This post is meant for all those who have advertised on this blog (MPS) and all those who are thinking about it! I want to give you an update on the site’s visitors’ stats.
The last time that I published site stats, it was a month or so ago and I was talking about 5,000 page-views a day…
Well, listen to this! Over the last six days, five days produced well over 7,000 page-views a day, and the other day was 6,968!
5,000 page-reads a day is not small fry, but 7,000-7,500 is fantastic!
This is AMAZING! But there are also new podcast listeners too!
So, book your advert and get in now before the rush, which is bound to happen with such stats – because advertisers current and previous are now getting 50% more value for money than they were last month
So, click the following link, read the deal and book your slot now, because prices may have to rise if demand outstrips the amount of time I have to do this work!
In this piece on PLR articles and the self-employed, we will choose a specific trades-person, say a carpenter, but the same principles apply equally well to any other self-employed tradesman or professional, such as computer engineer, lawyer and even dentist.
The basic concept is to use PLR articles that you have bought, possibly had written and use them in your advertising campaigns. If you have the time, you could write your own articles, but then, technically, you would not be using PLR in your advertising campaigns.
So, you need to find a reputable source of material. This can be difficult, so build a relationship with a writer who is prepared to do the necessary research and buy from him or her regularly. The best way of getting what you want is to suggest the titles yourself.
Go for a pack of fifteen, 500-word articles at a time because this will give your article marketing campaign a real punch and fifteen PLR articles are enough to do several other things with too which we will go into below. The articles should be useful, informative, but at 500 words, they will only give tantalising tastes of the subject matter.
The job of these PLR articles is to show that you know what you are talking about, not to teach the reader your professional skills! They should have the same tone as your web site and newsletter or blog, be that humorous or serious.
A carpenter can write on apprenticeship, tools, aspects of reading drawings, working on site, health and safety, customer relations, working in people’s homes, cleanliness, sharpening a chisel or saw, the different weights of hammers – there are dozens of topics for the self-emloyed, whatever jobs, trades or professions they have.
If you already have a web site, you can trickle-feed these articles into it at the rate of one a week. When they have been indexed by Google, say six weeks later, you can copy them to article databases with links back to your own web site in the author bio at the bottom, which will give you one-way backlinks to boost your sites rank.
If you do not have a web site, use five articles to create one. Add the articles to your newsletter too, because readers of that will probably very rarely go to your site, if they ever do – they don’t need to, do they?
The final stage is to create an ebook from the same PLR articles in order to reach a totally new audience again. You will have enough material for an ebook of about 8,000 words, so if you would prefer a longer book, get another batch of articles and when you have used them on your site and in your newsletter, you can add them to your book to raise it to 15-16,000 words, which you can sell on Amazon for $7-$10
You will soon recoup your outlay on the PLR articles from the sale of the books alone and you will be the author of a book on your chosen self-employed profession. You could publish one or two books a year and build yourself a worldwide reputation.
If you are looking for well-written PLR articles on niche subjects, Megan Publishing Services recommends The Niche PLR Collection, where you can choose from over 100 niche packs of 15 or more articles of 500-600 words each.
The Ultimate Promo Package is Megan Publishing Services’ prime advertising deal, which is designed to give a three-stage boost to the book or artwork that you want to promote.
NB: The Ultimate Promo Package is subject to limited availability because I need to read each book in order to provide a review – no more than one package a week (not per person – in total)!
Stage One: Lift off provides a powerful push to get your work noticed. Within a month, but at your own pace, we will produce an author interview, a book review, and a book sales’ page, which means that it will receive a random share of 30,000 banner adverts on MPS (Megan Publishing Services) a day and I will promote them on at least a dozen of the top Social media platforms
Stage Two: After-burner consists of creating six Tweets based on, and so uniquely relevant, to your work, which will be promoted across the Internet. The book review will be posted to Amazon US, Amazon UK and Goodreads. The Amazon US review will be available on ALL Amazon franchises around the world.
Stage Three: Cruising means promoting your work using three of your Tweets posted to my ever-growing band of 75,000 artistic reading and writing Twitter followers three times a day (every eight hours) for 365 days, which means that they will be seen potentially 82,125,000 times. Note that posting the Tweets every eight hours means complete global coverage within peak periods (due to the various time zones).
In short, the Ultimate Book Promo Package includes:
A review of your novel on my high-traffic website, Amazon and Goodreads (permanent placements).
Six Tweets based on your novel for you to use. I will send three of these Tweets to 75,000 of my followers three times a day for 365 days or at least 82,125,000 potential impressions.
An author interview about yourself and up to three of your books (permanent page).
A sales page for one of your books on Megan Publishing Services for one month.
Random banner ads out of approx 30,000 per day for one month (linked to sales page above).
Promotion of all website pages to more than a dozen Social Media accounts, including: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Livejournal, Plurk, Digg, Diigo, Tumblr, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Blogger, Surfit, Favoritus, Folk’d, G+, Favoritus and more.
First come, first served due to limited availability (I have to read the books myself, in between writing my own) – no more than one package per week!
If you are one of the growing number of creators of art without an agent, then you will have to do your own promotion. This was the realisation that I came to three years ago, when I joined the not always so merry throng of indie writers and artists. Promotion is tough and must be relentless, because it is so often futile.
Why do I say futile?
Because a lot of people’s promotional activity leads to nothing. The first example of pointless advertising that springs to mind is throwing up dozens of adverts like ‘Read My Fantastic Book’ on Facebook. I shouldn’t think that Facebook has sold one book for me in three years. So why do people keep doing it? (Myself included), because it’s easy and gives the satisfied feeling that you’re doing something. To be fair to us, a lot of automated advertising produces these useless ads too. Everything cross-posts these days.
Put a good ad-post on Tumblr and it’s automatically cross-posted to Twitter and Facebook, further adding to the junk posts that are already there. Sometimes less is more, as the saying goes. Cheese someone off once too often and you are consigned to the ‘undesirable alien’ bin, yet one of these ‘posts too many’ could have been an auto cross-post.
That’s how it goes, something else to bear in mind.
That’s not to say that Facebook is a waste of time, it clearly isn’t, since many, many people equate using it as ‘going online’ or even emailing. However, it doesn’t sell artwork well, but Twitter does.
Don’t ask me why the promotion of books works better there – I’m not sure, but I think it’s because a Tweet is short so people expect to have to click through to read more, which is where your sales buttons are. Once on Facebook, people don’t want to go out into the wild Internet. Facebook is a safe environment.
One of my wife’s girlfriends complained bitterly for months that I was ignoring her online and not passing her messages on to my wife. So, one evening I got her to show me how she was emailing me. It transpired that she was entering my email address into her Facebook Status Field and writing her often lengthy message there.
And she is not alone by a long chalk.
I think that the average member of LinkedIn has a lot more knowledge of the Internet, but does that make them art-lovers? I have yet to find out, but it is the next task on my list how to use promotion more effectively.
Yesterday, I talked about seeking publicity, and today I’m going to continue in a similar vein. Seeking publicity boils down to promotion or promo for short. Many writers and other artists consider promo to be the bane of their lives, but this is pointless, since it doesn’t get anyone anywhere. I have learned to regard promo as just another challenge – part of the package that means being a writer.
I have made a study of methods of promo both on and off line, but such a tome is never complete or it ceases to be shortly after it has been written, because there are always new, innovative ways of promotion. However, if you would like a kick-start, this is the place to go: ’52 Methods of Promo’. It includes fifty-two on and off line methods, one for every week of the year with a short test or task at the end of each chapter.
Anyway, that’s enough promo for that book for now 🙂
Have you tried Paper.li? I did as a pro for several months, but there is no way of judging its success rate at selling books. I find that a shame, because I suspect that it could be a useful tool, but as it stands, it seems to be more like vanity publishing. In the pro version you can place your own ads and use tracking URL’s, but you still don’t know. Another thing you don’t know is whether the images and articles in your paper are randomly syndicated throughout their free editions. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, this is the newspaper I ‘control’:
Modern Indie Books – feel free to post ads or comments in the Facebook box.
I like Hootsuite, and so recently went pro there (to Paper.li’s cost). However, I can’t see what extra I’m getting for my $9.99 p/m. There has to be something that I’m missing, but all I can see, because they are annoying the Hell out of me reminding me about it, is that I can enable collaborators. However, I don’t have any, so if that’s the only difference, I will soon be going back to being a freebie. Other than the constant nagging about using the colleagues feature, Hootsuite is great.
If I do pull the money feed on Hootsuite, I will invest it in LinkedIn Pro. I don’t know what that will buy me yet, although I have read the details several times this year, so that suggests that nothing jumped out and grabbed me.
Collaboration and finding work rings a bell, but I am not interested in either of those. Still, it won’t hurt to try it for a few months (with the free month). It might be useful for finding/talking to agents. I hope so anyway, otherwise I won’t stay there long either.
One last piece on promo. As I have said, I don’t mind doing it, but it does get harder with every new book you write, which is why I turned my attention to sequels last year. I now have thirty-two novels and ninety-nine non-fiction in four series. This helps because it means that I only have six books to promote (I promote only the first book in a series, not each one). However, the highest number of books for which one person can provide effective promo, in my opinion, is three, so I am still struggling at double capacity.
So, I need a collaborator, as Hootsuite keeps telling me. To this end, I have recently started making serious efforts to find an agent for the first time since I started writing.
That is a great feeling. I remember it well. My first book took me seven years to finish.
There it is on your virtual desktop, and then you transfer copies to CreateSpace, Kindle, Lulu, Smashwords and wherever else you might try to sell from. You tell your family and friends and are pleased when you see the first sales register in your account.
A week later sales have dried up and you tell yourself that another wave of sales will take place when your current readers tell their friends.
A week, and then two and then twelve pass and nothing happens.
That was my experience anyway. I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t know anyone who had written a book and I knew how hard it was, so I expected my book to be lapped up, but nothing. So I looked up a few publishers and sent them what they asked for.
Again I sat back and waited and again, it was in vain.
By now, I had wasted a year, so it was time to grab the bull by the horns.
The first thing to realise, when you begin marketing your book online, is that you have to have something to market. You may think that that is your book, and eventually, you are correct, but really you need to put that book on a pedestal, and shine a light on that – like they do in shops and musea.
So, what could be your book’s pedestal? Well, for online, sales that has to be either a web site or a web page.
The next job is to make your presentation as perfect as possible and then promote the Hell out of that page on Twitter, Facebook and the Blogosphere. That sounds easy, doesn’t it?
If it does, I am going to burst your bubble again – no-one has ever heard of you or your web site and becoming even remotely ‘well-known’ is very, very difficult. You might think of promoting your Amazon page instead, but let’s be honest. We all know that Amazon is only about selling, and I for one am not happy if I click on a link for more info and get presented with a buy button.
No, that has to be stage three. Stage one in beginning marketing your book online is to alert your Twitter or Facebook reader to the fact that your book exists and the second step is to warm the potential customer up with further information before eventually presenting him or her with the buy button on Amazon’s own web site.
So, if starting out with a new site is difficult when you begin marketing your book online and advertising your book’s page on Amazon is no good, what can you do?
My solution is to hire a page on a busy, focused web site like this one. If you want to sell books or other works of art, you can be almost guaranteed hundreds of ‘lookers’ because well over a thousand pages are viewed every day and the website’s title ensures that these visitors are focused on the Arts, and specifically on books.
I can offer you a sales page with it’s own unique URL that you can advertise, for $4.99 a month. For that you can put on the page what you like and edit it when you like and all sales go directly into whichever account you specify. Furthermore, each acceptable image will be shown at random throughout the website, including the front or home page and there is no contract, when you stop paying, your ad dies until you reactivate it.
It is the simplest way to begin marketing your book online that I know.
Hi, my name is Owen Jones and I am a serial writer. I just can’t stop and since not many people have asked me to, I am still doing it, as you can see. By the way, that was not an invitation to ask me to stop either.
Now, I first got into writing because I needed good, trustworthy content for my web sites, but when Google cancelled my account, I started writing books instead. I now have quite a few, but that is neither here nor there, what I am getting at is that I have always needed to advertise on line – first for my 140 web sites and now for my books.
Advertising on line is cheap, but difficult, it its rawest form. For example, you can throw an ad together and put it in the classifieds in your local paper and you can guarantee that someone, maybe even dozens of people will read it, even if they don’t want to buy what you have to sell.
However, the same cannot be said for online advertising.
Advertising in the local rag will cost $40 or so and sort of guarantee you those dozens of readers, but smart advertising on line costs nothing, although the kicker is that it guarantees you nothing too, because of all the millions of people globally who are trying to do the same as you – that is, sell something and make money without paying anything up front.
I know, because I try to do that every day and have been trying for the whole of this millennium so far 🙂
Anyway, joking aside, there are things that a free-loading, on line advertiser has to take seriously and they are the best media to use, and the best format of advert to put there. Simple stuff, or not?
So, which are the best media? For me as a writer, there is no question in my mind that it is Facebook and Twitter and of the two, Twitter is the better for me.
Don’t forget that I am a writer and that they are the best for me and my style. You may be an evangelicising missionary and in that case something else may suit you better.
Let’s deal with the easy one first.
Facebook, write what you like, within their guidelines and hope that Facebook puts it before your friends. I think that they usually do, but who knows? You need to be on there anyway, so just do it.
Then there is Twitter. I think that Twitter gets me more sales than any other medium.
So, how should one design the perfect Tweet advert?
Think of it, you are scanning down dozens of Tweets: RT this; #that; owly.something-else…
It all means nothing, does it?
Surely, the opening word if not the whole line should grasp your readers’ attention? Whatever language it is in, it should make sense, surely?
The first line is your hook into your target audience’s attention rt @wpo1408 or #rmnb does not do that! I read hundreds, several hundreds of Tweets every day that I know cannot work, and I feel sorry for their creators because they are trying. However, they are trying to be sellers and not reading as buyers.
This is the bog-standard blueprint:
1] always compose your message in Twitter, no matter what you do with it after that, because Twitter will tell you if your hashtags are worth using, and that changes often
2] write your message first, because that is your hook
3] then your link to your site, shortened if you want
4] now your rt @ if you want one
5] and FINALLY hashtags! Some say 2-3 at most. OK, if your message is good you won’t have room for any more anyway.
Don’t waste your time thinking like a writer, write like a thinker.
