The Bloggin’ BUZZ

2 Tip Tuesday

Have you ever heard the following Chinese proverb?

“Dig the well before you are thirsty.”

If you haven’t, then you’re either REALLY young or you’re not familiar with one of the most famous sales authors, Harvey McKay (author of Swim with the Sharks Without Being Eaten Alive and Dig Your Well Before You’re Thirsty).

How about this quote?

“It pays to plan ahead. It wasn’t raining when Noah built the ark.”
Thomas Edison (1847-1931) American inventor

So what does that have to do with social media? Everything.

As a speaker or author, you need fans. You need to have groups of people that love to hear from you, can’t wait for your next book, audio series or presentation. But how do you build that?

Avoid the mistake that I see over and over again.

Are you ready for it?

Waiting too long to build the audience.

What do I mean? It’s simple, really.

Tip #1 – BLOG
If you have a book that you’re thinking about writing or a presentation idea that you’re pondering, now is the time to start building the audience for it. By waiting to talk about your book until after it’s already published or your presentation until it’s complete, you lose precious moments to build anticipation. Blogging is one of the best ways to build the anticipation and the audience.

As an author, you can let people know about the formulation of characters, themes. As the book progresses, you can release snippets of chapters to your already supportive fans. You can share the writing process and your writing blocks. You can share your decision making process about whether you’re going to go through a major publisher or self-publish. Don’t be afraid to share the set-backs. Your fans will be supportive and cheer for you when the book is published. You may even be able to build pre-sales for your book!

As a speaker, you have an opportunity to send the message out about what you believe and what you teach. You know what’s even better? You can test your ideas in your blog! Get feedback. Engage with your fans. When you’re ready to write your book, you have a built in following and can utilize the ideas above. Another benefit? You can help to drive more attendees to your presentations and increase your SEO in Google results!

Tip #2 – Use your Blog to Build Articles
Oh, what’s better than that?! Getting more use out of the same output of energy? You can take a shorter blog post, expand it and submit it as an article to several online article sites. Who knows? Maybe someone that sees your article will go to your website, read your blog and point back to you from their column or article. Better yet, your article sets you up as an expert in your field and you sell more books and get better paying speaking engagements because everywhere they look, you show up.

(Who is they? Always intrigues me when people write that…and I’ve just done it myself. LOL)

Anyway, back to the point.

The nice part about building articles from your blog is that if you are able to engage people enough to write comments, you can get some great insight into which posts will be marketable articles. In addition, the comments could help you to direct the information onto a path that you hadn’t thought of previously.

I hope these tips help you to start building your well!

Thoughts…
Do you blog?

• If so, leave a comment about how your blog is helping you and type out your URL for other readers to see your blog!
• If it’s not helping you, leave a comment about what your concern is and I will address it!

Deidre Hughey

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 14th, 2009 at 8:01 pm and is filed under Is There An Author In The House?, Socially Speaking, To Blog Or Not To Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.