Social Media Begins with a Blog
Occasionally, even someone like me, who loves to write, gets sidetracked by life and stops—writing, blogging, posting. I kept up with my “Healthy Options” column, published the 1st, 3rd, and 5th, Tuesdays of each month in The Union newspaper, but Entrepreneurial Jan took a break. It wasn’t intentional, but apparently, I needed time to think, and as it turns out, time to synthesize, plan, and create.
During this two month hiatus, I realized that I’d lost my focus. Sure, I kept busy–even did a few workshops and worked on some fiction, but I wasn’t clear about where I was headed. Something was nagging at me.
That’s when all of the social media marking information I’d been devouring for the past few years, gelled. In a moment of divine clarity, I realized that building a writing platform and a list weren’t as complicated or time consuming as I’d been led to believe. In fact, what made everything seem so difficult was my resistance to “it.” By “it” I mean everything except blogging. After all, blogging is simply writing, but it’s all the other social media stuff that was dragging me down—until in that flash of insight I realized that once it was set up, everything else could be automated and relegated to a less than 10 minutes per post.
That’s when I really love technology!
With the goals of …
1. Establishing myself as an author (Building a Platform)
2. Promoting my writing and coaching services as well as my books
3. Growing a list for my workshops
Here’s my new, improved and completely do-able social media plan:
Blog (300-500 words) at least once a week (hopefully 2-3 times) and then post links to completed posts on Twitter, my Face Book business pages, and on LinkedIn.
That’s it. Simple and easy.
Of course, coming up with a minimum of 52 – 156 topics a year is the tricky part, but I’ve done a little online sleuthing and discovered an abundance of sites that help people come up with ideas as well as catchy headings. I’ve even come up with a way to coach others, regardless of their area of expertise, through a brainstorming process that quickly generates hundreds of topics. I know it works because I used it myself.
My goal for the rest of the year is providing information that will actually help members of my target audience—writers in general, people who have a story to tell for posterity, individuals who want to plan their novel to make writing easier and more fun as well as writers who want to learn how to jump-start their writing with prompts and other tools I’ll be sharing.
Stay tuned!
Give my ridiculously simple social media marketing plan a try and let me know how it works for you.
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Jan Fishler is the producer of the Path to Publication DVD series filmed at the Squaw Valley Community of Writers featuring Amy Tan, Janet Fitch, and other well-know authors, agents, and publishers. She is the author of Searching for Jane, Finding Myself (An Adoption Memoir) and Flex Your Writing Muscle – 365 Days of Writing Prompts. She writes articles for VietNow National Magazine and she has a bi-monthly column, “Healthy Options” in The Union newspaper.
