Greetings and Salutations -

Something we talked about during our recent Editor Chat was the power of social networking. It's no longer enough to hope that visitors remember to come back to you each week. Often they're just too busy to think about it. You need to post a message "where they live" so they see about your new content right in their normal stream of information.

Let's start with Facebook, since it's where many of you hang out anyway and it has such an enormous volume of people reading all day long. Even if you don't like Facebook, you need to learn to use it as a marketing tool.

If you don't have my Facebook how-to ebook yet, let me know if you prefer MOBI (Kindle), EPUB (iTunes), or PDF (generic) and I'll send it along.

First, create a regular person account. You don't need to "use" it (post to it) if you don't want to. This is just a way to log in.

And then go to any page, for example our BellaOnline one -

https://www.facebook.com/BellaOnline-323931250391/

and click the "Create a Page" link on there. Make a page for your area of interest. It can be your BellaOnline topic, your book series, whatever. When the page is ready, tell all your family and friends about it. Ask them to like it. Put that link in all your email signatures. And start posting.

A key is to have an appealing image with each post. Make sure you have legal rights to those images. There are many stock photo sites you can join to get those types of images. I use DepositPhotos. I know our training used to advise against having a "meaningless fluff image" with an article for bandwidth reasons. I'm going to update that - with social networking that image is pretty much necessary.

When you make a post about a BellaOnline article, let us know in our private Editor group -

https://www.facebook.com/groups/bellaonlineeditors/

and we'll like and share it. That will help, too! If you don't have access to that group yet, let me know.

Ask me with any questions. Social Networking can be quick, free, easy, and quite powerful in extending the reach of your projects.


Lisa Shea, owner
BellaOnline.com

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