a profile with Instagram, which is a social network geared toward image marketing. That actually might be a better network to join for someone in graphic design than an author. Just remember, your plan is a foundation and can be changed as you deem necessary.
2. Create your landing point. You have your goals and you know how you want to reach them. I hope, within that plan you included a web page or site for you and your product. This website, Ameehsal MindSpeaka, is not only my website, but landing point. Speaking from an author’s viewpoint, your website not only is a venue to market your books, but also where you introduce yourself to your audience. An author website is an excellent way to help your audience get to know you better and blogging is a great way to interact and build your platform. On top of that, your books are always available for purchase, even when you are not there to finalize the transaction.
3. Profile yourself through social media. Although I will get more into using social media networks as a marketing tool later in this series, social media is how you will reach your niche audience and interact with them (also covered more in depth in a future post). You definitely want to create profiles on any of the social networks that will help you express your personal brand. Some major social networks are Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, and YouTube. This is definitely not all of them, but, again, I will go deeper into using those networks in a future post. I would advise you using the same the name you use for your website for all your profiles to maintain consistency and help with building your personal brand recognition.
Note to authors: It is recommended that you definitely create an Author Page on Facebook and Amazon, if you haven’t already.
4. Stay Engaged! This is most important, because this is where sustaining that positive online footprint comes into play. You want to keep your action plan fluid, your creative landing point current, and social profiles active. When someone searches for you, your product, or company, you want all this positive to top the searches, over something less flattering. As an author, when someone searches my name, I would prefer my website, books, or reviews to pop-up within those first few screens, as oppose to a not so positive or even relevant comment my name was linked to.
That’s pretty much it! These are the same things I am doing, although I kind-of side-stepped the first one of determining my plan of action. I assure you though, I have circled back around to that starting point and have been on a more solid foundation since.
If you enjoyed this post and the information presented, I would love for you to leave a comment below. If you think I am way off base, tell me! I am always up to learn more. Last, if I missed anything, you can put that in the comments, too!
See you next week when I cover developing an online presence!
~MindSpeaka
Photo Credit: Digital Family Summit
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