Build Your Author Platform. Carole Jelen

List site pages and create a tab for each.

       Write static content for each page.

       Determine your website design.

       Publish your website—go live.

       Track and measure the users of your website.

       Include your live website URL in all networks, comments, articles, and every email signature.

Success Spotlight: Waterside Client David Meerman Scott (davidmeermanscott.com)

       8 books

       30 languages

       1,000,000 sold, including university sales

       The New Rules of Marketing and PR became a New York Times bestseller with 300,000 copies sold

      Beginnings: Starting out as a student at Kenyon College, Ohio, as a liberal arts/economics major, David became a bond trader on Wall Street. He worked in Tokyo for six years, then held executive positions in the electronic news division of Knight-Ridder, at the time one of the world’s largest newspaper companies. In 1995 David joined Desktop Data, which became NewsEdge Corporation, and then became vice president of marketing at NewsEdge until the business was sold to Thomson Corporation in 2002.

      In our interview, David said, “I didn’t plan on becoming a marketing strategist…. I came upon it accidentally.” At NewsEdge, he and his team found that do-it-yourself programs based on creating useful content and publishing it online at virtually no cost consistently generated more interest from qualified buyers than expensive professional public relations programs.

      How he came up with his best-selling book idea: David said that when he encountered Web 2.0, he started to see that thinking like a publisher was what seemed most helpful for people to understand it. He felt that it was important to share with others that online marketing is more like online publishing than traditional marketing, and that in order to be successful, traditional marketing thinking had to change. He felt that publishers:

       Know how to create and promote content;

       See patterns that others don’t see; and

       Use the big picture for business.

      The New Rules of Marketing and PR came together around the ideas forming in his head: Success on Web 2.0 is about content, about blogging, and about a great content-driven website.

      Platform: As an author, David has successfully created his fantastic author platform covering all 14 steps outlined in this book, including:

       Getting reciprocal links on other websites

       Giving free info in the form of PDFs

       Maintaining his blog

       Making videos available on his site

       Using social networks

       Speaking, and much more

      David went on to share another important finding: that his blog posts increased in popularity when he included things beyond his book topic, including links to related posts. In fact, David maintains, “That’s when my sales doubled.” He also placed his insightful articles on Huffington Post, which gained even more visibility for him and his books.

      Every day, David said, he thought about how he could sell ten books with these questions in his mind: Where? How? And when? And never stopping. David believes that every single blog post he creates is another opportunity that can (and does) compel ten more people to buy his book.

      David was sought after as a paid speaker before his book came out; he shared in our interview that later, when his book was out, he asked people to buy the book rather than taking a speaking fee. David continues to speak and teach seminars on marketing, and he constantly keeps his eye on how he can find opportunities to sell more copies of his books through these venues.

      David’s advice to authors: Have a vision/idea and articulate it; talk about things related to what you do, not just the book itself; and, most importantly, get out there and don’t stop promoting!

      David Meerman Scott’s final word on author platform building: Now anybody can earn attention by publishing their way, using the tools of social media such as blogs, podcasts, online news releases, online video, viral marketing, and online media.

       CHAPTER 2

       Blog to Build Your Readership Community

      “A blog is only as interesting as the interest shown in others.”

      —Lee Odden, author of Optimize: How to Attract and Engage More Customers by Integrating SEO, Social Media, and Content Marketing

      IT WAS IN 2006 that we really began to feel the change in the publishing industry brought on by individual empowerment in the digital age. First the music business radically changed, starting with music downloads; and then the movie industry, starting with streaming video; and then publishing, starting with ebooks. Global business was shifting on its axis. It was in 2006 that Time magazine awarded the Person of the Year Award to “YOU” instead of to a single person as in the past. Lev Grossman’s article in Time on December 25, 2006, said, “The new Web is a very different thing. It’s a tool for bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making them matter…. Silicon Valley consultants call it Web 2.0, as if it were a new version of some old software. But it’s really a revolution.”

      The world has become sufficiently tech-connected to enable us to interact, collaborate with, and create a community around our interest with a global crowd. Marketing specialists consistently encourage bloggers to rise above this noise level, but what a discouraging concept! Imagine moving into the midst of a huge crowd and being told you must rise above it. How can you create a blog with sufficient pull among the 156 million+ blogs published on the web today?

      

       Tumblr has more than 101.7 million blogs with 44.6 billion blog posts

       WordPress.com has more than 63 million blogs

       LiveJournal reports having 62.6 million blogs

       Weebly states it has more than 12 million blogs

       Blogster has more than 582,754 blogs

      Since the rise of blogging in the late 1990s, bloggers have discovered time and again that certain elements enable their blogs to successfully stand out from the crowd, and we share those elements with you here. This chapter shows how to draw your audience into your specialization in your genre, your unique value, and your subject matter expertise through blogging and outlines efficient strategies and best practices that will get you to your online community quickly and efficiently.

Your Blog Is About More Than Content

      A blog is by definition a web log or web journal,