Wise Moves for Savvy Entrepreneurs
Here’s a great technique for effectively promoting yourself online
I recently had the honor of being featured on Colleen M. Story’s motivational website, Writing and Wellness. When Colleen approached me for an interview, I was eager to participate. Suffice it to say that this author loves to have a spotlight on her work! What I didn’t understand when I agreed to work with Colleen was that she was about to give me so much more than publicity. She was about to give me a master class on how to use social media to effectively promote myself online. And if that’s not enough, she also modeled a fabulous technique for driving visitors to a website.
As we started to work together, Colleen emailed me eight questions about how I manage physical and emotional wellness as a writer/artist. She also asked about my challenges and triumphs as an author. I answered the questions and sent them to her. She then turned my comments into a post for her website. Looking at it, you will see that she used a style highly recommended for online writers: Each section of the “interview” has its own subheading to announce it.
Breaking up the text like that makes it less dense and easier to read online, but more importantly, it breaks the bigger story into little pieces that can be promoted separately. Colleen then showed me — by example — exactly how to do that.
Here are the five topics she pulled from my story. If the topic has an asterisk by it, this means Colleen illustrated that topic twice.
- I worked to get my name out there!
- How my book marketing efforts panned out.
- The biggest challenge of my writing journey is trying to balance everything.*
- I definitely recommend public speaking to authors.*
- Instead of crying about my book not being a best seller, I rejoice in my successes.
Using cartoons, GIFs, and photos, here are the seven promotional posts she created:
Please note that each image has the following:
- A link to me — @LorieKEckert — which then gets her post in front of my followers
- Hashtags that vary to give the story wide exposure
- The same bit.ly link which will take readers to the story on Colleen’s website
Take a minute to let this sink in. There are seven vastly different posts here that will appeal to vastly different people, yet all send the reader back to the same underlying blog.
Prior to learning this from Colleen, whenever I promoted my book, Love, Loss, and Moving On, I used an image of myself and/or my book. That’s pretty standard fare. As you will see below, Colleen used that concept too. But let’s get real here. I am not a celebrity. I am not widely known. So, who is going to click on a story about me? Meanwhile, the fun GIFs and cartoons and photos that Colleen uses just might attract a reader or two.
By the way, Colleen’s promotion of my story went from 2/20/20–3/4/20. In that period, she posted eleven times. (She used the “I’m Networking!” and “Cashier Pay Here” images twice.) I was thrilled with all the exposure and even more thrilled with still another lesson learned about marketing: Once is not enough. We need to get our message before the consumer’s eyes multiple times.
So many lessons! But there’s still one more and it’s ENORMOUS. Before I tell you about it, let me prove how easy it is to follow in Colleen’s footsteps by showing some of the posts I have created to promote my book using her methodology. (Note: The active links in my four posts look different, but both take the reader to Amazon.)
Are you prepared for one more terrific lesson from Colleen? Here it is: As online entrepreneurs, we are told that driving people to our website is all important. On the simplest level, it gets people to sign up for our mailing list. But of course, it also exposes people to the things we promote and sell on our websites. So here is Colleen’s true genius, when she promoted me eleven different times on social media, she also drove visitors to her website eleven times! Once there, we had the opportunity to:
- Download a free course
- Buy her book, Writer Get Noticed
- Buy her other book, Overwhelmed Writer Rescue
- Hire her to give a motivational speech or keynote address
- Hire her to lead a workshop
It does not escape my attention that Colleen has offered many authors the opportunity to be spotlighted on her website, which is the epitome of a win/win situation.
For the moment, I am using Colleen’s technique to drive people to Amazon to buy my book, but you better believe I am thinking of ways to use her technique to drive people to my website. Follow the leader might be a game for kids, but when you find a leader of this caliber, it’s a wise move for savvy entrepreneurs.
*****
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