Monday Marketing.

Lizzie Chantree Monday Marketing2

 

Happy 2019 everyone. Here are my marketing tips for today. This post is about setting new goals for yourself. Promotion and marketing can seem so daunting, but putting pressure on yourself to write and find new readers can cause extra stress, so these tips might prevent that from happening.

  1. Set yourself small and achievable goals to help make marketing seem less of an uphill struggle. Give yourself tasks like: Add 50 Twitter followers in a week. Build and promote your Facebook fanbase by getting 20 more likes in a week. Obviously scale this to how active your accounts already are. You might think adding 1,000 followers is achievable, so give yourself realistic targets.
  2. Set up tweets about your book/writing twice a day. Make them different and interesting.
  3. Submit your book to at least three blogs, magazines, review sites per week.

Challenging ourselves with small goals helps us to stay focussed and when we meet those targets, we feel good about it and want to try harder. If we have too many things to do on our lists, we can feel overwhelmed and then nothing gets done at all. Stick with what works and discard anything that doesn’t’t bring the results you are aiming for. Just add a different topic to the top of the list. Have a great week. From Lizzie.

For tips about repetition in marketing click here.

Happy New Year’s Eve!

Happy New Year’s Eve  everyone.

I was lucky enough to receive six marketing books that I’d wished for, for Christmas this year. I’ve begun reading them and will share any insights on my regular Marketing blogs in 2019. I can’t wait to get back to working on my latest romance book, as I have written about 20,000 words  and would like to complete it in the near future.

I hope that you all have exciting plans for the New Year and that 2019 brings lots of happiness and success to you all. I can’t wait to discover some new reads and to share them here too. I’ve tried lots of different genres in 2018, but am still drawn to the ones I write in, which are romance and humour.

Wishing you all an amazing and fulfilling New Year.

The saying goes, If you love what you have, you have everything you need.

Happy 2019!

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It’s almost Christmas!

Hello everyone. It’s almost Christmas and I’m sure you’ve all been thinking about, or have already done some festive marketing. I have been asked to design a lot of Twitter adverts recently and have also made some for the people who have appeared on my Introducing page on my blog. They are a great way to liven up Tweets and statistics say that people get more retweets on Twitter if the tweet has an image. So my top tip is to include a photo or graphic image to your tweets. There are lots of programmes where you can design them for yourself, or download free images if you don’t have your own.

If you are unable to design your own, I charge £10 per design for  jpeg twitter ad. You can contact me from the contact page on this blog and all you need to supply is your book cover and a review quote or the text you’d like included, including your Twitter @ name and your website or blog address.

Don’t forget to join in with my #CreativeBizHour Christmas party on Twitter with me, @Lizzie_Chantree tonight, 8-9pm GMT. Just add the # to tweets and replies to chat to join in and tell us all about yourself and your work. It’s a wonderful place to share creative ideas and the hashtag trends regularly, so your work might be seen by different people and one varied timelines.

Here are some examples of Twitter ads I’ve designed:

 

 

SEO and time saving tips for authors.

Hello everyone. I hope you had a relaxing weekend. For my Monday Marketing post today, I thought I’d offer some tips on something that can really save time for other bloggers and website owners who might be promoting your work, and hopefully improve SEO rankings on blog posts and website articles.

I found out years ago about the importance of naming your photos. I have blogged about this many times but it still happens a lot and it’s a simple thing to change. When people send me photos to appear on my blog, or social media feeds, they sometimes send them titled image001 image201 Book cover 4, picture in Spain etc! When Google search for content, they are always looking for something original, not only should you add your own content to posts to make them stand out and fly up the rankings, but the titles that you give your photos are so important. Not only do they register as the name of the photo and not another image001 or book cover 4, but they stand as an original image that you have given a name to. For example, I have called this photo, Lizzie Chantree author photo:

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This means that if I send this picture to someone to use on their website, they don’t have to spend hours trawling through photos to try and find the one I have sent them that they saved to their blog posts file, or other author files ages ago. They can simply search for photos with my name and all of the picture I have sent them will appear. If I am searching for a book cover an author has sent me earlier in the month that I have saved to an author file, I can easily spot the book’s name, but there might be over 100 book covers 1,2,3,4,5,6 etc. Simply naming your photos when you save them to your computer saves bloggers, website owners and anyone sharing your work a lot of time and energy and it also helps Google to recognise it. This means that they might be more likely to keep photos that aren’t clogging up their computers and confusing them with the same names and perhaps when they are uploading someone else’s photos to a blog post, they might think of you again as you are so easy to work with and provided professional content, that they can simply search for and find. Have an amazing week everyone!

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Monday Marketing. 3 Quick tips.

Hello everyone. I hope you had an amazing weekend. On Friday, and over the weekend, my publisher did a free book sale with lots of their authors. I was lucky enough for the two books I had in the sale, Ninja School Mum and If you love me, I’m yours, to both rise to #1 on Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com in multiple categories on the first day of the sale. Ninja School Mum is now #11 on the bestsellers lists in paid sales and IYLMIY is in the top #42. I decided to go all out and try some new ideas for the sale, so here’s what I did for the sale:

  1. I redesigned all of my social media headers. This was time consuming, but across all of my platforms the theme matched. As it’s nearly Christmas, I made them festive. Whichever page you looked at for my social media, you would have seen a complimentary design. I offer a design service for anyone who doesn’t know how to make social media headers or graphics and ads, but you can make free designs on places like Visme or Canva
  2. I made myself a slogan. I chose, ‘A gift for you!‘ This told my readers that I had something for them, to say thanks for being such wonderful readers. It also fit perfectly with my Christmas theme.
  3. I made Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, blog posts. These all matched my social media headers. I made several, so that I didn’t spam my timeline with the same content over the three day sale.

 

Twitter header:

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Facebook header:

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Facebook and Twitter timeline graphics:

Instagram post:

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Twitter for writers.

Hello everyone. Happy new week. Quite a few people have been asking me about Twitter and some ways to be social on it without it taking over your whole life. It’s not easy!

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I feel that as a writer, it’s important to be on social media like Twitter, as it gives my readers and followers on there a chance to find out more about my personality and writing routine. If people enjoy my Twitter timeline, it makes sense that they might also like reading my books. I do schedule some tweets, but change them up every one to two weeks. Twitter doesn’t like posts to be repeated more than once every 24hrs, so be sure to only schedule posts for longer than this time. You can change one word in a tweet and it will count as a new scheduled tweet though. Most of these sites have brief tutorials of how to use them and the scheduling is pretty say to do. You literally type the text and set the time. If you do want to add images, then you sometimes have to use the paid version.

Mostly, I pop by Twitter a few times a day, to say hello and post updates about my writing. I add funny photos that fit with my writing theme, which is humour and romance and try to lighten people’s day, as this is what my books are about too, making my readers smile.

Let me know if you have any other apps that might help other writers. Have a fun filled and creative day!

 

Apps that work well for scheduling are:

Hootsuite

SocialOomph

Buffer

 

Powerful words.

I hope you have all had a great weekend. I read an interesting article on Saturday about finding insights from inspirational quotes. It was explaining how we can look at the words used in popular quotes and to try and work out what is so powerful about them. Why do they make an impact and what do they mean to us?

Logic meme by Lizzie Chantree

We can turn this around and ask the same question of our own writing. Do our words convey the message we want them to? Are our readers going to feel an emotional attachment to our stories from what we have written? It’s a top tip when sitting back and reconsidering everything during the editing stage. Are you making the impression you want to? If not, what can you do to really make your story work?

Happy writing!

 

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If you love me, I’m yours. A romantic comedy by Lizzie Chantree.

Sharing is caring.

Lizzie Chantree blog

 

Hello everyone. I hope you had an amazing weekend. Today’s Monday Marketing is about how shareable your blog posts are. I find it really frustrating when I find a great blog to read and want to share it with my 60.4k real twitter followers. I love tweeting about topics that interest me and hope my Twitter followers enjoy them to. I read a lot of articles and often add them to my social media timelines. If there is no way to share an article, I leave it and sometimes don’t return to that site.

Tip 1.

Add social media sharing buttons to each article. Most websites and blogs have plugins you can add to easily share to Twitter Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn and more. It might be worth taking the time to call to whoever is hosting you site to ask how to add these buttons, but with WordPress, you simply click the plugin tab, find the ones for social sharing and then click install. They then appear at the end of every post you add to your site.

Tip 2.

Visuals. Always add visuals or photographs to your blog posts, Tweets and Facebook pages. Tweet images get on average 150% more RT’s than tweets without an image and on Facebook, posts with photos or images get approx. 87% more interaction. The images often catch the eye and engage the reader of the tweet or post.

Tip 3.

It’s often a good idea to add your Twitter timeline and Facebook details to your blog page or website at the side of the front page. This updates as often as you send out a new post, so your site has fresh content and it encourages readers to visit your other social media sites. You can do this by adding a widget to the sidebar on your blog post. Once again, a quick telephone call to your site provider will be the quickest way to understand how to do this. Most blogs and websites have a social sharing section in the plugins or widget sidebar in the menu, where you just have to say where you want it to go on your site and then click install.

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Don’t forget to join me for #CreativeBizHour on Twitter tonight @Lizzie_Chantree for an hour of creative chat and networking. Just add the hashtag to tweets and replies to chat to join in.

Monday Marketing. 3 Quick tips.

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Hello everyone. I’ve been travelling in Spain and around the U.K. for the last few weeks and have been writing a new book. When I write I am inspired by views and the hustle and bustle of people around me, but I also like quiet writing time in my own studio, where I don’t have any noise other than the tapping of the computer keys while I type.

I have been working on social media and branding too and am trying a new app, Visme. I was offered a professional account to try and see what I thought of the software and so far so good. The basic software is ok, but once you log into the premium settings, there is so much to explore. I will write a blog post about it when I have found out exactly what the best features are. For now, check out https://www.visme.co to decide for yourself.

Some tips on discovering your own author brand:

  1. Define your brand. What is your purpose? How do you communicate your message and make an impact? For me this is letting my readers know what my ethos is, my writing style and why they might like my books. Take a look through my blog page and social media sites. They all have the same branding and hopefully tell my readers that I write romance novels.
  2. Do you have a professional headshot that you use across all social media platforms. It’s worth getting a proper photos taken or asking a friend to take one for you.
  3. Do you have a digital media kit? This is a marketing package that states what genre your books are, prices, page length, release dates etc.  This makes it easy for journalists to upload relevant information without hours of research. Check out my media kit page here for some tips.

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Monday Marketing. 3 quick tips.

Happy new week everyone. Its been a hectic couple of weeks here, with a paperback and ebook launch, but it has been very exciting too. We all lead such busy lives, so how do we keep up with current social media trends and changes and not miss anything that might have an effect on our writing or business? There are places to go to find out about any major changes.

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  1. Facebook Newsroom: Facebook Newsroom  This page will give you details on how to control your newsfeed, platform updates, ad transparencies, Facebook community news and much more.
  2. Twitter’s Blog: Twitter’s Blog This page will tell you what if happening with your follower count, give tips and share latest news. Some people will see their Twitter follower count changing due to Twitter’s current policy on removing locked or inactive accounts.
  3. Instagram’s news page: Instagram Business News This page will tell you of trending topics, latest businesses that are popular and styles to follow.