I don’t celebrate Holidays, but this is some valuable information! Its always wise to release books and implement sales around high reading cycles (Holidays, Weekends, Summer etc.)
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Written word media recently published a great post with ideas on how to take advantage of holiday marketing trends to sell your books. With Christmas fast approaching, I figured this is a great time to have a look at the main points:
1. Between mid-November and early January, everyone loves to shop
From early November through early January, everyone is in a buying mood, so this is the perfect time to sell more books. Here are a few noteworthy dates within this range that are significant online shopping days, with ideas on what tactics and messages will resonate with customers:
Info by Written World Media
Image: dailyfinance.com
2. Focus on Amazon
Focus on Amazon – over half the shoppers will use it for their holiday shopping. Emphasize links to your books on Amazon. Your prospective customers will already be shopping on Amazon, so make it easy for them to…
The PBS Blog was not my introduction to blogging. At first, I hosted a blog through Blogger in honor of my first novel The Aftermath. My second blog, A House of Poetry, was dedicated to poetry and hosted here on WordPress. Neither of these blogs went very far. When I transitioned from A House of Poetry to The PBS Blog, I had a different intention. This time around, I enjoyed blogging, and I did not want to miss a day of publishing content. I was relentless and almost obsessive. I posted three times a day for five or six days a week. My routine looked something like this:
Of course, you have to first produce something. This post is about getting your blog to work for you when you are away, but that doesn’t happen unless you have first created something.
My first tip to getting your blog to work for you even when you aren’t blogging is to be consistent in publishing valuable content when you first start your blog so you have tons of content to repurpose later.
My first posts did not do well far as engagement. But what it did was help me get used to writing publicly, posting regularly, and creating content that people will read weeks, months, and even years later. People are still engaging with posts I wrote four and five years ago because blog posts have a long shelf life, unlike a social media post.
I believe in hard work. I also believe that hard work pays off. These are pretty much the basic principles that help me to keep this blog going.
Update: We are now in the era of the COVID-19 pandemic, which we were not in when this post I first published this post in 2016. More people are at home now, which is a wonderful opportunity to engage your audience because people consume a lot of content. Time spent reading blogs and social media posts have increased significantly, with everyone being at home. On the flip side, there are also more distractions which means that you are easily forgettable if you are not showing up regularly.
Another thing to remember is that a post you publish today can blow up a year from now. A post with five likes now can get 50,000 likes in a year, depending on the spirit of the time and how it is relatable to your post. Here’s an example of what I posted in the original version of this post from 2016:
“Last week, a blog post I published two years ago suddenly got lots of attention. My stats were going crazy! Shooting up to over six hundred views within 48 hours, over 3,000 by the end of the day, and over four thousand shares on Facebook. This was an old post that new visitors were just discovering. This is a clear example of your blog working for you. If I wanted, I could have sat back and took an entire week off and made it up in views, likes, and follows coming in from that post alone. This same thing can work on articles that surround certain historical events, like 9/11. Maybe you posted something on 9/11, and two years from now, it gets all of the attention you thought it deserved when you first published it. It’s all about timing.” – Yecheilyah
You won’t have to worry about posting as much once you’ve been doing it for some time, and you won’t have to worry about losing followers when you are not blogging because there is enough content for people who have not yet discovered your blog to read.
Schedule Your Blog Posts
Although I was publishing a lot initially, it doesn’t mean that I was coming up with the content on the fly. I planned my posts out and scheduled them. If you go into your WordPress dashboard, you can schedule your blog posts so that they will go live without you having to sit in front of the computer or phone and do it manually. If you are in the US, I recommend scheduling it to go live at midnight so you can reach people all over the world who are in different time zones. We talked about this in another post already, so as not to be redundant, I will refer you to that post which you can find here.
Download the WP App (Or Whatever App is appropriate for your blog platform)
You can also download the WordPress app, which, once the post is live, helps respond to comments and share to social media on the go.
This is probably one of the best tips of them all because you can grow while you sleep, which is like working while you sleep. And who doesn’t like that?
Support Other Blogs/Bloggers
Publishing posts regularly is good, but it is not enough. It is just as important to follow other blogs, comment on other blogs and interact with other bloggers.
The more I interacted with veteran bloggers, participated in challenges, followed and commented on other blogs, the more I became aware of the little nuggets and tidbits I needed to help my blog, not only to grow but also to keep growing. And consistent growth is a goal that I consistently strive for.
Guest blogging, interviewing others, and being active within the community will help you grow even on days you are not blogging because you are leveraging your platform through others. Someone might not have read the article on your page, but if you were a guest on someone else blog or a more prominent blog reblogged/shared your post, their readers become your readers depending on the subject and how it is relatable to them.
It’s a challenge for authors who write and publish books to be consistent in publishing blog posts while trying to write books because blogging is still a form of writing. Whether you are publishing a poem, short story, article, how-to, research article, giving a testimony, or breaking down how a quote is inspirational to you, it’s all still writing.
One solution is that by frequently posting in the beginning, supporting other blogs when you are not blogging, repurposing content, and scheduling blog posts, authors can continually publish books without neglecting their blog.
The key is a little bit of discipline and networking with others, incorporating blogging into your platform building strategy as a necessary part of the work, and producing quality posts as early and as often as possible in your blogging journey.
Growing up, my brother was a collector of the latest Nikes. He was the Air Force One version of the Air Jordan lover. He’ll collect all kinds of pairs of “Air Ones” and stack them in his room or in the basement. It was truly a work of art and since he actually is an artist, sometimes he even drew on them! In any event, it’s no secret, black people love shoes! I don’t say that in a discriminatory way, for African Americans are known to set the trend. There’s nothing wrong with our love for fashion which is often mimicked all over the world. It makes sense then, why it was an African American man who helped to revolutionize the shoe making industry. Meet Jan Matzeliger.
Jan Matzeliger was born in Surinam, formerly known as Dutch Guiana, in South America. Of mixed ancestry, Jan’s father was a Dutch engineer and his mother of African ancestry. Naturally, since his dad was an engineer, Jan would accompany his father to work and developed a skill for repairing complicated equipment.
At nineteen, Jan left home to explore the rest of the world, and began work aboard an Indian ship. He found his way to America and settled in Pennsylvania where he became interested in shoe making and worked at a shoe making factory.
The Lasting Machine
Though Jan was interested in improving how shoes were made, two obstacles were in his way: He could barely speak English and at that time shoes in the U.S. all came from the small town of Lynn, Massachusetts where “Hand Lasters” (people who could attach the different parts of the shoe together by hand), could only produce 50 pairs of shoes per ten-hour day. Though paid well, Jan had the discernment to see that what Hand Lasters were doing was not as good as everyone thought. There had to be a better way.
Specifically, there was no machine that could attach the upper part of a shoe to the sole and this is basically what the “Hand Lasters” were doing and they were the experts. According to them, “No matter if the sewing machine is a wonderful machine. No man can build a machine that will last shoes and take away the job of the Laster, unless he can make a machine that has fingers like a Laster – and that is impossible.” Jan Matzeliger thought they were wrong and set out to build a machine that would do just that.
Jan’s Finished Lasting Machine
Jan is a great inspiration for setting out to achieve something that no one thought would work. He worked hard on this machine using whatever he could find – cigar boxes, nails, paper, scrap wire—and after six months had a workable model. Jan however, did not have much money. He also kept his project secret. Still, the “expert” Hand Lasters found out and made fun of him for his project. Someone offered him $50.00 for the machine but Jan wasn’t having it. They tried to play him, but he was smarter than that. He turned down more and more offers and continued perfecting his machine until a better offer came from which he could acquire the tools to perfect the machine even more.
In March of 1883, the United States Patent Office issued a patent for Jan’s machine, which could produce 700 pairs of shoes a day, to the Hand Lasters 50 pair and the rest is history. Jan had officially revolutionized the shoe making industry.
Some of my brother’s art, “The Shoe King”
How does Jan’s invention help us today?
Today, shoe making involves four departments: Clicking or Cutting, Closing or Machining, Lasting & Making, Finishing Department and the Shoe Room. The Lasting and Making part is where Jan’s invention would come in. “In the early days of shoe making, shoes were made mainly by hand. For proper fit, the customer’s feet had to be duplicated in size and form by creating a stone or wooden mold called a “last” from which the shoes were sized and shaped. Since the greatest difficulty in shoe making was the actual assembly of the soles to the upper shoe, it required great skill to tack and sew the two components together. It was thought that such intricate work could only be done by skilled human hands.” (Wikipedia)
That is until Jan’s machine. Today, soles, which were once laboriously hand-stitched on, are now more often machine stitched or simply glued on by shoe making manufacturing.
I took a two-week break from posting on my own blog a few months ago. In that time, I was refueled with post ideas but I also had the opportunity to read most of yours. In that process, I realized something I hadn’t paid much attention to before. I didn’t pay much attention to it because that’s just how ingrained these things are in our lives today. The Cell Phone. During my observation, I realized that I read most of your blog posts (90%) from my phone. In fact, I observed that the only time I read blog posts from my laptop / desktop, is when I am logged in to draft a post that I can’t draft on my phone.
The number of mobile-only users has recently surpassed the number of desktop-only users. According to an article in Marketing Land, “Mobile now represents 65 percent of digital media time…
Like many of you, I experience doubt, fear, and all the other emotions that can bring about stress and negativity. I am no different than you in these feelings. I am human and like you, I have emotions. Sometimes I am broken, undetermined, and lack confidence. However, I soon remember that this is not how I want to live my life. It is not that I am “happy go lucky” all the time, fake, or that I do not have feelings of despair, but that I have made the conscious decision not to give my energy over to such feelings. Of course, there are days when I am not consciously strong enough to make that kind of a decision, and that’s when prayer comes in.
So often I hear writers, bloggers, and friends complain about not being good enough without realizing how they’re speaking this into existence. If you truly don’t believe you have worth or value, then that is how it’s going to be. It’s not about being flawless (for we have all fallen short in some way or another) but what it is about is talking ourselves into achieving our goals instead of talking ourselves out of them.
Like learning, self-examination is not a one-time thing, but it is forever constant in our lives. One of the reasons self-reflection is so important is because we often deceive ourselves. Self-Deception means that you are not consciously aware of your true self. The person in the mirror is not reflective of what really exists. There are often two kinds of ways in which we deceive ourselves:
a. The part of self-deception that makes us look at ourselves and downplay everything about us because we know that we are flawed.
b. The part of self-deception where we know everything.
Both of these views are wrong.
Self-examination is not comparing ourselves to others or being mean to ourselves. It does not make it so dark that nothing new can grow. In this instance of Self-Deception we’re just too busy counting our mistakes and being “down and out” to make any real changes. It’s almost as if we want to be in that low place. Walking around carrying the burden of this dark cloud over our shoulders like its a responsibility, and brushing off any inkling of light that wishes to squeeze itself through.
The other one simply leaves no room for improvement. Self-examination is not self-exaltation.
It is possible that the way we perceive ourselves is flawed. If we think we know everything it is possible, then, that we are self-deceived. Likewise, if we believe that we know nothing, then it is possible that we are self-deceived, for everyone has a little bit of something in them. We all know in part and working together we become whole as we all bring something different to the table. No one knows everything, but everyone knows something.
When we have these low moments, we must talk ourselves into those changes we want to happen in our lives and implement a plan that will help us to reach these goals in a practical way. Again, it’s not about having it “all together”, it’s about changing your perspective on life itself and going from concept to execution. Words have power and they do not come back void. Instead of speaking negativity over your life and having a “woe is me” attitude, try being inspired. Try optimism. Try faith. Try something different, for insanity is repeating the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. You already stressed yourself out about that today. Try something else.
So, your blog isn’t growing the way you want it to, what are you doing to change that? What practical steps are you taking to change what you don’t like? Or are you just complaining about it? So, you’re not where you want to be with your writing, or business, change it. Sit down and outline a plan. So, you don’t like the way your stomach looks right now, change it. Maybe you can’t run a mile starting out. You don’t have to. Run a block. Walk a block.
Anything you don’t like in your life can be changed but first you must change your perspective. In addition, there must be a willingness to be uncomfortable. Only when we are in that place can we really grow. For as the saying goes, “Comfort zones are beautiful places, but nothing ever grows there.” Yes, it’s going to be hard. Yes, it’s going to take persistence, and yes it’s going to take dedication but it begins first with the self-confirmation that yes, IT IS possible. We have to start using words like, “I can”, “I will” and “I will learn” instead of “I can’t”, and “I will never”. Don’t talk yourself out of achieving your goals. Talk yourself into them.
Info by Written World Media 
Image: dailyfinance.com 
The PBS Blog 