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As a writer, when it comes to building your writer’s platform, social media is one of the easiest way to interact and build your brand. Everywhere you look it’s sell, sell, sell and you’re encouraged to promote you yourself.

Building a writer’s platform means marketing yourself. And with any form of marketing, there’s a right way and a wrong way to do it. You may not like the idea that you’re an internet marketer but you are. Unless you stay totally off the Internet, you have to get used to the idea that in your Corporation of One – you as writer, novelist, author – you have a marketing department (yes, it’s just you) and one area of that marketing department gets to work on the social media marketing side of the brand that is you.

Marketing is the process by which companies create customer interest in products or services. It generates the strategy that underlies sales techniques, business communication, and business development. It is an integrated process through which companies build strong customer relationships and create value for their customers and for themselves. (Philip Kotler, Principles of Marketing – via Wikipedia)

The most important thing to remember is you’re not ‘selling’ as such but building relationships. Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin are just three popular ways to do that amongst the many other options open to you as a writer. Although all three social media platforms are on the Internet does not mean you should treat them the same. Think leaflet, newspaper and magazine. They may seem similar – all paper-based with text and image but they’re very different and you should approach them differently.

Lucky for us writers, there are many articles out there that give us an idea of what to do and what not to do.

Be aware that people are no longer ignorant about the marketing tactics used by internet marketers anymore. They are tech-savvy. Everybody knows what you’re doing – and it’s not a crime to self-promote – but at least do it in a way to avoid alienating the very same people you’re trying to connect with. Because there is a fine line. They know what you’re doing; they understand you’ve got to do it but what they don’t like is you spamming, and screaming down their necks about your book, your blog, your product, you, you, you all the time. The emphasis is on ‘all the time’.

Be aware that not only is there a right way to involve yourself but also there is the level of involvement. There are some people out there who think the term ‘self-promotion’ is like being accosted by a salesman who knocks on your door on a Sunday afternoon when you least want to be disturbed. And with so many internet marketers doing it the wrong way ie spamming, it’s not surprising that digital marketing gets a lot of people fuming.

Some people get very involved whereas others may involve themselves by just doing the minimum. There is no right or wrong way when it comes levels of involvement; just be aware and don’t get upset when people do not respond or get as involved as you do or if they seem to interact too much in your opinion. There are the extreme lurkers (nothing wrong with that – lurker is not a nice word – let’s call them readers and everyone has been one at one time or another – you know days when you think you’ve got nothing to say) and the extreme participators (nothing wrong with that) but be aware you’ll meet the extremes and the ones sprinkled in between.

For example, when commenting on other blogs. Some people only read. Some people read and comment. Some people don’t read, don’t comment and just spam. People take time and effort to write blog posts – if the post helped you or you were inspired, comment and let them know. Every blogger appreciates relevant comments, relevant to the post. If you are going to comment, say something specific about the post so that the blogger knows that you’re not a spammer. I don’t mind people linking back to their own websites to relevant posts. But some people do mind that.

The best way to self-promote that doesn’t offend anyone?

Just hang out, be useful, participate and learn to really know your subject and be an authority on it. If you comment and provide something useful people who are interested will find you, your website and your articles.

What things do people do that irritates you? What advice would you give to aspiring writers so they don’t offend you?

[pic taken from here]

Similar Posts ~

Why Spamming Social Media Won’t Get You Very Far by Jennifer Mattern.

Social Media Etiquette 6 Lessons Learned From One Japanese Company’s Major Twitter Mistake by Neal Schaffer.

8 Twitter Habits that May Get You Unfollowed or Semi-followed by AugieRay.

What is a Writer’s Platform by Jessie Mac

How to Twitter by Jessie Mac

“Each indecision brings its own delays and days are lost lamenting over lost days. What you can do or think you can do, begin it. For boldness has magic, power, and genius in it.” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe – Poet and Novelist

CURRENT STATUS: Reminder, Motivator and Daily Review Meeting (Read on if you want to join me in my Corporation of One meeting)

What l have learnt:

• I saw a website offering a PDF, email and print options for their blog post. Great idea.
• You can still be rejected even if you’ve published many books before says Rachelle Gardner – The Learning Curve that Never Ends.

What I have done:

• Read ‘Darkly Dreaming Dexter’ by Jeff Lindsay - watched some episodes of the TV series and then read the book. Enjoyed it.

WORD COUNT: Night Walker 128,000 in total. Friday 16 July 1700 words.

Say hello to my new baby blog. Here it is. After trying out a handful this one seemed the simplest. The whole process has been harder than I thought. It has taken me 4 days, including this one. I never thought it would take so long. Understandably if I had created the website myself it would make sense but these were WordPress templates created by someone else. It shouldn’t take that long. Wrong.

My previous blog was not adequate. It’s still there if anyone wanted to dip into it but it was limited in what I could do. So I had to change. People were asking me why the RSS feed didn’t work. I had just signed up to Twitter and found that other websites had links to Twitter accounts. I started reading and reading; and realized if I wanted a RSS feed that worked, a link to my Twitter account and many other options available out there I had to change. And I had to change very soon before the posts added up. I wish I knew an easy way to transport the past posts from the last 4 months. But in the end I just left it be.

So these last 4 days I’ve signed up to: -

- Google Reader for my iMac and iPhone. Being able to read articles from sites I’m interested in all in one place while on the move and away from my iMac has been invaluable.

- Twitter for my iMac and iPhone. It was a bit strange at first because you’re thinking what can I tweet about that would interest anyone. At first I had my tweets protected. There’s that fear of everything you tweet being all over the Internet but I retracted it and now anyone can ‘follow’ me. You have to get used to people, total strangers, following you, unfollow you and even tweet you. As of this minute, I have 10 followers. A small number but still, it’s all still a bit freaky. It can be unnerving but I’m getting used to it. And after 4 days, it’s a better way to keep in touch. It’s not perceived as rude, you can’t really be offended with the words allowed, to send someone a short message.

- New blog. The new blog allows me more room to play around with what I can put on the blog. As I don’t have books out I don’t need a proper website yet that requires other web pages. The ‘About’ page that I had in my old website I condensed into a few words and they’re on my blog. The other web pages can be set up later.

Before typing this post, I found an article by the author Alan Orloff stating 7 things he’s learnt so far and the 5th point he made seemed quite appropriate to this post:

Online promotion takes a lot more time than you think. Website, blog, Google Reader, Facebook, Twitter, listservs, Yahoo groups, nings, and a kajillion other social sites lure you in and won’t let go. These connections are valuable, but you need to exercise discipline or you’ll look up and four hours will have elapsed with nothing to show for your “writing” time except a few Mafia War hits.

Unlike the process of writing, setting up a blog and working with its many facets eg plugins, widgets, code etc and moving things around has been frustrating for someone as clueless as I am but it has also been very addictive. Extremely. This beginning part I couldn’t do for a few hours a day. It consumed me.

Like with everything else on the Internet, the results could be seen immediately if you persevere. That’s why the high you get from getting it right can override that of tapping away slowly when you’re writing, plodding along, unsure if you’re writing anything good. Now that the blog is up and running, I have to remind myself that I have to get back to actual writing. This is my experience of being a corporation of one. Now that the bulk of the set up has been done, I just need to post and save, maintaining with a little oiling once in awhile without it swamping the main activity of writing. Hopefully.