If You Aren't Using These Two Social Sites for Promoting Your Book, You Are Doing It Wrong.

The two biggest social networking sites that you NEED to be active on to drive traffic for your website (and book sales) are Twitter and Pinterest.

By active I mean posting things every day, at least 10x a day. Sounds like a lot, but it really isn't.

Twitter

It takes less than an hour to set up daily scheduled Tweets on Tweetdeck (which is free by the way). You can start by scheduling one to be sent out at every hour of the day. Or, if you're like me, you can do one on the hour, and on the half hour marks, like 2pm and 2:30pm.

I also mix in between those promo tweets links to my FaceBook pages, and links to posts I made on my blog here, and on my website www.bloodywhisper.com.

The difference appeared right away. Look at this huge spike in traffic. Over 1,000 more page views in a day!

Before I started actively using Twitter and Pinterest, I was lucky to get over 100 page views in a single day.

One of the main reasons why the traffic spiked so much, is well...it's a secret, but I'm going to tell you, because I can.

As your Twitter account popularity raises (i.e. how often you tweet, the amount of followers you have, and how often they like and retweet your tweets), your Google rank raises. Meaning your posts will appear in people's searches closer to the top of the front page.

Blogger is a Google site. Raise in Rank thanks to Twitter and Pinterest driving page hits, means that traffic will spike. It's as simple as that.

But how do I Write Tweets?

Tweets are super short and don't require a lot of text. Like 2 sentences tops. Super easy.

For instance, the scheduled Tweets I made for today can be seen in the pic below. See how short they are?

Here's an example:

WE ARE ALL MONSTERS ebook on sale now $1 #horror #iartg http://bit.ly/waam11

The smart thing to do, is make a whole bunch of Tweets ahead of time to promote your book. Do the atypical sales ones, such as the one above with the price in it. And then write twelve quotes or short summaries of what your book is about.


Since WE ARE ALL MONSTERS is a story collection, I made fast, one to three sentence descriptions of each story in the book.

This is the one I wrote for HER ROTTEN EMBRACE:

What the swamp takes, she also gives back. #horror #monsters #iartg #ebook #ghosts http://bit.ly/waam11 

Simple. Effective. Fast to write, fast to read, fast to catch your follower's attention. Slap a few hashtags on it, and you're good to go!

Check out Hastagify to research hashtags commonly used for topics related to your posts and book subjects. It's stupid fast to use, and simple enough for anyone to figure out during their first try at it. (Oh, and it's FREE!)

I highly recommend researching self published retweet groups for your genre, as they are super helpful for getting instant retweets and new daily followers.

Also, since you have limited space in the Tweet text box, use a URL shortener, such as bitly to save space. Sign up for a free account. Choose the name of the shortened URL wisely- something related to your book or site that will be easy to remember, and make your shortened link for Twitter!

Pinterest

Pins on Pinterest just require a click on a picture to add to your boards. Put a description and a link when you go to add the picture and voila- instant traffic boost. I kid you not, it's that easy. You can add the Pinterest Plug in to your web browser, and just click on the icon when you are on a page you want to share. It lets you pick the picture you want, and select the board you want to put it in.

Easy Peasy.

Under the picture on the left there's a text field. Just type in the name of the post and copy/paste the URL and then click on the board you want it to go on.


If you are interested in learning more or have questions on how to get started with Tweetdeck or Pinterest, please feel free to ask in the comments below!


Follow my boards on Pinterest here. 

Follow me at Twitter @cchouseofhorror