Blogging

Book launch tips.

/ lizziechantree / 10 Comments

Lizzie Chantree book quote 7.jpg

Happy new week everyone! Today’s Monday Marketing is about book launches. I’m currently working on my own new book launch for Ninja School Mum and thought i’d share some of the tips i’d learnt with you.

1.  Set up a blog tour team three months before your launch date. This is a great way to find people who want to support your launch and keeps them updated on the progress of your plans.

2.  Set up a document with all of the information you will need to send to the launch team. This should include blog posts, Q&A’s, promo information, book cover art, book blurb, author photo etc. Make the document easily accessible, so that the tour hosts can grab the details they need, with minimal fuss or extra work.

3.  Create a page on your blog about the blogs/websites of your tour hosts. Make a page for them on your website and add their site links. This is a great way to say thank you and to let others know about their blogs/websites.

 

If you would like to check out or join my tour team, the link is here:

Ninja School Mum Tour Team.

 

Twitter Marketing.

/ lizziechantree / 9 Comments

Lizzie Chantree Monday Marketing2

Today’s Marketing Post is about Twitter Marketing. I’ve noticed a lot of writers talking about how hard it is to promote their work lately and I have mentioned that supporting each other on Twitter is a good idea. Most writers will support others, but it is only fair to return the favour. Here are 3 tips for Twitter marketing.

  1. Join book groups on Twitter. They often have hashtags and will RT your book tweets with their hashtags in, as long as you do the same for other members of the group. Two of these groups are #RRBC and #ASMSG The members of Rave Reviews Book Club and ASMSG are very pro-active in retweeting book tweets with their hashtags. #RRBC have member of the month, and other prizes to be won for supportive members.
  2. Tweet support. Find some authors and bloggers with the same genre interests as you. Agree to support each other’s work across Twitter with RT’s. This is a tweet support team. You can set up automated tweets with their book links and Twitter handles in them and they can do the same for you. Apps like SocialOomph have free options and can schedule the tweets for you.
  3. Engage in discussion with your followers on Twitter. If you don’t talk to your followers in tweets, they won’t know anything about you other than you are selling books. If your genre is Romance, then tweet about things that would interest people who enjoy this genre. That could be relationships, travel, friendship, interiors, love, family, life goals, or anything related to romance that has a natural connection to your writing.

 

Love's Child TwitterAd 12

Love's Child New Apple Award

 

Link backs and SEO.

/ lizziechantree / 13 Comments

Lizzie Chantree Monday Marketing2

Welcome to another Monday Marketing post. I hope you’ve had a relaxing weekend and are ready for a brand new week?

Today’s topic is link backs and raising the SEO rankings of your blog or website. I recently discovered that a great way to generate more views on your site is to add internal links.

  1. Write an article or post with original content. Google notices if content is the same somewhere else on the web.
  2. Add internal links within your post. This is a great way to create more page views within one article. People often only stay on a page for a few minutes, but may click links to other related topics if highlighted in the post and stay on your website or blog for longer, which in turn will boost your SEO and make your site more visible. I have added links in this post for you to see what I mean. Click the highlighted text and you will be taken to other articles on my blog.
  3. How to add an internal link in WordPress: Highlight the word in your text that you would like to make an internal link, then click the insert link button in your control panel. Open a new tab/webpage in your browser and open a different page on your website that is relevant to the keyword you have highlighted and copy the link. For example: The word marketing in one of my posts, could be part of the current post, but could also lead you to another post i’ve written on the topic, which you might also enjoy. Then paste that link from the browser into the insert link box in the article you are writing. Check the open in another page box to ensure a new window opens with the alternative page, then click, add link. This will make your chosen word into a live internal link.

Team Building.

/ lizziechantree / 17 Comments

Lizzie Chantree Monday Marketing2

Happy new week everyone! Today’s Marketing Tips and are about team building. Being a writer can be quite isolating and I’ve found that networking and talking to others really helps me to be inspired and more confident. Here are some tips to gather your own team of confidants, creatives or co-workers to share your working life with. Some might even become good friends!

Networking: Networking is now big business, but the fundamentals remain the same. Networking isn’t always about furthering your career, it can be a great way to meet friends and share creative ideas. There are groups on most social media sites and they usually have a topic name. I run a networking hour on twitter called #CreativeBizHour and it’s for anyone who enjoys creativity and likes to meet other people and have a friendly chat. To join these chats, just add the hashtags to your tweets, but it has to be during the networking session times.

There are networking hours for so many industries or interests from working mums and dads to food lovers, fashionistas to people in specific areas of the world and the list is endless!

You can usually find networking groups locally by doing an internet search. These can be great fun and give you contacts with others who live in the same region as you and have similar interests.

Group Chats: Facebook is a great place to find groups of people with similar interests to you. If you love books, just type book groups into the search bar and lots of variations of book group will appear. See which ones interest you and ask to join. The page admins will then have a chance to check out your application, make sure the topic is a genuine interest to you and add you to the group.

Local hobby groups: Most small towns, villages and cities have local hobby groups. An internet search will usually find them. This is a place to meet people in your area with the same hobbies as you and a great way to network in person and make friends who enjoy the things you do.

 

 

Calling you!

/ lizziechantree / 25 Comments

Perty.Lizzie Chantree. Launch party.jpg

I’ve recently been told by my publisher that my new book with be out on the 30th Jan 2018. Hooray! The thing is …I now have to plan a virtual book launch. You may have seen my Twitter or Facebook post on this topic, where I have basically pleaded dramatically to anyone who can help me to make this process a success, to step forward! I have already published three books myself on Amazon, but this is my first launch and it is a complete mystery to me.

I began by thinking that the launch date was so far away, that it was too early to start planning, but seeing other authors with launch dates near mine already having book covers and blog tours planned, I’m starting to sweat and shake with nerves. Apparently it’s good to have live video Facebook feeds from your launch party, giveaways, quiz questions … What would make you attend a virtual book launch and what would draw you into interacting on Facebook and getting to know more about a book you hadn’t read yet?

So far I have set up a closed Facebook group that anyone can request to join. I will be jotting down launch day goals and explaining tips I have been given in case it helps anyone else in the group. I’m hoping that the people who have joined will jump in and have a great party with me on launch day. If you would like to be part of that experience, click the link here to join in with the launch group. The more the merrier!

 

Lizzie_Chantree blog header 2

My Author Facebook page:

Lizzie Chantree. Author photo 3

Click here if you’d like to be added as a friend of my author page.

Click here if you want to pop by and like my author page.

Many thanks. From Lizzie :) 

Effective social media management.

/ lizziechantree / 11 Comments

Hello everyone! How are you all today? It’s Marketing and 3 Quick Tips Monday. This post is about ways to help manage your social media. Here are 3 great tools to help you improve work flow and stay on top of time management.

Lizzie Chantree blog 3

ManageFlitter: ManageFlitter link, click here.

ManageFlitter is very easy to use. The free option works well, but it depends on your requirements. This platform helps you to work faster and has lots of great features.

You can sort your followers/following lists by criteria.

Find new people to follow.

Find out when your followers are online and schedule tweets appropriately.

Unfollow people. Some people follow Twitter accounts to grow their numbers, then unfollow as soon as they get a follow back. ManageFlitter helps you unfollow them too.

You can manage multiple accounts easily here.

Track keywords.

SocialOomph: SocialOOmph link, click here.

SocialOomph is a great way to boost your productivity on social media as you can schedule posts, add photos, and access multiple accounts across Twitter, Facebook, blogs LinkedIn, Tumblr, RSS feeds and more for a basic fee. The free option is good, but the cheapest paid option works for me.

Updates are easy to schedule and it has features to save posts for use later, copy old posts, make posts run on a recurring timeline and more.

Hootsuite: Hootsuite link, click here.

About Hootsuite: This is a great platform for managing multiple accounts from a single dashboard. You can schedule your own posts to go out at certain times of the day or you can RT or auto schedule from your own social media streams or lists. The downside is that it can be a bit sluggish and I tend to use it as a back up. It’s easy to use, but I wish it worked faster. It has to update information regularly, so this slows it down. It can be very useful and has a free option, which is suitable for most small businesses and creatives.

You can use Hootsuite for real time analytics and it has a trend spotting feature, which can be helpful if you want to see what’s popular on Social media and follow trends.

What time saving platforms for social media do you use? 

 

Babe Driven TwitterAd 20

Click photo to go straight to Amazon and grab your copy of Babe Driven for £0.99!

Monday Marketing. #3QuickTips

/ lizziechantree / 8 Comments

Lizzie Chantree Monday Marketing2

Welcome to today’s Monday Marketing and #3QuickTips. These tips are about looking after yourself as a writer.

1.  If you work in a distracting environment, like an open plan office, you might need to work out a few strategies to be able to concentrate enough to get some work done. A good idea is to make some mental distance and create a detached view of your working space. This technique is known as self-distancing and helps you to focus on the work in front of you and not the irritation of any distractions around you.

2.  Know when you’re done. Once you have planned, written, rewritten, edited and polished your work, be mindful of pondering. At some point you have to stop over analysing and just go with it. Be thoroughly prepared, but objective. Don’t miss out on moving forward because you can’t finish the last project.

3.  Take care of your body and mind. As writers, we often forget time and space and days can whizz by without us remembering to look up from a manuscript. You will be much more alert if you take regular breaks and eat and exercise properly. It gets your blood flowing and wakes up your mind.

 

 

Grab a new Summer read!

Babe Driven TwitterAd 20

 

Monday Marketing #3QuickTips

/ lizziechantree / 6 Comments

Happy Monday everyone!

Lizzie Chantree blog 7

My latest marketing tips are from an author marketing meeting I went to a few weeks ago. They are based around free giveaways. I have been looking in to ways to promote my new romance novel, which is out early next year and this seemed like great advice. Let me know what you think.

1.  If you are doing a free giveaway for your book, don’t give away your book! This sounds strange, but it does make sense. By doing a giveaway, you are trying to encourage readers to enjoy your work and buy your books. If you give the book away, you negate the possibility of the winners downloading/purchasing your work because they actually want to read it, not because they have been given it and might read it at a later date. A good way around this, would be to gift items related to your book genre and maybe a few chapters of your novel to tell them about the story. If they enjoy your style of writing, they might become a lifelong fan.

2.  If you are giving away your book, this can work best if it is part of a series. You gift the first book  in the series, then the reader may buy other books in the series if they love the characters and style.

3.  If you are running a giveaway, it can work to get together with other authors and make one huge giveaway. This way your promotion would be shouted out across the social media platforms of the combined authors and gain more exposure for your work.

 

 

Your vibe.

/ lizziechantree / 16 Comments

Your vibe attracts your tribe. This made me smile. I think my tribe would be full of slightly zany creatives, or people who enjoy creativity and unusual books!

Lizzie Chantree blog 2

The vibe you give off and the person that you are, attracts like minded people. You can often tell what a person is like by those around them. Surround yourself with people who will lift you up and enjoy your individuality. Most of my family and friends think I’m a bit eccentric, but they encourage me anyway. Thank goodness for that!

#BeYou 

Monday Marketing. #3QuickTips

/ lizziechantree / 8 Comments

This week I’m going to tell you about visibility and loading times for a WordPress website. Most of my Monday Marketing tips are ones I’ve discovered on my journey as an author, but I have been in the retail and wholesale business for over 20 years and studied design, marketing and advertising at college and university, so the #3QuickTips may be helpful to other businesses too.

Lizzie Chantree blog. WordPress

 

1.  Some wordpress themes contain code that slows them down. Some of the content you add can also slow the site down. By visiting a site called GTMetrix.com and typing in your site address, you will be shown a report on how well your site is loading for users.  Ideally you want an A or B rating.

2.  You will be shown Page speed, YSlow, Timeline and History tabs. Click on these to be shown elements of your site and how they preform. Here you can check if the theme of your site is slowing it down. If the theme is causing problems, then you might want to think about changing the theme.

3. Creating fresh content for your blog or website is a great way to make it load quicker. If text is copied from the internet, it can have hidden links and code inside from the originator which shows search engines that it’s not new and should be ignored.