Anne Lyken-Garner, today’s guest, is a writer and blogger. You can find her writing blog here: A Blogger’s Books. Also check out: How to Spend Less by Anne Lyken-Garner. Anne says:
Most writers write about their books on their blogs, or share their links on social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and StumbleUpon. These could be extremely helpful mediums through which we could promote ourselves and our work.
The problem is, we can’t do it on our own. Spamming is terribly prevalent on the Internet and as soon as you’re recognised or noted for being one, the impact you make and the links you share – helpful or not – get painted with the brush of suspicion.
The way to overcome this as writers is to help each other to become more visible. None of us could be a powerful member on all the social media sites. However, we each have our following or our fan base on our own little patch on the net. If we all helped each other in our own small corner, this could be a good thing for all of us. There are several ways in which we could increase each other’s visibility, but some of them can be slightly complicated. Here are four very easy ones which most of us have the ability to do.
Follow blogs
Most of us have blogs. Following other writers’ blogs shows their visitors that they’ve got a solid community. Your stamp of approval makes it easier for browsers looking for writing information to decide to follow them too. More readers mean more new visitors. Visitors translate into more authority for their blogs when the search engines send out their crawlers. A blog that has more authority and ranking is good for all involved because it means your tiny picture on the ‘follow’ panel is exposed to more traffic.
Furthermore, you will be able to see their new updates on your blog’s dashboard.
Link to other writers’ posts
If you find something interesting on your fellow writer’s site, link to it in one of your posts. Obviously this is to be done responsibly with the appropriate credits etc. This sort of exposure introduces your colleague to your readers and helps them to discover something new and interesting. Your job as a blogger/writer is to impart knowledge. Give your readers something good, worthwhile and different. They will love you for it.
Linking to other sites also increases their weight and authority where Google is concerned. Many bloggers won’t do this for nothing, but I do. My purpose for writing and blogging is not just for personal gain. I will link freely to sites and articles with the appropriate credits, if I think something is worth sharing. My readers are worth it.
Tweet their posts
Most of the writers on the Internet have now got twitter accounts. Tweet good posts now and then and help other writers to be visible on Twitter. There are thousands of other writers there. This has a two-fold purpose: not only will you be known for tweeting quality links on writing, but your colleague will gain some traffic from the link you shared. People notice when you’ve tweeted their work, and this ‘favour’ will come back to you triple-fold.
Stumble their posts
In my opinion, StumbleUpon is probably the best social media site to drive traffic to your blog. Some submissions don’t always make a big splash, but when they do, they’re huge. If you’re a member of StumbleUpon and you pay attention to what others are submitting, lending your support to their interests, your stumbles will soon get the attention of other users on the site.
Use your networking skills not only to build up your own fan base, but to help other writers along in their journeys too. In an age where Literary Agents and Publishers are holding back on marketing their authors’ work, we have to turn to each other to get where we want to be.
Book Marketing Floozy 