If you follow my blog, then you know Phyllis Zimbler Miller, gracious marketing guru, answers questions on the 5th day of every month. This month it’s about sharing. 

Thanks, Phyllis!
 

Q: Can you recommend good places to share blog post links?

As writers, we have the opportunity to use our skills to write blog posts that directly or indirectly promote our books. But writing posts is not enough – we do have to get our blog posts noticed.

Now we can write posts on our own blogs or write guest posts. (One good place to find blogs who might want your guest posts is BloggerLinkUp.com – I highly recommend this resource.)

In both cases we want to share our links as widely as possible:

One place is obviously Facebook. These days you can “promote a post” on your Facebook profile page for $7. This option is important because it increases the number of your Facebook “friends” who actually get your post in their news feeds.

If you want to share your blog post link with your Facebook “friends,” paying the $7 to promote that Facebook post can be a good marketing expenditure.

(You can also pay to promote a post from your Facebook Page, but as of this writing the option is only available if your Page has a certain number of “likes.”)

Of course, you can post your blog post link in your LinkedIn update and on some LinkedIn groups depending on the group rules. I manage the LinkedIn group www.LinkedInBookMarketing.com and blog post link updates are fine if the blog post is relevant for book authors.

You can also share blog post links on your Google+ profile as well as a Google+ company account if you have this.

If you have a photo in your blog post (and you should as photos attract people!), you can pin your blog post onto your Pinterest account. (I do this a great deal – see http://pinterest.com/ZimblerMiller) People can then repin your blog post photo (with its automatic accompanying link).

Always chose your more mature photo

My personal favorite place to share my blog post links is on Twitter. You can tweet your own links and then people can retweet your links.

Another place for sharing your blog post links is triberr.com – where you can choose to be in groups that share each other’s links. This does require a commitment on your part to share the blog post links of others.

Yes–sharing is good!

And then, of course, there are all kinds of special interest sites on which you can share your blog post links – or even the same post from your own blog. (I do NOT recommend you share a guest post unless you have explicit permission from the blog owner where the post was first published.)

One such site where you can re-publish your own blog posts is RedRoom.com, and another site is Business2community.com

As with all social media sites, the idea is to interact with others and NOT just push out your blog post links. An effective strategy is to share the blog post links of others so that your followers or fans recognize you as a good source of information and not simply someone “selling” his or her own posts.

Now for a warning I’d like to share:

 
Amazon’s KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing) no longer supports third-party ebook conversion software such as Calibre. Now you must use KindleGen to convert your ebooks into the Kindle format.

After my business partner Yael K. Miller spent hours researching what this entails, she and I have now embarked on this complicated process. What was once a matter of a minute or less on Calibre is now hours of very detailed coding.
Why are we doing this detailed coding?

Because suddenly two of my ebooks got “reviews” saying that the formatting of the ebooks was lousy. This really upset me because I had taken such pains to ensure that my ebooks had good formatting.

After much emailing back and forth to KDP, I learned about this KindleGen requirement and the issue with no longer being able to use Calibre. As I frequently re-upload my ebooks to add additional information, I needed to learn how to make the formatting of my ebooks continue to look good.

This change also required my rewriting an entire chapter of the ebook TOP TIPS FOR HOW TO PUBLISH YOUR BOOK IN THE AGE OF KINDLE (and the same chapter in the 3-in-1 ebook TOP TIPS FOR HOW TO PUBLISH AND MARKET YOUR BOOK IN THE AGE OF AMAZON).

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