Divine inspiration can come to you in many ways. It is very important that you are always listening. This morning an angel came to me providing me with some very valuable insight. I have been doing websites for over 20 years and a long time ago I had a page of links that became my personal “bookmark” page. Over time many companies wanted to be listed on that list. I never advertised my links, but it lived on my original website for years. It is no longer functional as most of the links are probably outdated. My point is that I already knew how to be a webmaster and forgot some very basic skills. Be an affiliate.
My websites and Facebook platform send a lot of traffic to Amazon. Why not get a piece of that back as a referral fee? It was a pretty simple process, signing up on their website, giving them my websites, and then finally giving me an affiliate id number that I can embed in my links. Every book sale that I send to Amazon I now get 15% back. This is probably the most clever trick I have come up with since launching the book. I wish I would have recalled this technique before the book launch.
The other nifty trick I recommend is having a professional looking cover picture for your Facebook personal page. Here is mine:
I haven’t seen any articles talking about cover photos so I will briefly talk about what went into this one. This is actually a PNG (portable network graphic) file as it it optimized for websites. Also as it is not the common jpg file, your graphics won’t ever be under virus attack. Thousands of people look me up on Facebook and they see my public profile or this one. Both are professional. This one directs you back to my author website and tells you that I am an author. It shows you the book cover, and brands me as a best selling author. It also shows you all the different channels you can purchase my book.
Many readers use Goodreads.com and their smartphone app, so sharing with readers that I am listed there helps to give them reviews from real readers and the ability to add it to their shelf to read later. The graphic reminds readers of the Amazon Kindle and the child leaning against the tree promotes casual reading. Naturally people are curious and they go to my website, my public figure page or to Amazon and ultimately results in an eBook download or printed paperback sale. Once you have a professional looking cover picture you can later use it to brand yourself when you post or blog.
Use a professional eye catching photo that highlights your energy. A picture is worth a thousand words. The day you decided to become a celebrity, a published author or public figure, your days of pictures with your animals for your avatar were over. There actually are a lot of things that you may have to consider once you are in the public’s eye. I do massive amounts of research and I haven’t found any blogs that really address this issue. For my aspiring writer friends I will share some of those things here in this blog as future articles. Like for instance, “What to do when your first fan turns on you?” Believe it, I have had fans who have used some really ugly words with me on my Facebook pages. I have even had to ban users. No profanity allowed on any of my pages.
I try to keep things pretty consistent so people recognize the branding. A lot of other public figures like to change things around a lot. It takes a long time to get international brand awareness. Once you have established your brand, like Google, you can play around with it. I wouldn’t recommend it when you are first starting. Start simple with a font. For some companies, like SONY, their font is their logo. My logo takes up too much of the screen to be part of my cover page. Facebook only allows 20% to be text. So you need to be creative with your cover page so it isn’t all text. When it falls into those guidelines you can promote your page with that picture. I hope some of these tips helped you. Be sure you subscribe to this blog or keep updated with the RSS feed. More handy helpful tips coming your way!
Here is the new Amazon affiliate link. When your website and book are launched be sure you share your link with your readers. They can’t buy if they don’t know it is for sale.
