I’m back. I just finished a good sized freelancing project which took up most of my attention. I’m back though, and here’s a link to an interesting discussion.

Self-publish — or Not?

This is an intelligent discussion of the benefits and drawbacks of choosing self-publishing over a traditional route. All too often these discussions degenerate into insults and absolutes that are useless. This discussion is pretty good though.

As I’ve mentioned before, I don’t consider self-publishing to be vanity publishing. I think some writers do have unrealistic expectations though. I frequently read comments where writers hope that their self-published work will be “discovered” and published traditionally.

Of course, I know that happens from time to time, but how often? Really? For ever book that gets discovered how many hundreds, or thousands, are left unnoticed? If you’re thinking of self-publishing with that hope in mind, I’d think hard about my plans for discovery. You’ll never get discovered unless you do something to get yourself discovered. That may mean getting an internet following, submitting your book to agents/publishers, doing your own marketing, or all or more of those things.

For me, what it boils down to is learning to do my own marketing for the novel. To get the book “out there” and discoverable, I’ll need to get as many people to see it and read it as possible. That means advertising. I know it’s an ugly topic for many writers, but I think it’s unavoidable.

And why am I thinking about this topic again? Well, now that the freelancing project is finished, I’m going to get back to the novel in earnest. Unfortunately, I find that I just don’t have time to balance my freelancing, fiction, blogging, etc. all at once. If I’m busy with one, then one or more of the others suffer. When I figure out how to stop sleeping and eating, I’ll get more done.

I’m catching up on comments, so if you submitted one and it hasn’t popped up yet, it’s probably stuck in my spam filter. I’ll get to it as quickly as I can.

Social media sites can be a great way to promote your blog. However, choose one that fits in with your site’s content and tone. For example, Digg is a great site, but it would be a bad fit for most of my content.

I tend to use StumbleUpon and Twitter primarily. I try not to bombard by followers/friends with links and posts, but many of them are nice enough to Stumble my posts when I do.

The one thing I recommend about using any social media site is to spend time really socializing and contributing before trying to get something back. Many of the people who frequent these sites are very attuned to what they consider “spamming,” and it’s all too easy to seem like you’re in it just for yourself. Remember, these sites are intended for everyone’s use and enjoyment, not as a marketing tool.

If you’re interested in following me, here are some of my social media identities.

Twitter: cornerscribe

StumbleUpon:  cornerscribe

Ravelry: jkay

Please feel free to leave your identities below, and I’ll reciprocate.

I recently bought a small StumbleUpon campaign for one of the posts here at Corner Scribe. I did it without much research or planning; I just picked a post I thought was good and bought $10 of StumbleUpon traffic.

The results… I’m not really sure.

I got about a 4 percent thumbs up rating, which was lower than I’d hoped for. However, since it’s my only campaign, I don’t have anything to compare it to either.

I didn’t promote the campaign other than buy the visits. From time to time I’ll promote my content on twitter, stumbleupon, entrecard, etc. and drive more traffic and stumbles that way. I deliberately chose to not do that in this case because I wanted to see how the post fared all on its own.

I didn’t include images, although I know now that Stumble users tend to prefer posts with them. Next time, I’ll try that.

Next time, I’ll also experiment with putting the same article in multiple categories; I know that that can have a big effect on how well a campaign goes.

If you’re interested in running a StumbleUpon campaign, you’ll pay $5 per 100 visits. Yes, that’s a bit high, but the potential is there for your content to get thumbs-upped and really take off. Here are a couple links you might find helpful.

Problogger gives some advice on advertising using StumbleUpon.

StumbleUpon Alerter is a great little tool that lets you track certain posts and see how many times they’ve been voted up, and by whom. By the way, if you have trouble getting it to run under Windows Vista, right click the shortcut, choose properties, and set it to run as Administrator. That did the trick for me.

It looks as if Entrecard has moved the Stumble exchanges into another forum. Since I haven’t seen anything to explain, I’m assuming the moderators are going to enforce the “must be Entrecard related” dictate on the promotions forum.

Will I be participating? I’m not sure, but I probably will from time to time. Will I promote posts that I feel are of low quality? No. When I run across a submission that I don’t feel that I can thumbs up, I usually try to find something else on the site I feel okay about stumbling.

I’m curious, how does everyone else handle this?

Updated to add:

Million Dollar Challenge has an interesting post about a stumble exchange there. Read through the comments to get a clearer view of how it works, and the potential problems of stumbling sites that aren’t “worth” stumbling. I never thought about one point that was made; if someone stumbles one of my posts that’s a bad one, then it makes visitors less likely to come back and view the good posts that I have.

Networking

Originally uploaded by paal

If you’re on Entrecard and have participated in the Stumble Exchanges, you’ve no doubt noticed that those have been shut down in the forums. You’re probably also wondering what you’ll do to promote your site now. Along those lines, I have a couple of suggestions. Continue reading →

Steve Pavlina usually has great articles, but this one is especially good. He points out a problem many bloggers, including me, struggle with.

If you want to make money, then treat your blog like a business, not like a blog.

Some of his points really hit home. I’ve spent most of my time developing content for my blogs and not nearly enough time marketing and promoting. Yep, my traffic numbers show it too. One of my goals this year is to boost traffic, so his article on making money from blogging couldn’t have come at a better time.

Here are some interesting points from the article (but head over and read the whole thing yourself anyway).

• He spends only about 20 percent of his time writing content
• He’s worked on multiple income streams; not all his income comes from ads and affiliates on the blog
• Writing for money is nothing to be ashamed of, and you should avoid those who try to make you feel that it is

Go over, read the article, and make a plan for some things you can do right now to promote your business (blog). Here are some ideas to get you started.

• Write a note to thank your recent commenters
• Participate in online forums
• Send an email to a blogger you read, introducing your site
• Participate in a social networking site that is appropriate to your niche
• Write an article that’s out of your comfort zone; often those are the ones that draw traffic
• Try something unconventional!

List any other ideas you have in the comments below.