The following is a guest post from Barry Skelhorn and an entry in February’s Self-Publishing Writing Contest. Click here to vote for the winner of this month’s contest. Want to help out your fellow indie authors? Consider entering March’s contest!
Self-publishing has its up and downs — just ask any aspiring writer. Like those authors I also been through the process for three books now and I am happy with the results. The middle parts can and will test your nerve and patience. I spent months writing, editing, and polishing my work. Only when I thought I had finished – I realised you never are when you self-publish.
Marketing should always have been on your list of to-dos even while you’re writing the first draft. It sounds strange but once you build up momentum with readers through blogging, forums or general face to face conversation from the beginning you are on the right track. With that in mind, I would like to share my experiences of a marketing tool that could help measure if people are taking an interest in your work.
The tool I am talking about is the website www.bitly.com. Its primary purpose is to shrink down web links. This in turn, makes ‘bit.ly’ links easier and cleaner to put into whatever media you want. I fell I should also mention that this site is free to sign up and use – maybe I should have mentioned that earlier.
So, once you’ve signed up, you can put the sometimes long links from amazon, lulu, createspace in and reduce them down. The added advantage of this from my experience comes into its own when using twitter. It helps your 140 max tweets go that little bit further and look a little cleaner on the eye. Once you’ve put you link and message out into the world of twitter, Facebook then the bit.ly site comes into its own.
Under the hood, there is a whole wealth of information just waiting for you to digest and build upon. This is because the when the link gets created it is also tracked. So with every click, it records the number of clicks, if it was re-tweeted or shared on Facebook with comments and ‘likes’. In addition, it will display the location that the clicker was from, it also has a copy of the original tweet / status update at the foot of the page.
With all of this information, it makes tracking anything from a competition update to a discount code that you have on a blog post an effortless process. I cannot stress the importance of getting data from your postings, in a world where hits and rankings dominate this will help you to no-end. On the other hand, if you are putting your content out there and are not getting any clicks, ask yourself have you completed the following:
- Do you have an author domain for yourself?
- Created an informative bio and have it on a site?
- Have you created a media kit?
- Have you created a press release?
Remember, tracking links is only part of a decent marketing plan, enjoy writing but as you are self-publishing it is up to you to do the leg work. Trust me once you start it will become second nature and you never know – you might meet some influential friends along the way.
About the Author: Barry Skelhorn is a full time IT techy from the South of England. He lives with his wife Louise and has a cat named Panda. Over the years he has fallen in love with the works of M.R James, Mary Shelly, H.G Wells and too many Victorian ghost stories to mention.
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