What a great webinar session I held today with our guest expert, Peggy Duncan. Though I’m a bit of a tech dweeb myself, I picked up some great tips, which I plan to implement immediately. In fact, I’ve already put a few of Peggy’s suggestions into action. Since it was such a power packed presentation, I thought that I would summarize some of her key points. You’ll find a list of the “technology” suggestions listed at the bottom with links to their sites.

• Benefits include: boosting your search engine rankings (SEO), building your brand and providing another way to reach the masses. These things translate into building credibility, loyalty and increased sales.




• Email is still a very viable marketing vehicle and should be an integral part of your overall social media strategy.  And on that note, remember that your social media plan can also incorporate things like blogging, webinars, video, as well as using LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.




• Always remember to provide compelling information that not only showcases your core expertise, but creates value in advance of the sales opportunity. You always want to give people a reason to keep coming back to your blog or sign up for your email list.




• Write for people. Every day things are happening in your business world that can become a great blog post. As an example, as I’m summarizing the webinar information from our session today, I now have a blog post.




• What if I’m not a writer? Hire someone to help you. If you are better verbally, get a tape recorder to record your thoughts and then type them up. Also consider a service like www.jott.com for both recording and transcribing. Plus, the service will help push out your messages through your social sites.




• When you are getting started, consider setting up a “hosted” WordPress blog from the beginning. You can host with companies like Host Gator, GoDaddy or any number of hosting platforms. The benefit to doing this from the start is that you can customize to your specifications. When you run a “free blog” with WordPress.com you are limited (due to security issues) to the number of widgets and gadgets you can add to your site.




• As you create your content, Peggy recommended that you write about what you know. Talk about how what you do solves problems for prospective buyers. Don’t forget that blogging isn’t just about writing. You can have guest bloggers, video interviews, whitepapers and more.




• Make those posts sizzle with compelling headlines and don’t forget to incorporate phrases that tell someone how you solve their problem. Remember that when someone has a problem to solve, that’s what they Google. For example, “I need help creating a Twitter background.” If you’ve created your headline to incorporate that message, your rankings improve.




• Build traffic by promoting to your various social sites. And for you LinkedIn users (and you better be using LinkedIn as a sales networking tool!), you can integrate your blog to feed your LinkedIn profile.

Take Action

As I concluded the webinar today, I reminded everyone of the importance of taking action. What’s the point of sitting in on webinars, whether you paid for them or not, if you never do anything with the information? If you are looking for a low cost learning and coaching option to help your put social media to work for you in driving sales revenue, I’ve just launched a group coaching community that not only will give you the training that you need, but the coaching and encouragement along the way to help you put learning into action. Learn more here. You’ll find other individual coaching options here.

Technology List

Finally, here is a list of the technology that Peggy discussed during the session. I plan to get started with a few of them myself!!

www.viddler.com Incorporate your video into your blog, as well as host on YouTube. You’ll find the vidget tool that Peggy mentioned here http://vidgets.viddler.com/

www.feedjit.com This nifty little tool lets you know when someone visits your site. Remember, just because people may not be actively commenting on your blog that doesn’t mean they haven’t dropped by to read what you’ve posted.

www.linkwithin.com This WordPress plugin increases page views and keeps your readers engaged. The widget links to stories that are relevant and interesting to readers of a particular post, keeping them engaged with your blog, and increasing your traffic.

www.facebook.com Use the notes section (to the left under create group. Note, you may have to expand the list), to drive additional traffic to your blog, webinar or events.

www.google.com/addurl Use this to register your blog URL. Why? To increase traffic of course. If you want more visibility for your business locally use https://www.google.com/accounts/ServiceLogin?service=lbc&passive=1209600&continue=http://www.google.com/local/add/businessCenter&followup=http://www.google.com/local/add/businessCenter

www.hootsuite.com For managing your content posts, you can use Hootsuite to post to multiple social media sites. The free version lets you post to 5 social sites and/or RSS feeds.

www.postling.com Similar to Hootsuite, but here is the core difference. The free version of PostLing only allows you to post to 1 social media site. The free version of Hootsuite lets your post to 5 sites. Could be Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc.

If you’ve written a book (like I have with co-author, Joan Curtis), congratulations, because you’ve crossed a major hurdle. Now that I’ve gone through the process myself, I truly understand why writing a book can seem like such a daunting proposition. But, you’ve done it. Now what?

Writing the book is one thing, but how you will market and sell your masterpiece is another. The following is a guest post from top blogger and best selling author, Chris Brogan

Read on to learn how Chris suggests you prepare for your book launch utilizing the power of social media.

1. Set up a URL for the book, and/or maybe one for your name. Need help finding a URL? I use Ajaxwhois.com for simple effort in searching.
2. Set up a blog. If you want it free and super fast, WordPress or Tumblr. I’d recommend getting hosting like Bloghost.me.
3. On the blog, write about interesting things that pertain to the book, but don’t just promote the book over and over again. In fact, blow people away by promoting their blogs and their books, if they’re related a bit.
4. Start an email newsletter. It’s amazing how much MORE responsive email lists are than any other online medium.
5. Have a blog post that’s a list of all the places one might buy your book. I did this for both Trust Agents and Social Media 101.
6. Make any really important links trackable with a URL shortener. I know exactly how many people click my links.
7. Start listening for your name, your book’s name. ( Covered in this post about building blocks.)
8. Consider recording a video trailer for your book. Here’s one from Scott Sigler (YouTube), for his horror thriller, Contagious. And here’s one from Dallas Clayton for his Awesome Book. (Thanks Naomi for pointing this out).
9. Build a Facebook fan page for the book or for bonus points, build one around the topic the book covers, and only lightly promote the book via the page.
10. Join Twitter under your name, not your book’s name, and use Twitter Search to find people who talk about the subjects your book covers.
11. When people talk about your book, good or bad, thank them with a reply. Connect to people frequently. It’s amazing how many authors I rave about on Twitter and how few actually respond. Mind you, the BIGGEST authors always respond (paradox?)
12. Use Google Blogsearch and Alltop to find the people who’d likely write about the subject matter your book covers. Get commenting on their blog posts but NOT mentioning your book. Get to know them. Leave USEFUL comments, with no blatant URL back to your book.
13. Work with your publisher for a blogger outreach project. See if you can do a giveaway project with a few bloggers (here’s a book giveaway project I did for Donald Miller’s A Million Miles in a Thousand Years book).
14. Offer to write guest posts on blogs that make sense as places where potential buyers might be. Do everything you can to make the post match the content of the person’s site and not your goals. But do link to your book.
15. Ask around for radio or TV contacts via the social web and LinkedIn. You never know.
16. Come up with interesting reasons to get people to buy bulk orders. If you’re a speaker, waive your fee (or part of it) in exchange for sales of hundreds of books. (And spread those purchases around to more than one bookselling company.) In those giveaways, do something to promote links back to your site and/or your post. Giveaways are one time: Google Juice is much longer lasting.
17. Whenever someone writes a review on their blog, thank them with a comment, and maybe 1 tweet, but don’t drown them in tweets pointing people to the review. It just never comes off as useful.
18. Ask gently for Amazon and other distribution site reviews. They certainly do help the buying process. And don’t ask often.
19. Do everything you can to be gracious and thankful to your readers. Your audience is so much more important than you in this equation, as there are more of them than there are of you.
20. Start showing up at face to face events, where it makes sense, including tweetups. If there’s not a local tweetup, start one.
21. And with all things, treat people like you’d want them to treat your parents (provided you had a great relationship with at least one of them).

This sounds like a lot of steps. It is. But this is how people are finding success. Should this be the publicist’s job? Not even a little bit. The publicist has his or her own methodology. The author will always be the best advocate for his or her own work. Never put your marketing success in the hands of someone else. Always bring your best efforts into the mix and you’ll find your best reward on your time and effort.

You might have found other ways to be successful with various online and social media tools. By all means, please share with us here. What’s your experience been with promoting your work using the social web?

Chris Brogan is the New York Times bestselling author of the NEW book, Social Media 101. He is president of New Marketing Labs, LLC, and blogs at [chrisbrogan.com].