I found my notes from the Author Promotion workshop! Way freakin’ cool.
Keep bringing visitors back:
There’s another way to help readers/visitors keep track of you and your site: change notification.
Over on the main site, They’re Just Words, changes are not daily like they are here. So a reader/visitor won’t always remember to keep coming back once or twice a week to see if anything is new. Enter change notification methods. This is where a reader/visitor signs up for notification emails when a change to a website occurs.
WordPress (which is fantastic, btw) has a plug-in for this. It is aptly named WordPress Email Notification plug-in. To the right in the sidebar is a place for visitors to sign up for changes to the blog. I just checked and They’re Just Words doesn’t have one (duh!).
For non-WordPress users, there’s ChangeDetection.com. The webmaster of a site can request the code and place it on the site for their visitors to use. Alternatively, anyone can use ChangeDetection.com’s change wizard to monitor any site they wish.
At first, I thought this service was just a way to get email addresses to then turn around and sell to spammers. Not so. This is from their Policies page.
Privacy We take your (and our!) privacy seriously. We never sell your e-mail address to spammers. Your e-mail address is used to provide you with feedback from the ChangeDetection system and inform you about issues relating to ChangeDetection such as system updates and changes. E-mails from the ChangeDetection may contain advertising. Additionally your e-mail address may be shared with the webmaster of the site your are monitoring. In such cases you should check the privacy policy of the site you are monitoring.
If you have opted-in to the optional mailings, you will receive e-mail advertising related to the topics selected. You may unsubscribe from these lists at any time.
So, yeah, there will be ads in the email notifications, but anyone who is on a Yapoo group list is used to those.
Ways to get your book release announced and keep your book up front:
Email signature – use it! I use Thunderbird and there’s an extension called “Signature” which allows me the option to have more than one signature and to choose which one I want for any email.
Internet Social groups/websites: FaceBook, MySpace, LiveJournal, places like that. Link to “friends” who then link to you who then have their “friends” see it who then perhaps also link to you.
Start early! – as soon as the cover is released, start putting it and the book info everywhere
More suggestions later!