Business

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.

 

Making the most of Pinterest.

/ lizziechantree / 27 Comments

Pinterest can be a great tool for authors. Here are 3 tips for making the most of your Pinterest page as a writer.

Pinterest. Lizzie Chantree

1.  Create new boards with #keywords in the title. This makes them easier for others to discover and helps boost your rankings. You can also use keywords in your pin descriptions. For example, the pin above would be in Books by author Lizzie Chantree, with the descriptive keywords, BeachReads, Babe Driven, Love’s Child, Finding Gina.

2.  Post original content. Write your own content, or search the web for interesting quotes, photos, or book writing related news.

3.  Add a Pinterest widget to your blog or website. This means that every time you write an article, the widget will take the most interesting pieces and form pins for you to easily add to your Pinterest page.

 

Monday marketing. #3QuickTips

/ lizziechantree / 21 Comments

Today’s marketing tips are about finding new categories to place your books in if the current ones aren’t working for you.

Lizzie Chantree blog 3

1.   Go to Amazon.com and type Kindle store into the search box.

Click on the Kindle Ebook tab under the search bar.

Click on the genre for your book (for example Romance) and look at the sub categories.

Click on a sub genre for your book (for example Contemporary).

Underneath are sections to refine by. If you choose one from the top and one from the bottom section, or two from a section, it will tell you along the top how many books are in this category. The lower the number, the less books there are in that category to compete with. For example in Contemporary Romance, with sub categories Wealthy and Beaches, there are 898 other books. If your chosen category for your book was Contemporary Romance, you could use the keywords, Wealthy and Beaches for a romantic book about an exotic wedding on a beach with gorgeous men. Alternatively, for the same book, Wealthy and Wedding as keywords would result in 1,450 competing titles.

Try lots of combinations and see which are the best selection of keywords for your work.

If you chose Cowboys and Amnesia in this genre, you would only have 38 competing titles! Remember you need a strong main category or no one will find you anyway, unless you are well promoted or well known. Don’t pick random categories, as they must fit within the context of your book.

2.  Pick your two book categories very carefully, but if they don’t work, change them!

3.  You have up to seven optional extra keywords. These keywords can be more than one word. For a book about Book marketing, you could use: Books on marketing, Marketing & Promotion, Making more sales, PR & sales, How to sell books, Books on marketing, Publishing success. These would be one keyword each. Check out possible combinations first and see how many competing titles there are. 

I’ve just changed all of the categories for my own books, so I’ll let you know how I get on in the coming months.

 

 

Believe in yourself. Be you.

/ lizziechantree / 18 Comments

believe in yourself

I love this photo. It can be easy to doubt yourself as a writer, but learning to believe in yourself and be who you are, can help tremendously. Here are a few ideas to bring inner confidence.

Do something that you love.

If you can find small pockets of time during the week to do something that you love, this will bring more confidence, as you will feel happier on the inside.

 

Stop procrastinating.

Don’t keep putting off getting things done. Task left unfinished will just drag your mood down.

 

Put on a happy face.

Research has shown that smiling makes us feel happier, even if we don’t fully commit to it. Try smiling a few times during the day when you wouldn’t normally and see if it lifts your mood.

 

Celebrate your achievements.

Pat yourself on the back for even the smallest achievement. If you did something well, feel proud of what you have done.

 

Be kind to others.

This is something that makes everyone feel good. Kindness to others is not something everyone can achieve.

 

Getting active.

Moving your muscles every so often increases oxygen flow to the body and helps your mind to focus. You won’t have time to doubt yourself when you are on the move.

 

Throw away any negative thoughts.

You don’t need them. Bin them!

 

Be you 🙂 

Relaxing view

 

Monday marketing. #3QuickTips

/ lizziechantree / 18 Comments

Working together.

Finding Gina. Twitter Ad 10

A powerful marketing tool is YOU! You are the best voice for your writing, but working together with other authors can help ease the pressures of constant marketing and it can also be great fun! Here are 3 top tips to help raise your book’s influence.

1. Share the work load: Work on joint promotions. Assign different jobs to each author in a clear and concise manor, explaining in full how you will all benefit from each task.

2. Combine talents: Think about finding other authors who bring something different into the mix. One may have a great Facebook page, one a fantastic Twitter following, one may have contacts in the press and another might have a key relationship with wonderful book bloggers.

3. Participation: Don’t just sit back and let others in the group do all the work. Contribute and network. Many best selling authors run promotions together and they often work in the same market, not opposing ones. Although they are trying to attract the similar readers, they are helping to broaden their market by having a further reach.

Monday marketing. #3QuickTips

/ lizziechantree / 5 Comments

Here are today’s 3 quick marketing tips for authors.

 

Babe Driven Twitter Ad

 

Most authors struggle to find high numbers of reviews for their work, but things always seemed a little easier to me when you can gift a book to a reviewer in America, but this is not yet available in the UK via Amazon. This is what I’ve discovered about gifting books:

1. When you gift someone a book, they might not download it. They can use the price of the book to buy something else.

2. Most authors drop the price of their book before gifting it, so that the gifting process costs them less.

3. You can’t gift a book during a freebie run. There would be no point anyway, as the reviewer could download it for nothing as long as you had the book free in every country. Free book promotions are often planned months ahead so you would have to plan both events together.

 

Author Branding

/ lizziechantree / 20 Comments

Branding

I’ve been reading quite a bit about author branding lately and the topic really fascinates me. I have run my own businesses for years, which is why my romance novels are focused around entrepreneurs, but I remember back to my first business logo and how awful it was! I was 17 and my first business was called Juniper Berry. The logo was quite unimaginative with a tree in a brown square box with some text underneath.

When I invented my first product, I was attending The School of Communication Arts in London and had begun to learn about product design and branding. We were set tasks to design new branding and packaging for some big companies as a project and the results were anything from funny shaped boxes to business cards made from a jigsaw! It did make me realise how important the identity is to a product and as authors, our books are our product and we are brand ambassadors.

When someone looks for your book or product, can they easily identify that they are from you? Can they read the label clearly, even from a phone screen or iPad? Does your branding follow through across all of your novels, or does it confuse your readers? This might sound obvious, but when you look at a selection of work from some authors, its not always easy to see which ones belong together.

I often identify my favourite author’s books online by their book covers. I know their style and expect their latest covers, merchandise or social media to be uniform. My books are all romances about various businesses and their quirky owners, but they are still very different. One is a sizzling beach read, one a romantic mystery novel and one is full of magic. Here are my covers:

 

Even though they are different, I always use similar colour palettes and type faces. My author picture and social media branding is the same on all platforms:

Vector illustration of a portable modern tablet pc e-book reader.

I understand that it might seem strange to think of writing books as a business, but we are making a product that we really hope others will love and packaging it in a way that appeals to those people is vitally important.

I’m in the process of designing bookmarks and have asked some of my readers what they would like to see on them. Most would like the cover design work followed through, as they enjoy bookmarks that match the books they are currently reading. Again, this is all branding and a wonderful way to connect with our amazing readers. I’ll let you see the finished design when they are done, but I will be listening to my readers and carrying through my brand design.