Posts Tagged ‘Templates’

The way to achieve credibility is by writing a blog.

At least that’s what I heard, and you probably did too. Is it true? Will a blog give you a writing career boost? Yes and No. It’s like planting a garden, if you give it the attention it needs to thrive, you will have good results, but if you neglect it, it will wither and die.

Here are some things to know if you are beginning a blog

1.  There are “free” blog hosting services like blogspot, blogger, and wordpress who are happy to have you join their family of bloggers. It costs nothing and they provide templates and other assistance to get you started.

2. What do the templates do? The templates are available to help you create a theme, and set up your dashboard. The dashboard controls all of the content on the blog. The theme is a term used to describe the look of your page. You can choose to personalize your blog by selecting one of many pre-built themes. If you want a site that is totally unique, you may want to consider hiring a web designer.

2.  Is there a downside to free hosting? It depends. If you are planning to use your blog as a revenue generating source, i.e. selling services or products to your readers, you may not be allowed. Also, the way the free hosting services keep it free is they can add advertisements to your site. That may not be a problem unless the ad turns out to be a direct competitor of yours.

3.  Unless you are already an experienced blogger, you may not know what you intend for the blog. The way to avoid having conflicts with hosting services is to host your own. You will have to get a domain and probably need the services of a web savvy friend to help you get set up, and going.

4.  Blogging is dynamic. If you put up a page and fail to nurture it will die. A dead blog won’t help credibility, and could hurt.

5.  How do you nurture a blog? There are two things that must be done. You have to add regular original content — not necessarily daily — but a couple of times a week if you can. The second thing is marketing. Think of marketing as telling people where your blog is and why they should go to it. It’s like being a cyber-carny barker. Some 170 thousand blogs are started daily,  so to stand out from the crowd takes some pretty strong barking.

6.  Do you have to write all of the content yourself? No, but if the purpose of the blog is to establish your credibility, you had better write a good deal of it. There are sites like ezine that gather articles for your use either for free or at a nominal charge.

7.  How much time is required to nurture your blog? Well — that depends. Working a blog can take as much time as you can give it. It can become a black hole. Treat your blogging as a business and do what successful business people do, spend your time on the activities that promise the highest rewards.

A successful self-publisher must be a terrific self-promoter. There is a myth that goes; if you build a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your door. If you believe that you’ll probably buy a genuine Rolex watch from a shady man in an alley for thirty bucks. No one beats a path to your door that isn’t encouraged, excited, and enthusiastic about getting the benefits of your product.

Thomas Edison

In the case of self-publishers, books are the products. Products, no matter how good they are, must be sold. Even Thomas Alva Edison with his marvelous inventions like the phonograph, and incandescent electric light bulbs knew that nothing moves without a sale. What was Edison best at selling? You are right, himself. He was a self-promoter of the highest rank. Electric light was actually invented 50 years before him, but he got credit because he learned how to make it functional, then he tied his name to it and voila Con-Edison was born.

What’s that you say? You aren’t a salesman type. You can’t sell water to a man whose house is on fire. No matter, I’m not talking about going out and knocking on doors. I’m talking about selling yourself by convincing others that the product of your mind, your book, is worth buying and reading. I know a woman in my area, Nancy Miles, who recently self-published a cookbook. This cookbook has the usual mouthwatering recipes with color photos and such, but it also has the added attraction of allowing her readers to go to her website NancyMilesInGoodTaste.com and use templates to create their own family legacy recipe pages. You can literally create a family cookbook with recipes to hand down to other generations. What a great idea!

Is In Good Taste selling well? It is, but if she had taken delivery and kept it in boxes in her garage, it wouldn’t. Nancy has been working the retail store circuit. She takes a book into buyers and shows them why it is different than the other cookbooks they sell. No high highfalutin’ sales pitch, just confidence gained by a belief in her product, and the desire to give everyone an opportunity to do wonderful things for their families.

The title of this post is Lousy Public Speakers Sell Fewer Books which came to me as I realized just how much publishing is changing. The traditional model is based on the publisher buying the rights, incurring all of the costs of  production and distribution, and rewarding the author with a royalty on the sales. The stark truth is that if traditional publishing was the only route, 95% to 98% of the available manuscripts would never get published. What a waste. Nancy didn’t wait for the luck of the draw. She’s out busily creating a market while she’s waiting to be discovered. In the meantime, she’s earning a pretty good living. I’m going to take a wild guess and suggest that her earnings in the first six months are in the neighborhood of $30,000 to $45,000. Remember, she’s doing this on her own, by herself.

Confidence is the key

My point is you don’t have to be a big time traditionally published author to make a living. You don’t have to be Og Mandino who wrote The Greatest Salesman in the World. What you do have to have is a good book, and the confidence to tell people about it. How do you gain that confidence? There are many routes, many coaches, and many teachers, but for my money, there is no better place to start than with Toastmasters. I’ve been in Toastmasters for four years, and I’ve seen time after time people come to our meetings, stand behind the lectern, and shake so badly that they rattle the table. I’ve seen those same people after their fourth, fifth, or sixth speech in the first manual, literally transform themselves into a confident public speaker. It is beautiful. It truly is. And what’s even better is you don’t have to empty your bank account. My club, Precision Speakers, collects $35.00 every six months. That’s only a buck-thirty-five per meeting. To find a club meeting near you go to the Toastmasters International website.

I suggest you get your shy or reticent self to a Toastmaster meeting right away. Get some club speeches under your belt and feel that confidence rise.