branding – Page 9 – President of Outskirts Press

Optimize your book or company for search

As we continue discussing how book marketing is similar in many ways to marketing a company, one consideration to always keep in mind is “search engine optimization.” This may seem a more appropriate topic when it comes to marketing a company, specifically as it relates to optimizing a company website, but the same considerations — and therefore the same tactics — hold true with regard to book promotion as well.

Optimizing your book for Internet sales starts with the title. I discuss this subject in my book Sell Your Book on Amazon in regard to how Amazon’s search engine indexes books, but the same can be said for Internet search engines in general (Google, Yahoo, etc). When “content” is indexed by computers, the “title” of that content is weighted quite heavily. For books, the title is… well, the title. For web pages, the title is the “title page” in the HTML.

This is so important for authors that Outskirts Press offers an optional service whereby we offer title suggestions to our authors. This begins with seeing the author’s initial title and/or sub-title. We analyze that against the content of the book and against other books that may either share that title or be “too similar” to that title. Next, we suggest 3 alternate titles and sub-titles that are geared toward maximizing the applicable “keywords” that define the book’s subject matter or content.

Sub-titles for books are one of the most powerful, and one of the most overlooked, marketing opportunities for books in the Internet age. One need look no further than five of the top 10 bestselling books published through Outskirts Press in 2009 for perfect examples. I’ll highlight the keywords that are helping these books get seen by more potential customers who conduct searches on the Internet.

The Complete Guide to Day Trading: A Practical Manual From a Professional Day Trading Coach, by Markus Heitkoetter
LEED AP Exam Guide: Study Materials, Sample Questions, Mock Exam, Building LEED Certification (LEED-NC) and Going Green, by Gang Chen
Meat Smoking and Smokehouse Design, by Stanley Marianski, Adam Marianski, Robert Marianski
Sell Your Book on Amazon: Top-Secret Tips Guaranteed to Increase Sales for Print-on-Demand and Self-Publishing Writers, by Brent Sampson
What To Do When You Become The Boss: How New Managers Become Successful Managers, by Bob Selden

If sub-titles are so successful for books, ask yourself…. should your company have one? Are the names/titles for the products or services you launch optimized for search? These are important things to consider.

branding, marketing

Establishing your expertise

Whether you are promoting a book or promoting a company, one integral step is establishing your expertise in your field. If you are a novelist, your “field” is your genre. If you write non-fiction, your “field” is your topic or subject matter. If you own a clothing store, your “field” includes the clothing lines you carry.

The question is not whether you are an expert in your field, since, presumably, you are if you have either written a book or started a business. The question is, how do you establish that expertise publicly by sharing it with others, either your potential readers or your potential customers?

There are a number of ways to establish your expertise, and they are the same regardless of whether you have written a book or started a company. One way is to write a blog. Another method is to write articles and distribute them through “article banks” on the Internet. These are not mutually exclusive. In fact, once you are doing one of these things, you can easily do the other. The writer’s maxim is the opposite of the old carpenter’s maxim: you should write it once, and use it twice — or even more!

Interestingly, if you own a business, one of the best ways to establish your expertise in your field is to write a book and publish it.

branding

Are you a best-selling author? Part 1

Some of my previous posts have already touched upon the caveat that should exist with the term “best-selling author” since different lists from different retailers have different values and different processes for creating the list. An argument could be made that the only true way to define a “best-selling” book is based upon the number of copies it has sold.

As both the president of a self-publishing company and an author, I am in a fairly unique position of being able to see my own book sales, compare it with my Amazon Sales Rank, and then do the same for the 5,000+ other books that have been published through Outskirts Press. I talk about this a little bit in Sell Your Book on Amazon, because I feel it’s a unique perspective. And since I have an opportunity to share a unique perspective, I feel obligated to do so.

And here’s my perspective: If you have an “Amazon Best-Selling” book, you should be proud. All things taken into consideration, that’s an amazingly hard feat to accomplish. With the proliferation of books being published nowadays (500,000+ a year), it’s been said that publishing a book isn’t all that impressive anymore. Excuse me? There are over 6 billion people on the planet. If you’ve written and published a book, no matter how you’ve done it, you’re in the minority.

With the “best-selling Amazon campaign” it’s been said that being an “Amazon best seller” isn’t all that impressive anymore. Excuse me? There are 500,000+ books published every year. If your book was/is an Amazon best seller, no matter how you’ve done it, you’re in the minority. And books that are Amazon best sellers still attract attention and kudos from publishing traditionalists like editors, agents, and conventional publishers. These people are scanning the self-publishing ranks looking for their next authors/clients, but maybe no longer due to the strength of the book and the promise of its sales potential. Now I believe it is because an author that can “become an Amazon best seller” themselves has successfully demonstrated his or her ability to leverage/monetize their platform. And that’s what is valuable to all publishers and agents — an author who not only has a platform, but can turn that platform into book exposure and book sales. Just having a list of 500,000 to million people to conduct the “campaign” is impressive to publishers and agents, not to mention composing a “pitch” compelling enough to get a large number of those people (most of them strangers) to purchase something. Like I said before, it’s all easier said than done, and that’s why being an Amazon best seller is a hard-earned, noteworthy status. We have many authors at Outskirts Press who have accomplished this, and it is a milestone in their continuing book promotion efforts.

branding

How to add a graphic to your Twitter background

1. Go to twitter.com and sign-in to your account if you’re not already signed in. You do this along the upper-right hand corner.

2. Once you are signed-in, you will see your menu choices along the top and these include: Home, Profile, Find People, Settings, Help, and Sign out. Click on “Settings.”

3. You now get a sub-menu of choices under the “Settings” section, including: Account, Password, Mobile, Notices, Picture, Design, and Connections. Click on “Design.”

4. At this point, your computer may ask you whether you want to only view the “secure” elements of this page. Click “No.”

5. You will see a collection of “themes” you can select from. Below the thumbnail choices representing your theme choices are two links: Change background image and Change design colors. Click “Change background image.”

6. You will see a “Browse” button to the right of an empty box. This is how you select the graphic from your computer. If you already have your graphic, click the “Browse” button to upload it now and then skip to Step 10.

7. If you don’t have a graphic you will need to create one. Depending upon your monitor’s resolution, it may appear that you have a “lot” of space for your background graphic. Or, it may appear that you have almost no space at all. The “lower” your resolution, the less space you will have. The graphic you use should be optimal for the maximum number of monitor resolutions, so it is best to keep your graphic no wider than 100 pixels wide. For example, our logo is 76 pixels wide on our Twitter page, but there’s still some “room to spare” even on lower monitor resolutions. So, if you’re thinking of uploading the cover to your latest book (which would be a good idea if you’re an author), you may want to consider a graphic size of 100 pixels wide by 150 pixels high.

8. Depending upon the graphic, you may need to “color match” the background color setting from Twitter. Twitter claims to accept .gif images, too, so you may also be able to use a .gif image with a transparent background if necessary. Fortunately, if you’re putting up a square or rectangular image, like a book cover, you won’t have to worry about this.

9. Save your image to your computer and then use the “Browse” button on your Twitter settings page referred to above to upload your image.

10. Once you have uploaded your image, be sure to select it from the thumbnail choices that appear below the “Browse” button. Note: If your image doesn’t appear, it means you indicated that you did NOT want to see non-secure images when you were asked. In that case, you’ll need to leave the “Design” page and then come back, answering the pop-up question properly.

11. Once you have selected your image thumbnail by clicking on it, click on the “Save Changes” button and your graphic will be added to your Twitter page’s background.

12. Congratulations! You’re done, and your branding on Twitter has officially started.

blogging, branding

Branding your Twitter page

Let’s first take a look at the NFL’s Twitter page so you can see an example of what I discussed previously. Depending upon your monitor’s resolution, you will either see the NFL logo clearly visible and non-obstructed along the left-hand side of the “conversation” box. Or, if your monitor has a lower resolution, you may see part of the NFL logo “covered up” by portions of the Twitter page itself. Or, I guess a 3rd alternative is, now that the Super Bowl is over, the NFL people may remove or alter the logo entirely, and naturally, I don’t have any control over that.

Now that you’re looking at an example, the goal is to put something of YOURS on your Twitter page that will help you brand yourself on Twitter. With the example of the NFL fresh in our mind, we added our company’s name to our Twitter page on its side. Obviously, we would prefer for it to be “right-side-up” but then one runs into the issue the NFL experienced, with the graphic being obstructed or partly-obstructed by the Twitter box and/or Twitter logo. We have two versions of our “company graphic treatment” — a horizontal version and a “stacked vertical” version — but after experimenting with different lay-outs and sizes, this was what we settled on because it was the only one that looked consistently the same, regardless of monitor resolution.

And now this opens up a number of different topics for me to blog about in upcoming posts… 1) the creation and considerations involved in creating a graphic treatment for your company name by using ours as an example and 2) the details of adding a non-scrolling graphic to the background of your Twitter page.

I could cover some of that now, but I read in a recent Entrepreneur article — about “ghost blogging,” interestingly enough — that business/corporate blog postings are ideally supposed to be under 300 words in length. So, with that sage advice in mind, until next time….

branding

Twitter, the Super Bowl, and branding

Before the Super Bowl this past weekend I went to the NFL’s Twitter page to see what a media phenomenon like “the big game” was having on the social media site. Yes, lots of tweets and yes, lots of followers (over 1 million – wow!). I also liked the way they had “branded” their page with an NFL logo. On my monitor — which is set at a resolution of 1600 x 1200 — it looked fantastic. Almost too good actually. So I looked at the same NFL Twitter page on a monitor set at a more common resolution, and the NFL logo was obstructed in a not-very-visually-pleasing manner by the “conversation box.” You could see that the NFL logo was “behind” the content box on Twitter, and the left-most portion of the logo was clearly visible in the “border” of the frame, but on a whole, it looked more like a mistake than it should have, especially since over 1 million people were probably looking at it.

So I guess one could take away two morals from that story. 1) It’s hard to take “things” like that too seriously on the Internet — if the Super Bowl people can miss a concept like accounting for all common resolution types in front of 1 million people, you’re certainly forgiven if you do, too. And, 2) branding your Twitter page is one of the quickest ways to give it a little panache in a land full of redundancy and duplicity. And we’ll discuss how in a future post…

blogging, branding

Fine tuning the blogging platform

Well, I think I’ve settled on the “Journalist” theme for the blog. One could argue it’s pretty boring (and one would be right) so my hope is that the scintillating prose I splash across the page brings all the interest the blog needs. Oh, and the covers of my books “pop” the most against this stark black/white landscape, which itself is rather appropriate for a blog that covers “publishing,” among other things.

This theme also doesn’t have that annoying “tag line” to the blog name which says something like “Just another WordPress.com blog” and which I couldn’t figure out how to get rid of except by selecting a theme that didn’t say that. It must be me, because I can’t imagine a platform that prides itself on its flexibility doesn’t allow the blogger to remove that from their heading. But I couldn’t figure it out in the 2 minutes I devoted to the task, so choosing a theme without that tagline seems to work. The downside is that there isn’t a graphic heading at all. Or maybe that’s an upside — it prevents me from having to design something. Besides, this blog is supposed to be branded by yours truly, so my photograph there hopefully provides all the branding this blog platform needs.

I also can’t figure out how to change the “Name” of my blog, in spite of the promise WordPress made when I first named it that I could change it whenever I wanted. The lack of the word “of” is bothering me. When I initially named it, I just strung some keywords together, but now it’s TOO close to an actual, grammatically-correct sentence, that the absence of the word “of” looks like a mistake. <sigh> I’ll keep trying to figure it out.

This photograph I’m using along the right-hand side is the same one I use everywhere else, so it appears on the backs of my books, it appears on my book web pages, it appears on Amazon, etc. The image you choose for yourself when establishing your brand is important, so take the time to do it right. Have it professionally taken, and then acquire the rights from the photographer to use it however you want (yes, you have to acquire those rights — just having a picture taken of you doesn’t entitle you to use that image; it belongs to the photographer).

By now I’ve also added a few “widgets” to the side column of my blog, specifically three image widgets that allow me to add a photograph of myself (for blog branding purposes) and the covers to some of my books. A nice thing is that when I write and publish future books — this blog will cover that process in great detail — it will be an easy matter to add those cover images to the column, too.

blogging, branding, search engine optimization

Naming your blog

The username or domain name you use for your blog is the most heavily weighted in terms of search engine optimization, so the URL is the single most imporant part of branding your blog. The second opportunity comes in the form of titling or naming your blog. Currently as I’m writing this (in December 2009), the name of this blog is “CEO Self Publishing Start-Up OutskirtsPress.com” which is not so much a title as a string of keywords I’m hoping will result in my blog being found in relevant search engines. An ideal blog name would be a combination of two things — an accurate, grammatically correct description of the blog’s benefits or purpose AND an infusion of relevant, highly-applicable search words or keyword terms.

My current name misses out on the “grammatically correct” portion of that criteria. Of course, I’m composing this blog posting in December of 2009 so perhaps by the time this blog launches in January 2010, I will have had time to arrive upon a better name. Like the headline of a press release, or the subject heading of an important email, or the title of a book, the name of your blog is vital, and it’s mandatory that you spend time getting it exactly right. Fortunately, WordPress allows you to change the name of your blog at any time, and then that new name propagates through previous posts. In essence, that means you can deliberately change your blog name from time to time to massage your SEO position/tactics. And, frankly, that’s probably what I’m going to do, so even though I’m writing this in December 2009, you may be reading it years later (isn’t the archival power of the Internet great?) and as a result, it is anybody’s guess what the “name” of this blog may be in the future…

blogging, branding, self publishing

Writers and entrepreneurs

Why, you might ask, am I spending so much time writing about choosing a theme for the blog? Isn’t this blog supposed to be about entrepreneurs, CEOs, writing, self-publishing? You know, interesting things? Yes, and it is…

Here’s one reason for the details: When I have less time to devote to the minutiae, I often advise a self-published writer or a CEO to simply “create your platform.”

And when they ask “How?” I answer “Start a blog.”

That’s short and to the point. WordPress even makes it easy. But for many people, that advice is not very helpful in its generality. Just because something is easy for one person doesn’t mean it is easy for other people and it certainly doesn’t mean they will do it “right.” And that’s a good thing, because if everyone else knew what you knew and could do what you can do, you wouldn’t have anything of value to offer or sell. The trick is taking your knowledge, infusing it with necessity, and then packaging it, and offering it to others, either for “free” as in the case of a blog, or for some amount of money as in the case of your book, product, service, or company.

When starting a blog and creating a platform, doing it “right” means taking into consideration all of the things I’ve been pontificating about for the past few posts, like branding, SEO, and here’s another one — consistent content. Blogging is like the antithesis of writing a book, which is perhaps one of the things that has always bothered me about blogging — blogs are not supposed to be succinct. If your blog is too succinct, you run out of things to say, and then your blog only lasts 5 months, like my last one did in 2005.

Although I should mention that any blog effort you make could always have a positive effect. Early in 2009 I received a call from a reporter from the New York Times who was writing an article about Kirkus Discoveries, and saw one of my blog postings about that very topic. He referred to it 4 years after I had written it, so the first few minutes of our phone conversation were interesting because, to him, I had just written it because he had just read it. Yet, for me, that posting was 4 years old in my mind. I barely remembered what he was talking about. Nevertheless, it led to an interview with the New York Times. Can’t beat that with a stick…

And that’s just one of many reasons why entrepreneurs and writers should have a blog. In fact, by and large, I’ll probably use the word “entrepreneur” and “writer” somewhat interchangeably. All self-publishing writers are, in essence, entrepreneurs. And, even though all entrepreneurs may not consider themselves authors, they should consider themselves writers. So even though I’m devoting a large portion of the beginning of this blog about inane details revolving around the selection of a blog theme, the AUDIENCE of this blog is entrepreneurs, self-publishing writers, CEOs, CMOs and other marketers (both b-2-b and b-2-c), people involved in any kind of start-up, and anyone else who would find value in improving their sales platform.

Platform. Is that a term I’ve used on this blog yet? It’s going to be a recurring topic. The cornerstone of nearly every speech and presentation I make involves creating and maintaining ones “platform” – the foundation upon which you build your career, whether you are a writer, a doctor, a speaker, or an entrepreneur. You need a platform and it needs to be branded.

And that takes us full-circle back to choosing a theme for this blog. I think I “spoke” too early with my last posting, because for some reason I though the “thinner” column of the “Contempt” theme was on the left-hand side, when in reality, it appears on the right-hand side. So far, it’s still the best theme (after Blix) that I’ve seen on WordPress, so I’ll add a few more widgets to the column and see how it holds up…

branding

Picking a Blog Theme

The typical topics of this blog won’t be so mundane as “picking a blog theme.” Or, I don’t know, maybe they will. But “branding” is one of the topics I’ll be discussing, and when it comes to branding one’s blog, there are some concepts to take into consideration.

When I first started blogging in 2005, I chose blogger.com as my platform because, frankly, I didn’t know of any other platforms. I found using blogger.com difficult. I had to sign-in each time, the U.I. (user interface) was clumsy, etc. Coming up with relevant content is hard enough — the publishing portion should be easy! Hey, that’s the philosophy behind our company. What do you know?

Nevertheless, I gave blogger.com the old college try, but eventually, other responsibilities won out over my blog, partly because using blogger was so hard, and my blogger.com blog became yet another statistic in the growing slush pile of blogs that begin with the best of intentions and then fade out slowly over time. In my case, 5 months.

Writing consistently and relevantly is hard work! It’s possible this blog will suffer the same fate, but I’m doing some things differently. Like, first and foremost, I’m using WordPress instead of Blogger. We have a number of blogs for Outskirts Press, including SelfPublishingNews.com and when I first set-up that one, I choose a theme for the blog that I was hesitant about right from the beginning. The header was too large and the way in which the blog subjects were presented was too clunky.

The custom header had already been created for that specific header-size, so I didn’t change the theme, even though I should have. Fast forward a year or so, and I ultimately decided to change the theme for Self Publishing News anyway — at the same time that I registered “selfpublishingnews.com” in our on-going SEO tactics. Up until then, the blog was outskirtspress.wordpress.com – which still works. Just like the current address when I’m writing THIS blog is brentsampson.wordpress.com but will be forwarded via DNS to brentsampson.com by the time this posting goes live.

Ah yes, that reminds me of one of the biggest advantages of wordpress over blogger. WordPress allows you to write blogs and schedule them for post in the future. Blogger doesn’t (or didn’t in 2005 when I was using them).

Anyway, back to the story – We kind of “re-launched” the blog as Self Publishing News and I changed the header at that time. But we had already branded the blog the “old” way, so even though the blog looked better, and it was a better UI for the reader, readers who were used to the “old” look were probably confused by the new one. Perhaps they thought they were in the wrong place. It’s easy to find yourself on the wrong blog on the internet, and since many blogs end up saying the same things anyway, you could easily find yourself wasting an hour on a blog you don’t even want to be on.

Adding insult to injury, the new theme had a narrower “main” column for the content, which means that many of the graphics we created for the old theme are now too wide for the new one, which is only problematic for readers visiting the posting archives, or for those stumbling upon previous blog postings due to successful search engine results (which, let’s face it, is one of the main purposes of a business blog anyway).

Long story, short: branding a blog correctly right off the bat is kind of important. So… I’m trying to settle on a blog theme for this one. I will probably create a custom header for it eventually, but I don’t have time to do that immediately, although I’ve learned my lesson with Self Publishing News and realize I’ll need to do it soon. Fortunately, with the ability to schedule posts ahead of time, I’m writing many of these blog postings all at once, still in 2009, with the expectation that by the time 2010 rolls around, all these little details will be completed.

With yesterday’s initial blog posting I chose a theme I don’t even remember the name of… and then when I saw it, I knew that it wasn’t the one for this blog. With today’s blog I’m trying a theme called “Sapphire” — perhaps it is fate, choosing a theme named after one of our self publishing packages.