Turning envy into inspiration

We're going to move away from the Author Platform now and talk about How to be a better novelist.

I read a great article on turning writer's envy into inspiration and wanted to share a few of the highlights with you in this post.

We've all been there, reading the most amazing, inspiring text and wishing we could be even so much as half as good, then realising with that horrible sinking feeling that we're never going to reach that high bar. It's simply not attainable to us.

But stop right there! You're allowed a marginal amount of wallowing in self pity before you pick yourself up, dust yourself off and get back to your craft.

Don't let envy eat away at you!

Yes, it's a natural emotion, but why not harness its energy and turn it to your advantage?

Everybody has a unique voice and you shouldn't try to write in a voice that isn't your own. By all means follow the market trends and advice, however stay true to your originality and stay true to your instincts.

I strongly believe you can't be taught to write - you've either got the flair for it, or you haven't - but you can be taught to write better and hone those natural, inbuilt skills.

Writing isn't a race or competition either. I personally see it as more of a journey - a journey only for me. People will always try to measure your success with how many book sales you've made blah blah blah, but I reach the pinnacle of my success when I finish writing the story. It's all to do with how you feel about your achievement, not how other people feel about it. Manage your expectations of yourself.

Finally, study the work that inspires you and learn the techniques these writers use to capture the scene, the emotion, the whatever it is that's gripping you. I'll often dig out different books when I'm writing this scene or that scene so I can embrace the greatness of the writer and try to apply it to my own writing.

Strive to be better at what you do, but for gawd sake don't waste time beating yourself up!

Remember this definition of success from Maya Angelou: Success is liking yourself, liking what you do, and liking how you do it.

Social media techniques for newbies

I'm still learning how to best manage my time with my blogging and social media platform building. It can get disheartening when you're spending hours upon hours writing content but your website traffic and blog traffic remain low. Worse still, you haven't touched that manuscript in a very long time and the vision of becoming a serious writer and freelancer is quickly diminishing under the author platform and brand building pile.

Sound familiar?

I think it will always be a juggling act so be prepared for that, but there are little things you can do to start to turn things around if you want to see better results and be encouraged. The following is from my personal experience. I started an experiment three weeks ago with the aim of increasing my website traffic and I'm pleased to report it's going very well.

Using Hootsuite - to give me the option to track those all important shortened URLs and the traffic they might produce - I began by scheduling tweets with a link back to my website content every hour. The tweets are divided into three (three different subject matters) so each one reoccurs every three hours. This is personal preference. I have a thing about threes! I know this is controversial social media practice but I'm about to change it up so bear with me. I reasoned that I could reach all of my target audience across the globe by dividing up like this and tweeting every hour. Also I am looking to get traffic all over my website, not just to my blog. I want people to see the different things I write about and I want people to get to know me.

So one week went by and my website traffic skyrocketed into the hundreds again and I began to gain more Twitter followers. I schedule a week's worth of tweets at a time to keep it manageable. This takes about an hour and a half depending how prepared and focused you are. It's mind numbing work but well worth it. The second week I changed the content and for the third week coming to an end today, I changed the content once more. Going into the fourth week, I will be tweeting some of my favourite recent articles from other writers keeping to my "threes and hourly" schedule. I've picked these blogs to follow and they now sit on my Blogger page. This is another benefit of using Google's Blogger platform. Make the integration work for you. I believe you should be able to do "dot to dot" with your social media so maintaining your author platform becomes seamless.

It helps to have a regular blogging schedule too so you are always producing new and fresh content - and more importantly, you're still writing and not just being a scheduling monkey! This gives you more to tweet about and more to share through your social media. I blog over on my website and I'm currently working on this blog to see where it leads me - whether I can gain a bigger audience for my work, whether the stats can help me and whether Google+ is something I want to venture into.

Going back to my hourly tweeting schedule, I know I can't always be tweeting links to content because social media is supposed to be just that - social. My next step is to build relationships with fellow bloggers in my areas of interest - writing, travel and photography. I also want to have a "product" that I can offer for free over on my website and here on this blog. That "product" will be the basis of Phase Two of this experiment!

One final word - I have my website linked up to Google Analytics. You can only link one website / blog to Google Analytics but, for me, that's ok because Blogger has its own Stats so I can still track this blog's progress through there. Anyhoo, one important thing I've already noticed is that I don't get a very high percentage of returning visitors to my website. I'm hoping by bringing the "social" into my media and offering my "product" I can turn this around.

Finding the right people on Google+

Much like Twitter, to get the most out of Google+ and be inspired by great content as well as sharing your own great content in the subject areas that matter the most to you, you need to search out the best people and groups to follow - and in Google's case "circle" them.

Remember, you can then share your circles with other people and they can do the same for you - social networking at its easiest!

The obvious starting point is Goggle+'s search. Here you can type in keywords, phrases and even hashtags to find people who are commenting and posting about the topics you are interested in. Also check out the excellent "Communities" feature.

Here are a couple more interesting ways to find people for the more serious user:

Circle Count - this ranks users according to how many followers they have. It also measures the influence of a person, useful if you are searching for an expert in your chosen field.

Recommended Users - again this is good if you are looking for influential / high profile people to follow.

When talking about Google+ in yesterday's post, I hinted that it would be a good starting point for finding potential clients and freelance writing work. Just to see how effective it really is, I searched "freelancing writing jobs" and up popped The WM Freelance Writers Connection. See what they are all about here. It's a really great concept - and they have regular job posts. This is just one of many you could be connecting with...

In conclusion, Google+ has a real social networking business feel about it, so if you're hesitating and thinking one more social media to maintain for the author platform is definitely going to be one too many, take a deep breath and give it a go. You can always back out later if it isn't working for you.

I still prefer Twitter (as I keep saying) because it's fast and easy, but Google+ is worthy of consideration if you are looking to take your author platform to the next level. I'm going to try a little experiment to see if it helps me get down to the serious business of finding paid freelance work as well as making acquaintance with real industry professionals. I shall report back soon!

What is Google+?

A late edition to your author platform could be Google+

It is being tipped as the next big thing ahead of Twitter (and Facebook) which is why I'm going to post about it today.

I'm still learning having only recently set up my profile, but here's what I know so far...

• Facebook uses "likes" and "shares" and Twitter uses "retweets". Google competes with a +1 button
• Google has social "circles" and unlike Facebook, is a search engine with a global reach
• It offers free, business pages
• You can construct targeted groups to market using Google "circles" - the potential reach is far better than Facebook
• Your blogs, articles and websites can be linked back to your Google+ profile to establish your authority in a specific area of knowledge
• Use the "contributed to..." area on your author profile to link out to your work
• Use the "other profiles" area to link to your other social media accounts
• Make full use of the "Introduction" section and any full URL you write will turn into an active hyperlink for people to click through to (could be your website)
• The content is quality content. It's rumoured some communities (circles) are kicking people out if their content lacks substance. They prefer to know WHY you think something is valuable and worth the time to read
• The circle system is great if you have different friends in different industries. I can keep my travel content separate from my photography content and writing related content - targeting interested parties much more effectively
• As a freelance writer, you can search out potential clients. More on this to come...
• Potential to use Google Hangouts to network with fellow writers (even hold a conference!)
• You can share circles you've created
• The more +1s you get, the higher you move up the search engine rankings within Google. Excellent SEO! A social media that is also a search engine !!!
• The visibility of content is much better in Google+ ie. more people will see what you post
• Now for the most important detail: "Google Authorship and Author Rank" - the capability to verify your identity with Google and connect your Google+ profile with content you have written all over the Internet. This is your opportunity to make ALL of your content work hard for you as it will ultimately count towards your expert status in your chosen field/s. This raises your original content higher up the search engine. And when you set up your Google Authorship (use this link to help you), your profile image will appear besides your results in Google search. Pretty cool eh!

Twitter Tit Bits Part 2

As you know, I love Twitter over all of the other social media out there and I feel Twitter is my best friend when it comes to marketing and promoting myself and my books. I've been using it now for about two years and I know I've barely scratched the surface. Here are some more useful (and creative) ideas and techniques for managing your Twitter account and keeping the enthusiasm alive.

• Have a separate account for your book character/s or let one of your characters take over your Twitter account for a day or two

• Use your favourites as a testimonial page by saving any nice tweets people make about your book

• Some established hashtags for the writing and publishing world that will get your tweets circulating in the right newsfeeds

           #followfriday or #ff or #writerwednesday - recommending authors and people in your area of expertise you might want to follow

          #amwriting - charting your progress on a current project and supporting other writers

          #amediting - for when you're editing and need help and advice

          #writetip - sharing tips

          #fridayreads - persuade your friends to promote your book - or if you're reading a great book, remember to include the username of the author, the official hashtag for the book and the link to Amazon in your fridayreads tweet!

          #bookgiveaway - if you're running a promotion 

• Work trending topics into your tweets 

• Set up a list of your favourite tweeters to create a whole new newsfeed you can then add to your homepage on your website. It will be packed with useful info. for your followers and puts everything in one place for them (and you) 

• If you're feeling really serious about Twitter, brave or just plain crazy, organise a "tweetup" - real-life meet up of the people you follow on Twitter!

• Tweet about the ideas and concepts contained within your books 

• Tweet the bits of reviews people give your books that will generate curiosity - so no bragging

Blogging conundrum

So I've been blogging for a while over on Weebly and recently decided that I wanted all of my content to filter out from one source (my website) to keep things more manageable, but I was still left with a blogging conundrum - should I have a Blogger blog, or not?

 
My reasons to have one:

It integrates nicely with some of my favourite writing and travel related blogs

Greater exposure

Top SEO

 
My reasons against:

Weebly blog is well established and I want all of my content to feed from my website out to various social media streams

Having another blog in another location to look after will be too much to maintain

 
However, I have noticed some distinct disadvantages with Weebly blogs as follows:

You can't copy or save an archive of your blog posts to any where. So, you will not be able to migrate. If you need to move to Blogger or WordPress, you have to manually copy and paste all of your posts and comments.

There are no post tags. Post tags tell precisely what the post is about in five or six words and search engines give priority to them, treating them as subjects rather than words. With the post tag facility absent in Weebly, it leaves your blog posts treated as generic content.


Thinking about all of the pros and cons above, I finally decided to have a Weebly blog and a Blogger blog and to copy and paste my Weebly content to Blogger. It's definitely not efficient, but it's an adequate compromise for now. I reasoned it was better to be a part of the growing Google social media network, than to miss out altogether.

Website interaction

Drive the spark within your website

Time is precious so I have to admit to not being a fan of forums or chat rooms. I also don't have enough time yet to prepare and send out my own ezine.

If you feel yourself agreeing with me, what can you do then to make your website more interactive for your audience?

Here are 5 suggestions which are very easy to implement if you have a basic website already in place.

1) Star in and post your own YouTube videos with a direct link to your YouTube Channel so people can check out your additional content. Talk about anything writing related. Give advice. Discuss the themes of your latest book. Make your content come alive.

2) Include a blog so people can leave comments and subscribe to your posts via an RSS feed.

3) Post podcasts so your content can be downloaded and listened to as audio files.

4) Link up Facebook and Twitter to your website, so when you post new content, people using social media are instantly notified.

5) When you have enough of a following, prepare and email exclusive content to them using an autoresponder.