This past month we’ve been looking at evaluating and increasing your online presence. An important question to ask is: Who is taking about you? The “buzz” about you and your book is important, so if the answer is “no one,” it’s time to get to work!
In our previous blog posts, we have talked about how knowing your audience and blogging can improve your online presence. Now it’s time to get to the nuts and bolts; let’s increase the buzz around you.
First step? Find out how many people are talking about you. Go ahead, Google your name (yes, it sounds creepy and egotistical, but it’s good to know what people are saying about you).
Do your search results fill up a page or two? They should. Ditto your book title. Why? Positive listings act like an online resume. Also, getting your website url posted on other people’s websites makes Google think that you are popular and relevant, increases your “searchability” factor, and eventually moves you up in the search rankings.
Here are some things you can do to help get your name out there.
Guest post on other people’s blogs. Include your website url in a short bio at the end of the article.
Online reviews, essential for book publicity, also advertise your name, book, and website. The more articles you can get your name and website url into, the better your search rankings.
Start tweeting. Twitter is like one big networking event. It’s easy and fun to meet people, and one of the best ways to drive traffic to your website and get people talking about you. Here’s a basic primer:
- In Twitter, do a search on terms relevant to your audience, which will result in people whose focus is similar to yours. “Follow” them. They will follow you back. Now you have people to talk to.
- Get over “what do I tweet about?” Tweet the link to your blog post, about current events, pithy sayings, links to interesting articles.
- Take note of the influencers in your area of interest. In your tweets, include the user names of these people (the name that starts with @) so that they get notified when you post about them. Hopefully they will do likewise.
- Get retweeted. “Retweeting” means that one of your followers finds your tweet to be interesting, and retweets it to their followers, sending your thoughts and username to a whole new group of people. Somewhere down the line, someone unknown to you will click on your username, find your website, and write about you. It works.
- Learn how to use # (hashtag). It’s too long a topic to address here, but it’s effective!
- Hang out on Twitter for a while and watch what everyone else does, and then do it better.
Getting known takes time. People often ask, “When will I start to show up in the search rankings?” Well, you’re there, on page 20, unless people search on your exact name or book title. Moving up closer to page 1 takes some effort on your part to get people to notice you, write articles about you, and talk about you.
