About Me
Monday, July 11, 2016
Every now and then I like to share new tools I have found
with my fellow writers. Lately, I’ve been doing a lot of promoting and found a
few things that work and a lot that don’t much. I’ll skip over the bad ones,
you’ll find them easily enough. Here are some great tools you should be adding
to your repertoire!
@Copromote!
You can find them on Twitter, or visit their website, Copromote.com for
some great promotional juice! It is a sharing network, where you choose topics
of interest to you and your audience, then, share them! It works on Twitter,
YouTube, Tumblr and Instagram and the results are almost instant!
- · The free account allows you a limited number of shares every day. If you want more, you can upgrade to pro, but their prices are a bit steep for what they offer, in my opinion. You’ll have to try it yourself, since I opted to stick with free.
- · You select posts to share with your audiences from people you follow on the site. Each share is worth “share” points, that represent the number of audience members your own posts can be shared with.
- · Select one of your own posts to “boost” and input it into the system. CoPromote users that follow you can find and share your post to earn points as well. I get dozens of RTs and shares when I boost, which lasts for 7 days, I typically pick up followers each day as well.
PRO TIP: If you boost a
post, make a note to go back each day
and use your max free shares to promote other content, to boost your post even
higher.
This great list of promotional sites
There are a lot of lists out there of places to share free and discounted books for free, or on a subscription service. The problem with many of them is that they were written five years ago and half the sites have either closed up shop, or don’t have the options the list claims. Here is a great list that is updated and accurate for the most part. It also shows you the main features of each site to save you time.- · Follow the links and do your homework before you give them any information, especially money.
- · Check for online reviews on writing blogs if you are considering paying for promotion. The vast majority of paid promotions sites give limited value at best. So be aware. If they have a single shot option, try that first.
- · Keep track of which sites you’ve used and the results you get. Be sure to pay attention to the rules on free promos. A lot of sites will promote you every time you have a giveaway, provided you follow the rules.
PRO TIP: If you sign up
for a free account, you can save the list, with your selected sites marked, to
save time the next time.
Contentmo.com
It’s not a very catchy name, but this little site actually
did what they said they would do. Although I have not tried their premium
services myself, I recommend this a good place to start, since I saw some good
results from their limited free promotions.
- · They shared my book on their blog, with an advance email to let me know it was going up so I could share it.
- · They promoted the post, with the other books that were also featured during the same time, on Twitter and it blew up my newsfeed with shares and new followers. I don’t think I got hundreds of downloads from it, but it definitely worked.
- · They have an active audience that continued to share that post after they had finished promoting it and I engaged with some great followers through it.
PRO TIP: Find and RT
every post from Contentmo, it will get
you new followers, replies and likes.
Twuffer
This is what Buffer used to be before they morphed
themselves into a cross platform social media automation dashboard. It’s a
Twitter automator that allows you to easily share content on a schedule you
choose. It’s free, it’s easy and if you are doing nothing for Twitter posting,
this is a good start.
- · Set up what days and times you want to share on a calendar. These will be repeated, so take some time to look at your stats and figure out when you get the best response.
- · Add tweets in the forms of links to your own content, links to other’s content, images, anything you would normally share on Twitter.
- · Twuffer will automatically use that new Tweet to fill the next slot in your pre-selected schedule, creating a constant cue of juicy, useful content.
PRO TIP: Use Twuffer to
fill those times of day when you are busy elsewhere, and be sure to check and
respond to engagement on your posts!
Massplanner
I cannot express how much this tool has helped me! Because
of the amazing background tools it has, that no other dashboard has (I’ve tried
most of them, except for the uber expensive “enterprise” scale dashboards) and
it works!
- · I’ve tripled my engagement on Facebook, which was my primary platform for the past couple of years until recently.
- · It has google+ tools, which almost none of the others have and if you are not using Google+, you’re stupid. It works great. Less spam, more response. A little slower, but consistent.
- · The initial set up is cheap for basic service, the subscription is never more than $10 a month, and you OWN, not rent, your add on tools, so they work on the same $10 subscription forever.
**Full disclosure, I did sign up as an
affiliate, so I make a bit off of each signup here, but if you can’t see the
value, I’ll gladly pay you back, even though that’s not part of the company’s
plan**
This one surprised me. I’ve had a profile there since it
started and fed a little bit of content there automatically, but I haven’t
spent any time on it at all. I literally just now familiarized myself with the
platform enough to get how it works. I get almost instant blog traffic and
downloads on freebies with a few minutes of posting and I’m convinced that will
grow as my audience increases. If you have a Google account, for Gmail, or any
other Google tool, you have a profile, do yourself a favor and optimize it.
- · The audience growth is paaaaaaiiiiinnnnnfullllyyy slooooow, but everything else works great, and I think the key is following active users and engaging them to turn them into followers.
- · Google+ communities are awesome. Many have huge followings, 20k+ and less spam, by far, than Facebook’s groups. The reach seems to be better as well, since I get almost instant response from posting there.
- · The +1 shows up in other places too when the content gets shared and the integration with Google’s other tools looks cool, although I have not had the time to play with it yet.
PRO TIP: Don’t give up on
audience building. It took about a week of regular posting to see the “followers”
number start to rise, now it’s up daily a bit more.
Get out and explore
For those of us who have been kicking around online since
the 90s, hunting down the tools we need is second nature. If you don’t know,
you find the most useful step behind page one, because that’s how it works.
Scroll down further, especially if looking for good “free” tools, and you’ll be
amazed what you find.
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