blogging

Blogging Advice for Writers

Another piece of advice I learned from this “Social Media Scientist” is that you should blog on specific days of the week according to what you hope to accomplish with your blog. For instance, if you are trying to generate comments, blogging on the weekends is shown to be statistically better since people have more time to comment, and there is less competition for their time.

On the other hand, if you are trying to generate click-thrus, blogging during the weekdays is better because people are more pressed for time, given their own responsibilities, and are therefore more likely to click-thru on a link you have in your post than comment on your blog.

Well, that’s a no-brainer for this blog, since I’ve already discussed the logistic reasons why I don’t have “commenting” enabled.  But for your own blog, the goal may be different…

blogging

Social Media Scientist

So rather than writing one long posting on the days on which I post, now I will — hopefully — post 2-3 somewhat shorter postings all on the same subject.   I say “hopefully” because there’s a chance this concept is more than I can chew; I already lack the time to devote to this blog the amount of time I do already.

According to Dan Zarrella, the “social media scientist” who was recommending this, the reason this is more successful is that the majority of blogs are only posted to once a day — if that.  Statistically few blogs are posted to more than once a day, and any time you do something “different” than the majority, you give yourself a competitive advantage.

He was probably summarizing a more complicated idea, so I will attempt to enhance that idea a  little bit with an example as it pertains specifically to this blog.  Every time this blog is updated, my account on HootSuite is programmed to automatically update our Outskirts Press Twitter feed with the subject of the post, a link to the post, and relevant hash tags.

Therefore, by only posting once a day, our company’s Twitter account is only updated with my posting once, unless I manually retweet it — which I admit I should do, but simply lack the time. More on that later.

But, by breaking a larger posting into smaller posts throughout the day, each posting receives its own Twitter tweet, thereby multiplying the potential exposure for the blog by three.

That’s just once example of the benefit. I’ll discuss more soon…

blogging

Social Media Energy

I learned in the recent webinar I attended that the “energy” of social media is dependent upon the time of day, and the day of the week.  One graphic in particular that was shared during the webinar demonstrated that blogs that are updated more frequently than once a day are many times more likely to be read, shared, and subscribed to. 

I’ve already discussed the fact that I “squeeze” this blogging effort into an already-overloaded schedule, so while I was listening to this “social scientist” tell me I had to blog MORE each day, my immediate reaction was, “Yeah, right!”  But then it occurred to me that I could post approximately the same amount of content, but I could also accommodate this “multiple-postings-per-day-directive” by  “splitting it up” through-out the day.

So… that’s what I’m going to try to do, at least for a while, and we’ll see how it works.

blogging

Social Media Marketing

Starting in April I will attempt to follow some “social media scientist” advice I received from a webinar I attended recently.  The webinar was held by Dan Zarrella in which he discussed the science of timing as it relates to social media marketing, blogging, and emailing.   Over the next few posts I’ll share the advice and employ it with this blog.

The first change starting in April is the timing of the posts.  Up until now, I was scheduling these posts to go live in the afternoons. The main reason for this was to keep from “bumping” into the release times for the Outskirts Press blog postings, which usually go live in the mornings.    Why did I care?  Because our Twitter account tweets automatically when either blog is updated, and we attempt to spread those tweets throughout the day — as best as we can, at any rate. I’ve discussed the logistic difficulty of that in the past.

But many of those concepts have changed now, and I’ll discuss that next time…

self publishing, self publishing a book

Best Book of the Year Award – Update

I’ve mentioned from time to time in the past that I write quite a few of these blog postings all at once, and then schedule them to appear on my blog on particular days in the future. It’s like my own little time machine.  Sometimes it presents a problem, like today.  I’m writing this blog posting BEFORE the Colorado Independent Publishers Association EVVY Awards take place on March 19th, but I’m scheduling this posting to appear a week later, on Sunday, March 27th.  So, by the time this posting actually runs, we will have already announced the results of the Awards Banquet.  But, of course, as I’m writing this, I don’t know who won.  All I know are the finalists.

But knowing the finalists is enough to discuss our Outskirts Press Best Book of the Year Award.  Everyone who chooses to publish with Outskirts Press is automatically eligible to win this award and its $1,500 prize.  All the details are on this page of our website.  Basically, when the dust settles from the requirements, the Outskirts Press Best Book of the Year Award is among one of the EVVY-winning books. 

Here are the EVVY Award finalists, which means one of these 8 titles is going to win the Outskirts Press Best Book of the Year Award for 2010:

The Rise and Fall of Captain Methane
Queen Vernita Meets Sir HeathyBean the Astronomer
The Beads of Lapis Lazuli
Psych Consults
The Key to Job Success in any Career
Whispers of Joy    
Art, Experience and Faith
One Wacky Wasp

I can already tell you that One Wacky Wasp won’t win the Outskirts Press Best Book of the Year award. I wrote that one, and I’m not eligible to win the Best Book of the Year Award. 

This is also the first EVVY Banquet in quite a few years that I will not be attending personally. Traveling requirements prevent me from going.  Kelly S will be receiving awards on behalf of our authors in my place.

And I’ll write the next posting AFTER the awards are presented so I can discuss the next steps of the Best Book of the Year awards a little more specifically.  From among the EVVY winners, Outskirts Press selects three finalists… and more on that in the near future. In the meantime, congratulations to Dorcey Alan Wingo, Dawn Menge/Heath Rhoades, Doris Kenney Marcotte, Robert J. Mignone, Frank B. Leibold, Joy Andreasen, and William Squires, respectively.

Social Networking Sites

Facebook statistics

When writers publish their books with Outskirts Press at the Diamond or Pearl level, we spend the next two years sharing marketing and promotional suggestions with them via email.   The act of “publishing a book” doesn’t end when you are holding the copy in your hand. Marketing that book is just as important.

Over the last several months, our company has made a big push into social networking, and we’re working hard to bring out authors along for the ride.  We’ve added Facebook “like” buttons to all our products and services; we have added the same buttons to all our published books in our bookstore and to our author webpages, and we’ve added Facebook plug-ins within the Publishing Center so authors can keep up-to-date on our Facebook community from within Outskirts Press.

Why are we taking all these steps? Because Facebook is an important marketing tool for a published author.  One of our recently published authors, Kirk Byron Jones, Ph.D., recently wrote a guest article for our Outskirts Press blog titled 7 Ways to Build Your Facebook Community: Imagine Your Book Before Thousands of Faces. In the article, he discusses his Facebook community and its 12,000 (!) supporters.  That’s quite a platform.

In fact, by any measure, Facebook is quite a platform. Just listen to some of these statistics, according to Facebook themselves:

  • More than 500 million active users are registered 
  • 50% of the active users log on to Facebook in any given day
  • The average user has 130 friends
  • People spend over 700 billion minutes per month on Facebook
  • There are over 900 million objects that people interact with, including profiles, groups, events and community pages
  • The average user is connected to 80 community pages, groups and events
  • The average user creates 90 pieces of content each month
  • More than 30 billion pieces of content shared each month, including web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo albums, etc.
  • Entrepreneurs and developers from more than 190 countries build with the Facebook Platform
  • People on Facebook install 20 million applications every day
  • Every month, more than 250 million people engage with Facebook from external websites
  • An average of 10,000 websites integrate with Facebook every day
  • So far, more than 2.5 million websites have integrated with Facebook
  • More than 70 are translations available on the site
  • About 70% of Facebook users are outside the United States
  • Over 300,000 users helped translate the site through the translations application
  • There are more than 200 million active users currently accessing Facebook through their mobile devices.
  • People that use Facebook on their mobile devices are twice as active on Facebook than non-mobile users.
  • There are more than 200 mobile operators in 60 countries working to deploy and promote Facebook mobile products
Social Networking Sites

Facebook Images

Continuing our discussion of branding various social networking and video sharing sites, I’d like to return to Facebook for a moment and touch upon a topic I briefly mentioned a few posts ago when I was discussing the new Facebook Page design and its new “branding graphic” specifications along the left-hand side:

In addition to the graphic along the left, I mentioned that the five image slots along the top also provide a branding opportunity if you manage the photographs correctly.   This section of a Facebook page randomly presents the 5 most recent images uploaded into the main folder. In  the case of Outskirts Press, this is ideal because we have five different publishing packages that are represented by five different gemstones.  They add a splash of color and “interest” to what might otherwise be a normal, standard Facebook page.

The downside to this is that you have to prevent other users from uploading images. Another downside is that when you, as the page administrator, upload an image, it may disturb the “branding” efforts you have put forth. This is what happened with Outskirts Press on St. Patrick’s day when we offered a one-day “Search for the pot o’ gold”  Internet search opportunity for a Facebook community, the prize being a book teaser video worth $99.  We uploaded the image of the pot of gold that was within one of our YouTube Videos, and of course, as a result, that image also appeared as one of our top five images:


But that’s okay. If anything, the temporary “difference” to the Image Section brought even more attention to the one-day only St. Patrick’s Day event.

Interestingly, no one “won.”  I don’t know if it was because the search was “too hard” or “too boring” but that’s always one of the fun things about running social networking events — you never know what is going to happen…

self publishing, self publishing a book, Social Networking Sites

Amazon Author Central Benefits

Today I’m going to share a real-world example of one of the benefits of Amazon Author Central. I experienced this personally because of my involvement with Fandemonium, the Facebook Anthology social publishing experience that Outskirts Press and its Facebook Community members joined together in producing over the past two months.

Author Central allowed me to “improve” the appearance of Fandemonium’s listing on Amazon.  Here’s how:

When Fandemonium was originally distributed via Ingram, the “meta data” information for the book’s synopsis information looked like this on Amazon:

It’s all one big block of text, and not very visually inviting.  I’ll admit this was my fault, since I uploaded the meta data personally for this book instead of having one of our professional project managers do it for me, in which case, it would have looked correct initially. They publish over 100 books a month so they’re used to the tricky nuances of formatting meta data so it looks great on Amazon.   Another example of  “leaving it to the experts.”

But, never fear.  Amazon Author Central let me easily improve the formatting myself. I simply logged into my Author Central account and edited my book’s record. The changes took a couple of days to update, and then, just like that, the new listing looked like this:

This is just one reason to have an Amazon Author Central account. I’ve discussed other reasons in the past and will continue on that topic in the near future.

In the meantime, congratulations to all our Facebook Community members who have work appearing in Fandemonium.  With every copy sold, Outskirts Press is donating $7.38 to the American Red Cross on behalf of its Facebook fans, so buy your copy today by clicking here.   Currently, American Red Cross efforts are assisting in the aftermath of the Japan earthquake and Pacific tsunami, so in addition to taking part in a social publishing experience, it’s for a good cause.

twitter backgrounds

Twitter Backgrounds – How to

After branding your YouTube channel and Facebook page, branding your “Twitter backgrounds” comes next.  

There are two considerations. The first is logistically “how to” add a Twitter background, and I’ll provide the step-by-step instructions for adding Twitter backgrounds below.  The other consideration is adding a background that supports your branding message and “works” within a wide variety of monitor resolutions. 

But first thing’s first…

10 Steps to Adding a 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, Messages, Who to Follow.  You will also see a Drop Down choice next to your Twitter name along the upper-right hand corner. Click on that drop down arrow and choose “Settings.”

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

4. At this point, your computer may (or may not) ask you whether you want to only view the “secure” elements of this page.  If it asks you that, click “No.”

5. You will see a collection of  “themes” you can select from.  Scroll lower and 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 between the edges of the “Twitter table” and the edge of the monitor.   The graphic you use should be optimal for the maximum number of monitor resolutions (which, as I stated in a recent post, is 1024 x 768 according to Wikipedia).

8. Depending upon the graphic you upload, you may need to “color match” your Twitter background with the background color settings.

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 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.

In the case of Outskirts Press, we continued the branded background that we added to our YouTube Channel, and (to a much lesser extent) to the branding efforts we made to our Facebook page.  If you’re going to go through the efforts of customizing each of these social channels, they should demonstrate brand cohesion, right?

This background isn’t as ideal as the one for YouTube since it lacks the horizontal “banner” across the top of the content table that includes our graphic treatment company name and positioning statement tagline.  

And, in light of the monitor resolution considerations introduced above, we cannot add our logo and our “write.publish.market” tagline in any aesthetic way to the background itself, because it gets “cut off” in lower resolutions.  That’s the tricky part to be aware of!  Sure, the screen shot above (at approximately 1900 x 1200) appears to have plenty of room for a logo.  But at the recommended resolution for background design (1024 x 768) this Twitter page actually looks like this:

Not nearly as good, is it? We can’t prevent the woman from being “interrupted” by the Twitter table (short of removing her entirely), but at least the other two people simply disappear, as opposed to being cut off. 

This is the reason there aren’t any words on the background. They would get cut off, too.

In fact, Twitter makes uploading Twitter backgrounds harder than it needs to be by setting their background HTML to “fixed, left-justified.”  It would be easier to make Twitter backgrounds look “right” in multiple resolutions if it was “scrolling-centered” like the YouTube settings for custom backgrounds. 

But, oh well, you work with what they give you…

Now on to re-branding our blog, which is a topic for the near future. But first I’m going to talk a little more about our Facebook Anthology that we published for free for many of our Facebook fans, now that it’s for sale on Amazon… see you next time.

branding

YouTube Channel Branding

With Facebook branded, the next step was to brand our channel on YouTube. I’ve blogged in the past about setting up a channel on YouTube that gives you the degree of design control I will focus on now, so I won’t reiterate that part.   But basically, YouTube provides much more control over the look and feel of your “page” than Facebook does. You can alter the background color, the background graphic, and even the transparency of the “borders” of your channel lay-out. 

For Outskirts Press, our focus was the “write.publish.market” graphic and tagline I mentioned last time in relation to branding Facebook. Now, rather than being limited to the small, 180 pixel-wide graphic imposed by Facebook, we had the freedom to upload a graphic as wide as a computer monitor.  There are two tricks to doing this correctly:

1) You have to account for different monitor resolutions.  Wikipedia suggests that 76% of Internet users view at a resolution higher than 1024 x 768 and 20% see at a resolution of 1024 x 768.  So by designing your YouTube background graphic (or your website, for that matter) at a resolution optimal for 1024 x 768 you are optimizing the experience for 96% of Internet users.  Granted, this statistic probably doesn’t involve the growing trend of viewing websites like YouTube on mobile devices, which shoot the computer monitor trends out the window, but that’s a topic for a different day.

In our case, we created a graphic that looked good at 1024 x 768 as well as higher resolutions and then used a “gradient” to bleed out to a solid background color at the sides and bottom.  That way, even if someone was looking at the background at a very, very high resolution, the graphic wouldn’t just end abruptly or, (even worse) repeat in an unaesthetic way.

2) The second concern is coping with the content.  Since the background is fixed-center (unlike Twitter, which is fixed-left, and we’ll talk about that next), the YouTube background needs to be designed in three parts — the left, the right, and the top — and then “combined” together around the content table.  This is because the background or “banner” portion of the background is visible above the YouTube channel content.  This banner needs to be 960 pixels wide and designed to exactly match the edges of the left and right portions where it they all touch each other.  

Our first design of the banner involved an animating .gif that alternated between “write anything,” “publish everything,” and “market everywhere.” Unfortunately, the banner cannot be an animating .gif image (come on, YouTube, why not?).    Therefore, only the first frame of the animating graphic displayed.  I briefly toyed with the idea of alternating the three “key frames” of the animating graphic every week or so, but instead opted for the shorter version of our tagline: “write.publish.market” and that’s the banner you see below, on our new YouTube channel, revealed here for the first time:

It carries over the branding message and repeats the characters of the Facebook graphic, and those from our website index page, while also taking advantage of the greater design controls afforded by YouTube. 

Maybe in time Facebook will offer this degree of freedom, although perhaps not; one reason MySpace is so terrifying to visit is due to the design freedom is affords.   Many MySpace pages are just plain fugly, which reminds us all that just because someone “can” do something themselves, doesn’t mean it is being done correctly, professionally, or aesthetically.

Hey, what do you know– that’s what we often say about self-publishing. Sometimes, it’s better to let the experts handle it.