Promotion: This Means Getting Social

For a blogged book, promotion means, “What are you going to do to tell the cyber world your blog exists?” How will you sell your blog?

This is where you add your social hat to your business hat, because to gain readers you must promote yourself and your blog via social networking. Otherwise, how will anyone know your blog exists?

This does not just mean gaining friends on Facebook and followers on Twitter, the most powerful social networking sites, however. It also means getting out there and participating in forums and commenting on related blogs and on-line columns.  It also means posting your blog to Reddit.com and StumbleUpon.com, and forming networks of bloggers who will help you get your blog noticed by being on their blog roll and by reciprocal linking and agreements to submit each other’s posts to sites like StumbleUpon.com, which increases their ranking.

You’ll also need to set up your blog to “ping” to places like Technorati.com. (I’ll talk more about this later.)

All of this falls under the category of promotion. However, you can also do more traditional promotion. You can send press releases to the media. You can publish articles on your book’s topic. You can set up speaking engagements, workshops and tele-seminars. You can send out a newsletter.

You can create a website that hosts your blogged book, and that site can offer more features that attract visitors and readers. It can also have a media kit or author’s page to help you get more media attention.

You can create contests, give aways and gimmicks to attract attention to your blog. You can hire a publicist. All of this falls under the heading of promotion.

Here you must think and act outside the box. And you have to do this both to gain readers simple because you want people to read your blogged book and also to be found or to prove to a publisher that your blog deserves to be published.

Should you decide to write a book proposal, the promotion section can make or break you. The publishing house will rely on you to come up with a great promotion plan; it will become their promotion plan. Yes, a publisher will add to your plan a bit, but primarily they will rely on you to promote your own book in your own way.

Most writers don’t want t do this work. Their eyes glaze over, and they simple say, “No. Won’t do it.” If you want your book to sell, which in this case means to be found by readers, you must promote it. Period.

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