Brent Sampson: CEO of Book Publishing & Marketing Firm OutskirtsPress.com

This week I’ve posted last year’s and this year’s About Us pages. So to continue the “past, present, and future” theme of the week, let’s look toward the suite of services Outskirts Press will be introducing in the near future.  Starting Feb 1, this was already “teased” on our Facebook Welcome page (on which we promote the upcoming events for the next two months), but the graphic below perhaps gives an even better indicator of the exciting new services coming your way in March… And that’s all I can really say until next month; but this graphic, along with the headline of this posting, probably sheds more than enough clues about what’s in store for our authors… stay tuned!

I know I promised to talk about how to create a Facebook landing page, and I will, although that topic will probably have to wait until January. Because tomorrow’s posting is going to be a follow-up to the recent posting regarding Hootsuite and Google + pages for business and then for the next two weeks I’m going to do a series about the funniest contractual clauses I’ve read in other self-publishing agreements. Seemed like a good Christmas series of postings…

But, speaking of Christmas and of the Facebook landing pages topic that I’m pushing to January, I thought I would at least share our current Facebook landing page for Outskirts Press. Hey, you too can be eligible to win an Amazon Kindle, and perhaps even a Barnes & Noble Nook or an iPad 2.  Here’s what our landing page looks like (well, without the actual “Like” button, which is where Facebook comes in when you visit our page.)

Yesterday I finished the blog series about creating a Google+ page for business by suggesting that with this post, today, I would share a method to automate posts to Google+. And before I do that, let me dispel the notion that “automating” posts is any sort of “click it and forget it” type of thing.  The task (yes, it’s a task) of “automating” your social media presence still requires a fair amount of work. For instance, for the purposes of maintaining our growing social network communities for Outskirts Press, we use the following “automation” and tracking tools: TweetDeck, HooteSuite, Klout, Ping, Rooster, and FTTT.  And to give you a visual representation of what all that involves, here’s a screen shot of JUST our HootSuite dashboard:

Scary, yes? Helpful? You bet!  In this particular screen shot, if you squint closely, you may notice that we are able to monitor 5 social media “streams” simultaneously, plus we’re able to post directly to our Facebook page, keep track of retweets from Twitter, and even schedule posts in advance on a few of our networks all at once. Unfortunately, no single application that I’ve been able to find has access to ALL the social media networks that we use, which is why we have several (and of course, that sometimes causes scheduling conflicts where several of us at Outskirts Press may inadvertently schedule various posts too close to one another).   And up until very recently, NONE of them automated posts to Google+ Pages (simply because Google+ Pages are so new).  But within the last couple of weeks, the API was opened up to six applications, including Hootsuite.

Sounds too good to be true?  The ability to automate posts and content to our new Google+ Page using an application we were already familiar with and using heavily? Well, right now, it IS too good to be true.   Development of new functionality like this takes time and even though Hootsuite has the Google API available, they don’ t yet have anything operational on their dashboard. Instead, they direct you toward a “landing page” requiring you to “apply” for the benefit of having Google+ added to your dashboard.  Here’s a link to the application.

So until it is officially added to Hootsuite — or to the others, which are: Buddy Media, Context Optional, Hearsay Social, Involver, and Vitrue– this is the procedure for putting the steps into place to be able to automate your Google+ pages as easily as your other social channels.  Of course, you might get hit up by some marketing emails from Hootsuite or even sales calls, so… just sayin’.

I’ve applied and will keep you posted…

Speaking of landing pages, today also marks the beginning of our  new Facebook landing page to encourage more “Likes” to build our Facebook community, which surpassed 3,000 this week.  And I’ll discuss all the fun details involved in creating and implementing Facebook landing pages next…

… Continuing from where we left off yesterday as we incorporate a small business on Legal Zoom step by step…

6. Select your state. I’m choosing Colorado. You have to choose the state either from the drop down box or by clicking on the graphic (if you know your geography), followed by clicking the orange Continue button.

7. Next you see a Progress Bar, some information about the process–including the claim that most people complete it within 15 minutes–and the first two questions.  Personally, I’m finding this interesting due to some similarities with our publishing site at Outskirts Press, which demonstrates in some ways that internet site best practices are not industry specific.

For instance, before our Version 4.0, we had a “progress bar” for the pre-production process.  For a variety of reasons, we removed it, but I’ve always wanted it back.   We also notify authors of how long the pre-production process will take, by saying “most authors complete it in X amount of minutes.”  In our case, we say it can be done within an hour.  That’s probably as realistic as Legal Zoom’s 15 minutes, but I digress.

8. The first question it asks is: Would you like to form a new corporation, or convert an existing business to a corporation, and the default answer is “Form a new corporation” which is the one I’m choosing.

9. You also get a chance to re-confirm your state again.  It may seem repetitive, but this is actually a trick of website design. What this site has done is introduced the process with the “fun” (and easy) exercise of clicking on a big map.  They could have just come straight to this text-intensive screen and not missed any steps, but their user-tests probably informed them that people seeing THIS screen first bailed on the entire thing.  People like clicking on graphics. They don’t really like reading websites.  This is why our Version 4.o website design at Outskirts Press has icons for every option/service we offer. But… I digress again.

10. Next question: What is the proposed name of the corporation? Please type it in EXACTLY as you want it to appear. (The name must end with “Corporation,” “Incorporated,” “Corp.” or “Inc.”)  – Here’s where you get one of the benefits of using an online service. They’re going to “test” the availability of your name.

11. It also asks for two different alternative names to the Proposed Name of the Corporation question it asked above.  Personally, I wasn’t prepared to have to have 3 total company names — I had a hard enough time coming up with one!   So I just attempt to hit the SAVE AND CONTINUE button without supplying any alternatives, and it works.  I guess if my name isn’t available, I’ll cross that bridge when it comes…

… to be continued…

Yesterday when I posted the recent webinar I conducted about using Amazon to market your business or your book I mentioned that it would stream from MetaCafe because it exceeded YouTube’s length maximums.  That didn’t prevent me from uploading it to YouTube; I just didn’t expect it to work.  But, surprise, surprise.  It appears to have loaded just fine onto YouTube, even though it’s over an hour long.  Just goes to show: you can’t believe everything you read on the Internet. Sometimes, you have to experience things yourself. 

Here’s the stream of the webinar again, embedded into this blog, for your convenience:  Book Marketing Online Through Amazon. Enjoy…

I recently conducted a webinar for the Internet Marketing Club on the topic of using Amazon to market your book or your business. Rather than getting into the nitty-gritty or summarizing it, I’ll just provide the entire webinar here in its entirety. I hope you all find it helpful. It’s long — 60 minutes — but filled with content about how to establish your presence, your content, and your expertise on Amazon in order to promote your book or business.

Just click on the image below to watch. You’ll be taken from WordPress to MetaCafe’s website, since WordPress doesn’t support embedded MetaCafe videos and YouTube’s maximum video length is 15 minutes… 

Here’s also a convenient way to purchase the two products mentioned in the video.  You can save 10% on my book, Sell Your Book on Amazon, by clicking here.

And you can save 25% off a la carte pricing on three specific Amazon Marketing options (Kindle, Search Inside, Keyword Tagging) we offer with the Amazon Extreme package by clicking here (and in that case, we’ll include a free copy of Sell Your Book on Amazon).

Enjoy…

Over the last couple of weeks we have held two different Web 2.0 polls on our Outskirts Press blog. The first poll determined that our clients wanted us to add a Social Media Market Research option to our growing selection of publication services. This option helps authors make the best, market-based decisions regarding their covers, titles, beginnings, endings, or marketing tactics, for example.

The second poll determined that our new and potential clients wanted us to offer a $300 “Mad Money” publishing promotion in October, which rewards new publishing packages with a $300 “line of credit” to use toward any pre-production service/option the author desires, including editing, professional custom cover design, Kindle edition, iPad edition, ghostwriting, or what have you.

But in both polls, the margin of victory between Choice #1 and the runner-up was fairly close. In the poll determining the next option we should launch, Market Research won by only 10%.   It earned 50% of the votes while the Featured Book-of-the-Week option earned 40% (author apps earned the remaining 10%).  And in the poll asking what promotion we should offer in October, Mad Money won by a margin of just over 1%. The instant 10% discount barely came in #2.

So while these polls helped us prioritize, the results certainly don’t prohibit the other options and other promotions from being offered. In fact, the Featured Book of the Week option’s showing with 40% demonstrated to us that it’s a highly-valued option also, so we are already working on it and will most likely have it available for our authors in October.   We’ve always known the instant 10% discount to be a valuable promotion, so we will more than likely offer that promotion before the end of the year as well.

The poor showing of the Author Apps option did surprise me, frankly. But, to be honest, it was also kind of a relief.  I was involved significantly in its pre-development here at Outskirts Press and now I feel confident re-prioritizing some of my other responsibilities and putting the Author Apps a little lower on the launch list, which will probably push it out to 2012 sometime.   I’m loving these author polls. They help us give our authors exactly what they want when they want them.  When you have so many things you WANT to do but a limited pool of resources with which to do them, this sort of insight directly from your  clients is invaluable.  

So if you’re a business owner, manager, entrepreneur, author, or other professional, I encourage you to start using polls on your blog or website, too.  They’re easy content, fun for your visitors, and provide you with actual useful feedback that validates your customers and helps your business.

So you want to use the photo strip on the top of your Facebook Fan page to advertise a service or product, but you do not want to diminish the aesthetic nature of the thumbnail images themselves? This series of blog postings over the past few days have discussed that very goal. Yesterday’s posting revealed the dimensions of the image to create in order to

• maximize the potential of the large image
• optimize the location and size of the thumbnail image
• allocate a portion of the large image for branding and marketing purposes that don’t interfere with the thumbnail

When following the specifications, you can turn this template:

Into this branded image with a call to action in the Photo Viewer:

And still keep the thumbnail image looking precisely like you want:

In thumbnail form, it just shows the Diamond, like we want. However, when someone clicks on the Diamond for a closer look, the full image appears, providing a URL to order, a summary of some of the package’s benefits, our Outskirts Press logo, and instructions for a call to action to click on a link to go directly to the order page.

See how it works and looks on our Facebook page by clicking here.

Those of you familiar with the Facebook Fan pages know that with the redesign that Facebook introduced at the beginning of this year came a 5-photo “photo strip” along the top of every Fan page. Our Facebook page for Outskirts Press used that strip to showcase the “icons” for our five publishing services, shown in the screen shot below:

I’ve mentioned on this blog in the past how that photo viewer strip allowed for a more aesthetic “branding” opportunity. For instance, in our case, Outskirts Press is often associated with the gemstone graphics, so placing those five graphics along the top row of our Facebook page worked well.

The problem is that when anybody clicks on any of those graphics, what they see doesn’t really MOTIVATE them to do much more. See below to see what I mean.

Not terribly compelling, is it?  Next time we’re going to talk in more detail about how to modify those photo strip images so they work as promotional elements or advertising for the product or service your Facebook Fan page is about.

There’s no doubt book video trailers are an exciting way to get extra exposure for your book. Statistics indicate that the Internet audience is “watching” the Internet more and “reading” it less.  Book video trailers offer an excellent opportunity to engage those people and introduce your book to them in a medium they like.   It’s such a good way to kick-start your online marketing efforts that we even offer Book Video trailer services for all authors, regardless of where they published their book (although Outskirts Press authors receive a 40% discount).

Outskirts Press authors who create their book video trailers through us are also guaranteed extra exposure on our iPhone app, since all the book videos we create for our authors receive exposure to a variety of networking and video sites like Twitter, MetaCafe, and YouTube.  And since every video we place on our YouTube channel is highlighted on our iPhone app, this is one simple way for a our authors to receive exposure on our self-publishing app.

Cost and production values for book video trailers can vary greatly.  Our competitors, for instance, charge in excess of $1000 (and sometimes much more) for 60 second book video trailers.  This may help explain why our Book Video Trailers option is among our most popular marketing options, both for our authors and writers who have self-published elsewhere.

Here’s an example of one:

And this concludes the series of posts on how to increase the odds of getting featured in our free self-publishing iPhone app.  The last category of the app is “Twitter” but that’s pretty self-explanatory. Do anything that we highlight on any of our channels and it is picked up by our Twitter feed and subsequently posted to our iPhone app, too. Easy!