Microblogging platforms are services that focus on short updates pushed out to anyone subscribed to receive the updates.  The largest example, by far, is Twitter.  It allows you to post updates that are short and concise, no longer than 140 characters.  Started in 2006, Twitter's rapid growth reached 100 million users in April of this year.

"I don't get it"

This is the quote I've heard about Twitter from more people than anything else.  To be honest, it took me awhile to "get" it as well.  While I could try to explain it here, I've found any verbal explanation falls short of actually helping people  understand how the platform works.  If you are interested in Twitter, the best thing to do is signup, start following a few people and begin reading their updates on a regular basis.  Once you do this for a little while, you'll start to get it.

Why Twitter?

When deciding whether Twitter is a good outlet for you, keep in mind that it still has just 25% of the users that Facebook does.  That said, Twitter is a great medium for two main reasons:

1. It is extremely easy to connect with popular people.  Guy Kawasaki is a well known author and venture capitalist.  I was hired by him last year to design and build a blog.  As a result of doing that one job for him, I received tens of thousands of dollars of contracts.  I first made contact with Guy on Twitter.  Twitter is one of the easiest ways to directly connect with people that would otherwise ignore your phone calls and emails.
2. Content spreads very quickly.  Many of my clients get a large majority of their blog and website traffic from Twitter. Re-tweeting (reposting the same update as someone else) is very popular on Twitter and, as a result, your updates on Twitter can quickly spread.  The more people that re-tweet you, the more people that click to your website and follow you.

Getting Started

If you are ready to take the plunge into Twitter but are still a little unsure about the process, follow these steps:

1. Signup and start following a few people.  As I said above, the best way to "get" Twitter is to start following a few people and regularly reading their updates.  This will give you an idea of how it works.
2. Learn the terminology.  Here is a great article on the terminology commonly used on Twitter.  This will make your life much easier.
3. Start by linking to other content.  While promoting your own content is important, you don't want to only do that.  Start by linking to other articles and blog posts that are on your subject material.  This will establish you as an expert in your field and give you a good start on Twitter content.
4. Get involved in the conversation.  While you are reading the updates of the people you follow, start replying to them if you have any good feedback.  Most people pay close attention to the people that reply to them on Twitter and will often engage in conversation.  This will allow you to build tighter connections with people and catch their attention.

Today, I'll clear up that confusion.

First, let's ask the question I've heard from several authors...

What's the point?  How does filling out your author page help sell more books?

The #1 goal of your Amazon author page isn't to directly sell books, it's to connect with the reader.

After the reader visits your author page, you want them following you on Twitter, subscribed to your blog or showing up to your next event.  Amazon is by far the #1 bookseller online and people go there first to find new books.  By filling out your author page completely, it gives you a chance to connect with current and future readers so you can stay in contact long term.

Amazon is a huge store front and they give you space to sell your wares.  Do you leave your space empty and boring or make it a book-selling machine?

Here are a few ideas to amp up your Amazon author page:

• Bio - Don't talk about where you went to college or how much you love your dog.  Instead, introduce the kind of writing you do and how they can learn more about it.  Keep it short and have a call to action.
• Twitter/Blog - Pull in your Twitter and Blog posts so people can easily click to connect with you.
• Videos - Don't just put up any video you have, use this as another opportunity for readers to see, hear and connect with you.  Give a call to action here as well.
• Book Tour - If you're going through the time and expense of a book tour, take the extra step and add these to your author page so readers know about the event.  It's already built into Author Central.

Again, the goal is to use your Amazon author page to connect with your reader so you can continue to sell books to them long into the future.  Make sure you're using all of the tools Amazon gives you to do it!

Media sharing sites allow you to upload and share various media such as pictures and video.  Most services have additional social features such as profiles, commenting, etc.  The most popular by far are YouTube (videos) andFlickr (pictures).

There are two reasons to get involved in these media sharing sites:

1. Your tribe message is a natural fit.  If you are building a tribe around photography or videography, getting involved in these sites is an obvious choice.  But you also need to decide if your subject material naturally fits there.  If you are writing a cooking or recipe book, sharing pictues and videos fits nicely.  Likewise, if you are a fitness or martial arts instructor, producing how-to videos is the way to go.  If there is big emotional or practical value to sharing your message with picture or video, media sharing sites are a great fit.
2. It's easier for you to produce video than written word.  I recently spoke with an author that had a ton of videos of him talking but very little written content.  When I asked him why, he explained that it took him no time at all to sit down in front of his webcam and produce a short video while writing was a long, laborious process for him.  In other words, if he wasn't using video he wouldn't be doing anything.  If this is the case for you, then go with video and YouTube.

If you are going to get involved in media sharing sites, here's a few ideas and guidelines to be successful:

1. Start your own group or channel.  Market it to your tribe and other communities that are a natural fit.
2. Comment on other photos and videos that you find interesting.
3. Make sure your profile and portfolio pages are filled out and include links to your website.
4. Add relevant tags and descriptions to everything you upload.
5. Do not focus on selling your book.  Instead, focus on spreading your message and growing your tribe.
6. Upload new content on a regular basis.

YouTube gets over 100 million visitors a month and Flickr gets over 22 million.  These sites get huge amounts of traffic and getting involved and building a following is a great way to bring new people into your tribe.

How do I get on the bestseller list?

Whether you're shooting for the top 100 or top 10, hitting the Amazon bestseller list is extremely important.  No matter what your goal is, here is the #1 thing you need to know to get to the top of the Amazon bestseller lists:

Focus all of your sales into one day.

While Amazon keeps their exact formula for picking the top books under wraps, it is clear that it weighs heavily on how many books you can sell in a short period of time.

In fact, a recent campaign by Seth Godin for his book We Are All Weird was able to hit the #2 spot on Amazon by selling less than 2000 copies of his hardcover in a day.

Another author I worked with was able to generate 500 sales of his book in a single day and this put him in the top 100 on Amazon.

Contrast this to another author friend of mine who has sold thousands of copies of his book but never broke into the top 100 because they were spread out over several months.

It is important to focus all of your marketing efforts into selling as many books as possible on a single day.  Less sales in a single day will drive you higher on the list than more sales spread out over time.

A couple caveats:

• Don't try to game the system.  If you buy 1000 copies of your own book, you won't hit the bestseller list.  If your friend buys 1000 copies of your book, you won't hit the bestseller list.  Amazon keeps track of IP addresses, credit cards, etc to make sure authors aren't buying their way onto the list.  The best strategy is to build your tribe and activate them to buy the book all at the same time.
• These numbers change day to day.  All of the bestseller spots are relative to other book sales.  If you generate 3000 sales in a day but another author sells 4000, you'll rank lower.
• You can track your sales.  Want to know how many sales your marketing efforts drove?  Use the Amazon affiliate program.  Embed your affiliate link in all of your marketing efforts and you'll be able to see exact stats on how many books you sold.

In the end, here's how you hit the bestseller list:

• Focus all of your marketing into generating sales on your launch day.
• Generate 500 sales to make the top 100
• Generate 2000 sales to hit the top 10

Want more Amazon insights like this?  Signup for my newsletter below.

Social news sites let people post various news items or links to outside articles and then allows it's users to "vote" on the items.  The voting is the core social aspect since the items that receive the most votes are displayed the most prominently.  The community decides which news items get seen by more people .  The most popular are Digg and Reddit.
 

Last week when we discussed social bookmarking sites, I pointed out that there was a right way to use them and a way that is a complete waste of time.  This week, I only have one thing to say about social news sites - they are a waste of time.

There are many sites that constantly chase getting high ratings on the various social news sites, but for you as an author it is a complete waste of time.  Here's why:

• It is a constant strain to stay on the top. The type websites that regularly get a lot of traffic from social news sites are constantly posting new, outlandish content in the effort to get attention.  As I write this, a few of the top "news" items at Digg are "My Butt Is Big", "Best Free Mac Software 2010" and a comic strip titled "Not so fast criminal!" By constantly striving to appeal to the masses at these sites, your content will have to become more and more outlandish and you will always have to water down your message.
• Social news traffic is bad traffic.  Remember one of the rules of leading a tribe - "Focus on fans, not numbers".  You may be able to get a lot of traffic by posting on these sites, however almost all your new visitors will look at one page and then leave.  You won't see an increase in newsletter subscribers or any other engagement.  Just getting people to your site isn't the goal in building a tribe.

Spending a lot of time chasing social news traffic is always a waste when building a tribe.  There are much better places to spend your time marketing yourself and your tribe.

Social bookmarking sites are services that allow you to save, organize and manage links to various websites and resources around the internet.  Most allow you to "tag" your links to make them easy to search and share. Delicious and StumbleUpon are the two most popular.

There are two approaches to using bookmarking sites to build your tribe.  One is a waste of time and one establishes you as an expert and great source of relevant information.

In a recent book on social networking strategy, it suggested spending a lot of time interacting on bookmarking sites with other users and sharing links with them in order to build a following.  This is a huge waste of time.  People use bookmarking sites for two things:

1. Saving links
2. Finding links

People are not hanging out on these sites to find new friends and interact. They are there to find something interesting enough to click and go to a new website.

However, Ramit Sethi of I Will Teach You To Be Rich uses his Delicious account in a much more effective way. As he is reading and doing research online, he takes the extra bit of time to save articles, tags them and writes a short description of the article.  Since most of what he saves is directly related to the content of his blog, it becomes a great resource for his fans to follow and gain valuable information.  By Ramit becoming a source of great content, even though it is not his own, he is further established as an expert and source of relevant information.

StumbleUpon offers a personalized way to find new stuff on the internet.  It takes your interests, your friends interests and the interest of "similar" users and recommends websites you may be interested in.   For the purpose of building your tribe, any direct involvement in StumbleUpon is a waste of time.

There are two ways to use bookmarking sites to grow your tribe:

1. Make it easy to share your content on these sites. You can add links to your blog posts and other content that allow people to bookmark your site on Delicious and share it on StumbleUpon.  Both sites can be a great source of traffic so you may want to make it easy for your fans to share your content there.
2. Build a resource for your fans.  By regularly saving and organizing relevant links on Delicious, you will create a fantastic resource for your fans while also establishing yourself as an expert and source of information.

If you're interested, here are a few of the notes I took while watching:

• People don't buy the book because they like the book (or author). They buy the book because they likethemselves.
• The goal of your book is not to get people to like you or your book. The goal is to help the reader think "I'm awesome!".
• Don't try to reverse-engineer successful books. Reverse-engineer successful readers of books.
• The #1 goal of your book is to help the reader "Kick Ass".
• What really matters is what the reader does after reading the book.
• Have a relentless focus on the results of someone reading your book. Ask on every page, "How is this helping the reader 'kick ass'?".
• Who cares about your Table of Contents? What is your "Map of Superpowers"? What power to act and succeed are you giving to your reader?

My notes are a sad reflection of what she actually said in the talk so make sure you watch it above.

Social Networking

As explained last week, a social network is a service that allows you to connect with other people of similar interests and background.  Usually they consist of a profile, various ways to interact with other users, ability to setup groups, etc.  The two most popular social networking sites are Facebook and LinkedIn.

Facebook

Facebook is, by far, the most active social network on the internet with well over 700,000,000 members.  It is the most sophisticated and cutting edge platform available.  They are constantly adding new features and testing the best ways to allow people to interact.

If your tribe is made up of a mainstream audience, this is the place to be.

The biggest question that comes up when discussing Facebook with my clients is whether they should use their personal account or set up a separate Facebook page.  In almost every case, you should setup a Facebook page for building your tribe.  This allows you to use your personal Facebook account to connect with friends and family and keep the tribe building side separate.  Facebook pages also provide tools like discussion boards, picture uploading, aggregating blog posts and other customizations that make it a great tool for building your tribe in social media.

 LinkedIn

LinkedIn is the business professional's social network.  If your tribe consists of marketing professionals, CEOs or some other business focused niche, you should spend your time on LinkedIn.

The first place to start is building up your connections.  Go through your rolodex and contacts and find those people on LinkedIn and connect directly with them.  From there, LinkedIn offers other tools such as Q&As, groups and "inMail" that allow you to connect with new people and build a following.

Other Social Networks?

There are, of course, many other social networks out there, however these are the two I recommend in most cases because of the popularity and focus of the sites.  If you think there may be a better option for you, browse through this list on Wikipedia to get a head start.

You have spent months or years creating the manuscript for your book.  You've gone through the hellacious process of editing and rewrites.  You've finally got a cover design you love (or tolerate).  It is finally time to sell your book.

Here's the problem: Nobody cares about your book anywhere near as much as you do.

• Your family is excited for you, but it's not their project.
• The publisher wants it to sell well, but it's one book on their huge list of titles launching this year.
• The reader may love it, but they don't care about how much blood, sweat and tears you've invested.
• Your book is one of 3,000,000+ ISBNs that are being issued this year.

Even with all of the above truths, I often run into the same problem over and over when talking with authors.

Authors don't truly believe that nobody cares about their book as much as they do.

In a recent behavioral economics study titled The "IKEA Effect": When Labor Leads to Love, the authors outline several experiments that prove:

"the increase in valuation of self-made products"

"You put way more value on your book than everyone else does"

Do you have a good idea for a book?  Maybe just a seed of a thought?  What should you do with this?

The typical model is to develop the idea over a long period of time, build a "platform" to sell the book and then convince a publisher to take a risk on it.  Then, once the contract is signed, work for approximately two years for the book to hit the shelves.

That's quite the turn around time to see if your idea has mass appeal.  And if you think the publishers have an inside track to what has mass appeal, consider that over 80% of books lose money and you'll see they are guessing just like everyone else.

But how can you see if your idea is any good before spending years of your life and lots of money (yours and other people's) on the hope that it is?

Publish a manifesto.

Seth Godin released the complete manuscript of Unleashing the Ideavirus as a free PDF download in 2000.  It went on to become the most downloaded ebook of all time.  It was eventually picked up by the publisher Hyperion and continues to sell even though you can still get the entire book for free.

Max Barry had an idea for a novel and began releasing one page of the story every weekday for 9 months.  By doing it this way, he was able to take reader input and build an audience along the way.  Afterwards he went back and rewrote the entire story as a novel and Machine Man was published this month.

John Locke became the first ever self-published author to break 1,000,000 sales on Amazon.com.  All of his books costs $0.99.  Each of them could be considered a "manifesto" as the barrier for people to try out his stories is less than a dollar.

By publishing a manifesto, you give your idea a chance to spread and build a following before investing huge resources of time and money.

Here are two simple ideas to try out your manifesto:

1. Create a free PDF and give it away to everyone.  Write out the core to your idea or the first few chapters of your novel, turn it into a great looking PDF and then send it to everyone in your contact list.  Your colleagues, friends, family, college roommate, etc.

2. Write a Kindle Single.  Create 80 pages of content and sell it for $0.99.  This gives you a way to leverage the worlds biggest online retailer and see if your idea will spread.

From there, watch and cultivate.  As people respond, engage in dialogue.  Learn what they like and don't like about it.  See where it takes you and be open to change.

In today's world, the tools are at your finger tips to start small and grow something amazing.  You are no longer beholden to three year cycles and getting the right handful of people to like your work.  Put out your manifesto and see what happens.