Social Media, Marketing and Getting Connected Part II

© 2011 Odilia Rivera Santos

I spent some time today perusing articles on marketing your books online and promoting events. There is always a point at which one must ask How much can I do?
This is a very important question, because it does require time and commitment. If you don't monitor your Twitter and Facebook accounts, your followers, fans or Facebook 'friends' will get a lot of spam. There is nothing more irritating, online anyway, than joining a fanpage and seeing nothing but ads for açai-induced weight loss and Facebook-has-a-new-dislike-button-click-here posts with a picture of a nearly naked man or woman. If you know you will not keep up with Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr and others and you have money to spare, hire a social media firm or an individual geek.

CREATING A WIN-WIN SITUATION
Publish your own paper in three minutes! http://paper.li/
On my previous post, I had mentioned Paper.li with no intention of publishing my own paper, but I woke up this morning feeling kind of Hearst-like, so I decided to give it a try.
It is a brilliant marketing tool because you can post your links and create a paper that reaches a very specific group of readers, there is no maintenance and it's free.
You put in the tags -- tags are words used to connect different tweets. If you use the tag writing grants, every tweet mentioning those words will appear in your paper. You get to put in quite a few tags.
Today, I created The Writers for Writers Daily.
http://tinyurl.com/3bjuz2b
This newspaper is geared toward helping writers with self-promotion, freelance work, and general inspiration. I found some great articles and websites I had never heard of in my newspaper : )
If you post any articles on writing, you will likely end up in my The Writers for Writers Daily; in essence, you are creating a newspaper for you and those most likely to be interested in your work.

EDIT YOUR EMAIL SIGNATURE
We are writers, so we have to be careful about this. Keep the signature short and to the point. The title of your book or name of blog, subject matter, or event and the link. No one will read a dissertation of your work at the end of an email. I must admit to having a very long signature with my info and apologize to all who've been subjected to the excessive verbiage.

Goodreads is one of those sites I don't use very often. It is an online book club where people list all the books they've read or hope to read along with reviews. They have a space for authors to promote their work.
Goodreads Author Program: http://tinyurl.com/qzxanj
I recently included a short essay I had written entitled Lonely Art to see what would happen.

Amazon also offers writers the space and opportunity to advertise for free on their Amazon Author Page: http://tinyurl.com/nlsba5

TEACHING A CLASS OFFLINE
Skillshare
I love writing, editing, translating and reading, but there are times when human interaction is absolutely necessary. I teach creative writing classes and found this great site called Skillshare to advertise your workshop or class and set up payments through them.
http://www.skillshare.com/learn

TIME
I like formulas, so consider this one: for every five-hour block of writing, do one hour of marketing.

Social media is an experiment and we all have to see what works and what doesn't work.
“It is often the last key on the ring which opens the door” - Anonymous -- if I find the author, I'll let you know.

I will teach two workshops in October of 2012: Social Media Workshop for Beginners and Social Media Workshop to Advance Your Business at Breath and Bones Yoga
Limit per class: 7 students.
Bring a laptop to set up accounts and/or learn to connect to networking opportunities
http://www.secure-booker.com/breathbones/ClassSchedule/Workshops.aspx


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If you'd like to take a Four-week Creative Writing course with me, sign up here:
http://tinyurl.com/6fzeo4d
Buy my e-book! Latinalogue, Puerto Rican Nonfiction Part I