This week I talk to Jeff Sieh, an awesome man with a beard, general nice guy and Pinterest expert. He’s the host of the Manly Pinterest Tips Podcast and manages the Pinterest and Instagram pages for Social Media Examiner, arguably the most influential Social Media Marketing blog in the world.
Marketing
How to get the most out of conferences
As I hinted at in previous shows I’ve been away for 10 days both on holiday (or vacation as the Americans like to say) and at a major Marketing conference, Social Media Marketing World arranged by Social Media Examiner, in San Diego in California. I’ve only just arrived back a few days ago and due to Jet Lag and organisational incompetence it’s going to be another short show.
Given the topical conference theme running through my head I’d thought I’d share some of my tips for dealing with conferences. I am a bit of a conference junkie, in that I go to far too many, but I do feel that there is value in conferences for everyone. So here are my tips for getting the most out of conferences.
How NOT to Launch A Book
In this episode I tell you about my recent (very soft launch) of Magpies and Magic 2 : The Great Escape and the fact that not for the first time I’ve done so many things wrong.
Building up a Twitter Following Fast
In this episode I talk about a repeat of an experiment I performed when I started self-publishing, that is building up a Twitter following relatively quickly. In under 6 months I’ve built up my following on the Begin Self-Publishing Twitter account (beginsppodcast) to over a 1000 followers, taking about 10 minutes a day on a normal day doing this. I am still building up followers on my main Stoneham Press account as well, which has now over 4500 followers in just under 2 years. I soon worked out that you can do this with relatively small amounts of work if you use the right tools.
iBooks Latest
I discuss what I learnt from a recent webinar for the Alliance of Independent Authors from the people at Apple in their iBooks department. I found this to be a good sign: the guys at Apple haven’t really reached out much to the Indie community in the same way as say Kobo and Amazon have and it was good of them to give a webinar to those of us who were able to sign up as part of the Alliance of Independent Authors,
I learnt a few things myself and so I thought I’d recount them here.
Paid Online Advertising
In my last show I talked about my efforts to revive the flagging sales of my Magpies and Magic book and over the last week I’ve been looking at ways to do this. I’ve just kicked off a few different campaigns and hope that at least one of them shows some promise so I can scale it up to really revive the book in preparation for the launch of Magpies and Magic 2.
I’ve not been entirely focussed as I have been playing around with a brand new marketing option that has become available: Snapchat custom geo-filters. While the jury is still out on whether they are that useful to authors it did get me thinking about the fact that many people just aren’t aware of the terrific possibilities available in online marketing for targetting.