Top Tips for Marketing Your Book for the Holiday Season – Written By Ronita Mohan – On Nicholas Rossis’ Blog

Thank you very much, Ronita, for a blog post full of marketing ideas for the Holiday season!

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The holiday season isn’t just about snow and families and giving gifts—it’s also a great time for marketing your book.

We have some top tips for holiday book marketing—including what to post on social media and include in newsletters—so you can improve book sales and reach customers well into 2020.

Season’s Greetings

How are your fans and audience going to know that you are participating in the holiday season? A simple gesture is all it takes—share season’s greetings on your marketing channels.

This means sending out a holiday-themed post on your social media and sending a holiday email.

But you can go beyond that. Why not also design holiday cards—with card templates—that fans can send to their families?

You can use imagery from your books or, if you prefer, something simple: you in a festive hat, or your books with festive bows tied around them.

Sharing best wishes for the season is a simple way to remind people that you and your books are just what they need to make their holiday season.

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How To Help Stop Somebody Stealing Your Blog Posts – Written By Hugh W. Roberts

On Hugh’s Views and News I found an important blog post about how to help stop somebody stealing your blog posts. Thank you very much for all your efforts to help us bloggers! We really appreciate it!

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I recently stumbled upon a blog where the author had copied and was using my blog posts. No pingbacks or mention that I was the original author, just plain copy and pasting of some of my posts and images. It left me feeling angry, yet I also felt honoured that my work must be good enough if somebody wanted to copy it.

Photo by Lukas on Pexels.com

Unfortunately, with the internet being such a vast and open space used by billions of people worldwide, the chances of that happening to any one of us who publishes anything on the internet is a distinct possibility. Whether it be photos, fiction, reviews, poetry, recipes or gardening tips, everything faces the chance of being copied and somebody else taking full credit for your hard work.

Read the entire blog post HERE

 

Akismet – Or the Secret Infiltration Of Our Blogs

A few weeks back I was going through my comments, since I had to approve a few of them, and was informed that I had something like 70 spam comments. You can see the spam file here, just when you’re in your comments:

Once again curiosity-driven I went through the spam file and scrolled through the different attempts. And I realized something: while a few months ago, these ‘cyber-impostors” were simply commenting on our blog posts, they had found out they might be more successful replying to one of the comments on our posts.

While a year ago, sales companies for mattresses, online drug stores, and internet Viagra were trying to use our blogs as a sales platform, this time I found that Russian sex sites tried the same thing.

I saw the statistics and realized that the number of spam comments was almost as high as my regular blog comments. Can you imagine if Akismet didn’t exist? We would be drowned in mattresses, bad internet Viagra and Russian whores.

 

I admit at this point I’m grateful for Akismet and WordPress protecting us from the worst. Some trigger words might make them turn a regular comment into a spam comment, but by going through our spam file regularly, we can still catch them.

Without Akismet our blogs were unreadable, and we would have to give them up.
I recommend you keep track of your spam folder to help them improve their service.

Happy blogging!

picture courtesy of http://www.twitter.com

 

FOMO Bloggers: Why You’re Harming Your Own Blog

‘Suzie Speaks’ provides us with a post about blogging and what we bloggers should concentrate on. I’m impressed by this post and I’m convinced I’m not the only one!

Suzie Speaks

Ethel has written a post. It’s a great post and it’s receiving lots of positive feedback. Janey wants lots of positive feedback too. Janey copies the post, changes a few words around, adds in a few extra ideas and publishes it as her ‘brand new, completely original post’ in all of the 232 Facebook groups that she’s a member of. Nobody will notice, right?

In the last week I’ve read two articles that I immediately connected with. The first, a completely fabulous post by Kate Toon – 19 Things NOT to Do in a Facebook Group – which hilariously highlighted just some of the silliness that I witness daily, and the second by Elena Peters – What’s Up With the Fast Blogging? – a short set of thoughts on the misconceptions of overnight blogging success and the desperation of bloggers to achieve it. They’re both completely different posts, but they…

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13 Free Blogging Tips For Every New Blogger

Hugh provides us with 13 free blogging tips for every new blogger. Thanks so much for this post, Hugh!

Hugh's Views & News  

If you are new to blogging or are even thinking about starting a blog, here my thirteen quick blogging tips to get you on your way.

• It’s all about me. Ensure you have an ‘about me’ page. Tell visitors a little about yourself and at least give them a name by which they can call you. However, don’t have an ‘about me’ page that starts off by saying ‘This Is An Example Of An About Me Page’. Click here to read about setting up an ‘about me’ page and what it should include.
• Make a journey outside of your own blog. I’ve always been amazed by just what information is out there in the blogging world. I’ve learned how to self-publishing a book, how to use social media and make it work for me, how to bake gin & tonic cupcakes, take great photos and, of course, picked up lots…

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Different Types of Closure

Charles Yallowitz provides us with a post on his blog “Legends of Windermere”, describing different types of closure. I love the article. Thank you, Charles.

Legends of Windemere

Yahoo Image Search

I’ve said in previous posts that one of the most important parts of concluding a series is creating closure. You need to bring things to an end, which isn’t as easy as some people think.  In fact, one of the reasons it can be so tough is because you have a variety of closure types to choose from.  It depends a lot on what you’re going for, but even planning doesn’t alleviate all the pressure.  So, what are the types?

1. Classic Good Ending– All of the good guys get what they wanted and all of the bad guys got what they deserved.  It’s the oldest type of closure in the book.  Nothing messy and no risk of people feeling it’s a downer.  Though, you might get called out for being weak and unoriginal.
2. Classic Bad Ending– I’m not sure how long it took for someone…

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Is it time to turn off comments on your blog?

Hugh wrote an amazing article about blog posts and turning off comments. Would you do this, bloggers? Isn’t it a blessing to reply to comments? Read what Hugh has to say! Thanks for a great post, Hugh!

Hugh's Views & News  

I’ve always believed that leaving and responding to comments on a blog is one of the actions at the very heart of what blogging is all about. Imagine my surprise when I then read that some bloggers are turning off comments being left on their blogs for good.

If you’re lucky enough to get lots of comments left on your blog, then responding to them can become overwhelming. In the almost four years I’ve been blogging, I’ve approved and responded to nearly 30,000 comments, and it can sometimes take me a whole morning responding. However, I’ve always had the attitude that if somebody has taken the time to read and leave a comment on one of my posts, then it’s only right and polite that I acknowledge them and write a response.

‘Treat every visitor to your blog, as you would any guest to your house.”

Those were the words I…

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Blogger Tip 02 – How to Reduce the Number of Images Required in Your WordPress Media and SAVE STORAGE SPACE…

Need to save more storage? See what else you can do to limit the space used up by your images. Thanks so much for the tips, Chris, The Story Reading Ape!

Chris The Story Reading Ape's Blog

WP TIP 1

If you use more than one image in your posts, then use WordPress Publicize to automatically upload your post to Twitter, Facebook, etc, or, manually upload them, the image last inserted into your post, is the one that will be displayed on your media.

To avoid the wrong image being displayed, either:

Insert it LAST

OR

Select it as your ‘Featured Image’

Authors especially would probably prefer their Book Cover being displayed, rather than some other, random, image.

WP TIP 2

If you opt for using a Featured image, or, have the same image appear more than once in your post (as I’ve done on this post):

You DO NOT NEED to upload the same image for each separate appearance!

Select the same image to be inserted wherever you want it to be shown in the post.

This will save taking up unnecessary space in your media…

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Blogger Tip 01 – How to Resize Images inside your WordPress Media and SAVE STORAGE SPACE..

Phenomenal! On The Story Reading Ape’s blog I found blogger tip #1 to save storage space when it comes to our pictures. It’s a really important post to read for our very busy bloggers. Thank you, Chris!

Chris The Story Reading Ape's Blog

Have you been using images that are VERY LARGE, and/or, PNG Format?

Have you been reblogging and noticed how LARGE, some folks make their images?

Result

Running out of space in your WordPress Media Storage and thinking about paying for more?

Unless you are displaying your own images / photos, and WANT to have them full size

Before you spend any money, go through your Media Storage images and reduce their sizes

You might be shocked at how much longer you can work with the storage space you save.

Step 1:

Select an image and click on it to see it’s size (width x height in pixels)

and

how much it ‘weighs’ (i.e., how many KB or MB it is):

Step 2

My example has already been adjusted, but you can see it’s size and weight

To reduce them, click on the Edit Image button shown under the image:

Step…

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The WordPress ‘Press This’ Sharing Button Is Back

It seems using the “Press This” button on WordPress has changed. Hugh explains us in a video how to use it now. Thanks for keeping us updated, Hugh!