First of all, book bloggers who review books on blogs are just as legit as book reviewers in magazines, so treat them with the same respect (yes, I know they don’t have to go through the same gatekeepers that magazine and newspaper writers do, but they should be treated professionally).

1. Contact relevant bloggers only. If your book is about shopping, don’t pitch your book to the blog that clearly only ever reviews books on heavy metal. You don’t have to be a subscriber necessarily (though if you are, it’s nice to say that you’re one of their readers), but do have enough of a look at the blog to know whether contacting them is a waste of your time.

The key to finding a reviewer is finding the perfect match. It’s a lot like landing a book deal. You don’t want necessarily just the only publisher who will take your book (tempting as it may be). You want the right publisher. So don’t go pitching to every book blog in existance–they don’t all review your kind of stuff. Pitch the ones that are right for your topic.

Remember also that you’re not just looking for book blogs, but blogs on your topic that might be interested in reviewing your book or even interviewing you or running an excerpt. One way to find blogs by topic other than the typical google search (or searching on Technorati.com) is looking at who’s talking about your topic on Twitter. If they seem to know what they’re talking about regarding your subject, look at their profile and see if they have a website or blog. They may be interested in reviewing your book or posting content from it on their site.

How do you know if these blogs have any readers? Sometimes they will tell you in the sidebar how many people have subscribed to this blog. Other times, comments are enabled, so if there are a lot of comments under each post, there are a lot of readers. A lot of times it works the other way too: no comments means few readers.

2. Unlike some larger book reviewing publications, sending unsolicited copies is a bad idea. Unless you’re using a database, you may not find their mailing addresses anyway. It’s best to send them an email. A personal touch is always nice and increases your chances, but copying-and-pasting your press release is fine if you’re tight on time. If they are interested in the book, either way, they’ll email you back and ask for a review copy. Some blogs even do Q&A, exclusive excerpt, or get original content from the writer.

3. Send the cover image, whether they ask for it or not. Do not send this out in your pitch because often people will not open emails from people they don’t know if it has an attachment. But if they’ve asked for a copy sent to them, feel free to email them a hi-res jepg they can use, because if you don’t, they won’t use a picture, or they’ll copy a low-res one from the internet, or they’ll try to take a picture or scan themselves which don’t always come out looking good. You may also want to include your author photo. Only include an interior image if you have permission to use images from the book as part of the publicity efforts. Don’t forget to include a credit line for author and interior photos.

4. Give them time. If you don’t hear from the blogger a month after you’ve sent the book, email them and say that you’re just checking to make sure they received the book, and if they did not, you can send a replacement. A month is a good time because if you write too soon, the mail might not have delivered it yet. It’s also a long enough time where they may have set it aside, meaning to get to it later, and put it out of mind for a while. A month after shipping, this might be a good reminder and spark a new interest in them to pick up the book. Remember, book bloggers have lots of other books to read, but they also don’t like to be hounded: “Have you read my book yet, are you going to do a review, how about now, or now?” If they say that the have received your book and plan to review it, it might be another three to six months before they do. This is normal and to be expected.

1. Content, as always, is king. If you don’t have high quality video and high quality content, then all else is futile.

2. Post your videos to social bookmarking sites like Delicious, Digg, Reddit, Stumbleupon, etc. Put your videos on Facebook, Twitter, and wherever you think your potential viewers hang out.

3. Invite your YouTube friends to subscribe to your video if they haven’t already. And don’t be ashamed to invite your favorite YouTubers to subscribe to you if you’ve subscribed to them.

4. Title your video with something not only relevant to the video’s content but also interesting, shocking, mysterious, or controversial. Also use Title Case and don’t make it a long sentence–get to the point.

5. Use keywords not only in your title, but in that handy keyword box YouTube has you fill in. Be specific, often using multiple words or even short sentences as keywords if you think people will be searching for that exact phrase or sentence. If you have a video on how to play the harmonic underwater, if you just put “harmonica” and “underwater” your video will appear on all searches for “harmonic” or “underwater” but because they are popular phrases, your video could be at the very bottom. If your keywords are “harmonica underwater” and “playing harmonica under water” your video is more likely to be number one on the list for when people search those. You may also want to include things like “strange talents” and “weird instrument.” Also use keywords in the description, but avoid key word stuffing.

6. Don’t make the description too short (or too long for that matter). Include any relevant links. Ask them to subscribe.

7. You can even embed a little “subscribe” or “click to subscribe” button into your video once you’ve uploaded it, so it will actually show up on your screen. Some people like to pick out something that is talked about and focus on that to get people to either subscribe or thumbs-up their video. (The thumbs up gives the video a better rating and gives it a chance at being featured on YouTube’s front page or at least being higher on the searches, so you might want to ask your viewers to do this if they are not ready to commit to subscribing.) For example, if in part of the video you talk about zombie caribou, you might embed a little thing that says “Click thumbs up if you like zombie caribou!”

8. Be part of the YouTube community(communities). Subscribe, comment, and friend. People often will look at your channel if you are talking to them on YouTube or have requested to be their friends. But don’t be a spammer!

9. Be consistent. Let people know what to expect from you. Doesn’t mean you can’t change your mind later on if you want to have a new feature that posts every day for a month and then goes back to posting just once a week on the old feature, but let your viewers know this is going on. Don’t disappear off the face of the Earth for four months and then come back to YouTube expecting everyone to remember you.

10. Be a YouTube partner. You get to pick your thumbnail, which is important for when people are scrolling through videos (otherwise, try to put your select thumbnail at the halfway point of your video). You also get a nice banner on your channel and lots of other fun stuff that lets you stand out.

11. Don’t use copyrighted material. If you’re using a song, for example, owned by someone else, YouTube could prevent you from having a high-ranking, delete the audio track to your video, or delete your video all together.

12. Some people disable the comments and rating ability, which is maybe because they don’t want to have to answer questions and delete spam, etc., but if you don’t want to answer questions, then don’t answer questions. It doesn’t mean you can’t let your fans post comments and talk among themselves. Allow them to build a community around being your fan. However, the more you are involved and respond to your viewers, the more affection toward you they will have.

13. Instead of leaving comments, you can leave a video comment. Try leaving a video comment to similar videos or creating videos in direct response to someone else’s video.

14. Best face forward. On your channel, the default will show your most recent video in the player. But you can change this. Pick the best video (you can use free YouTube insights to see which video has the most interest or you can just look at number of views) and put that on the front. Or maybe you have an introductory video. You can also choose to have the video automatically start playing. Personally I find this annoying but it probably has its advantages too.

A lot of people will buy software that will generate comments and views on your YouTube videos. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. But either way, I personally find this to be a dishonest way of gaining interest. If your videos are good and you know how to market yourself well enough using the tips above, you shouldn’t have to stoop that low. But you will need patience. It usually doesn’t happen over night. Don’t expect to be a viral hit. Just aim for having loyal followers.

Useful Links:
Top Tips to Get More YouTube Subscribers (Squidoo)

1. Don’t put things on Facebook you don’t want the internet to read! It’s as simple as that.

2. Change your Privacy Settings to limit who can see what information.

Useful link:
Making Yourself Almost Invisible on Facebook

The Facebook Settings You Should Change as Quickly as Possible

Terminology: Domain name is the URL itself, not the space to keep your website on the internet.
Hosting is the space (amount of megabytes) that you are allotted on the internet for your website. They are sold separately, but often available from the same company. Sometimes when you buy hosting, they will give you one free domain name as a bonus.

1. More professional approach: Buy software like Dreamweaver or Sharepoint to create a website. Buy a domain name (www.mybook.com) from a service like GoDaddy.com or 1and1.com. Then also pay them for hosting space. This allows you lots of space to add multiple pages, photos, media, and gives you complete design control.

2. Good enough approach: Go to a free website service like freewebs.com. You can use their web-based web design program—it’s free and you don’t have to download anything, but it gives you less megabytes and is more restricting. Your website hosting, though small, is free. You will not have a domain name like mybook.com. Instead, it will be something like mybook.freewebs.com. What you can do to fix this is buy a domain name from GoDaddy or 1and1 (they are cheap) and instead of buying hosting from them too, you can just have your new domain name (mybook.com, etc.) automatically forwarded to the site you created on Freewebs. So if people type in mybook.com, it will automatically redirect them to mybook.freewebs.com.

Click here to download pdf.

Source:

http://akstout18.amplify.com/2010/10/19/the-difference-between-social-media-and-traditionally-marketing-summed-up-in-2-sentences/

Blog Carnival

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I’ll be upfront. I’m new to this idea. But so far, I think it’s brilliant. The idea is blog carnivals, which you can learn more about at blogcarnival.com.

It works like this. Let’s say that you and Bob both have blogs about oil painting. Bob has decided to host a carnival about different painting techniques. He’s going to call it The Oil Painting Technique Carnival. Over the course of the next month, people who have blog posts about oil painting techniques are going to submit their posts to him. Let’s say you did a post back in June about a new technique that you learned about, and you submit yours to him as well. Bob is going to pick the handful of best posts of the month and put them in a post on his blog. His post will be a bunch of links with some descriptions of why these posts are good. And you can take a sampling of the internet’s best oil painting technique posts by browsing the links Bob has picked out for you. Hopefully your link made the cut! Next month, Bob will do the same thing and pick some new articles that people send his way.

For an example of what a post would look like, here is a carnival edition that someone did about audio. The carnival is about creating audio, whereas the entire blog is about using your software, so the blog doesn’t have to be the same topic as the carnival. The carnival can be a subset of the topic. For example, let’s say you want to create your own carnival now. You’ve got a blog about live music/concerts. Your carnival doesn’t have to be so broad as to ask people for entries about concerts in general. You could ask people for articles about concerts in New York City. Then, each month, you’d ask for more articles about concerts in NYC.

There are also traveling carnivals. Maybe you and Bob team up with Jenn and Phil, who each have their own painting blogs. In March, Bob posted his carnival edition about oil painting techniques. In April, you post another carnival edition about oil painting techniques on your own blog. May, Jenn hosts a carnival edition about oil painting techniques on her painting site. June, Phil does on his.

This is still new to me, but I think it’s absolutely brilliant.

When you first join Twitter, you have no followers. The best way to gain followers is to follow other people, preferably people who are in your field. If you write books about flying planes, you’ll probably want to follow people who write and publish books, who use social media, who fly planes, who make planes, who teach aviation courses, etc. But now you have hundreds of people in your feed. (Your feed is what you see on your front page of Twitter when you are logged in. You see the most recent posts of all the hundreds of people you are following). You have gained followers, but how are you ever going to make sense of all these posts? There are probably many of them who only tweet about how they are going to make fish for dinner or are dreading cutting the lawn. You could unfollow them (they aren’t likely to notice)…or…

Twitter Lists

You can create as many lists as you like. You can also follow other people’s lists. (You can also create private lists that only you can see.) You might want to make a list of book people you like, another for people who give good tips on social media, another on people who work with new plane technology, another for aviation educators, another for pilots. Then if you use something like Hootsuite or TweetDeck, you can line up all your lists and browse with ease.

You can also just pull the tweeters you actually want to follow into a list of your favorites. Maybe this includes your friends and family and your favorite bands who you like to follow in case they announce they’ll be playing in your town. Once you have this list, instead of checking up on the people you follow by going to twitter.com, you can go to

twitter.com/[yourtwittername]/[yourlistname]

 As an example, I am following 714 people, but I only want to read 35 of them, so I created a list called “besttweeters” and now instead of going to Twitter.com, I go to

twitter.com/milohtomb/besttweeters

So, how do you create a list?

Here’s one way. First you find a person who you want to add to the list. Let’s say you want to add Jim Keats. Here’s what his page looks like (twitter.com/jimkeats):

On the left, under the name “jimkeats” you’ll see the Follow button. On the right, you’ll see two more buttons: one that says “Lists” (big green arrow pointing to it) and the tools button that looks like a gear. Now, if you click that Lists button, it says “New list.” Click that and it will prompt you to name your list and give a description. Once you’ve done that (and chosen if you want it public (anyone can see it by putting in the URL) or private (only you can see it and only when you’re logged in)), you have created your first list. Congrats. To add other people to the list, start the same way by going to the person’s page. But now when you click the Lists button, you are given the choice to add another list or check mark the box to make this person go into the list you just created. Your new list will basically be like your front page feed (showing all the most recent tweets) but only of the people you put into the list.

Following other people’s lists

Sometimes creating a list is a lot of work, especially if there are people who have created better lists that suit your needs. Looking for a list of social media gurus? You could either seek out all those people yourself, or you could just follow http://twitter.com/ApplauseBooks/social-media

To follow it, you can:
A) Bookmark http://twitter.com/ApplauseBooks/social-media
B) Insert this list into your TweetDeck, Hootsuite, or any other tool you use to follow people
C) Click “follow this list” (which may be a bit messier)