Marketing Tips For Authors |
| Stumbling on New Readers By Anita Brady Posted: 25 Jun 2012 04:00 AM PDT  Today, I have a guest to speak to authors about StumbleUpon. Anita Brady is the President of 123Print.com. She will give you the scoop on this amazing social media marketing tool and suggest ways authors can harness its power in their book marketing plan. Stumbling on New Readers StumbleUpon search engine helps target your ideal readership By Anita Brady  It is a brave new world for authors with the rising popularity of self-publishing and the promotional options available through social media. Whereas not that long ago self-published books weren't afforded a second glance, they're now taking the literary world by storm. An author friend of mine recently benefited from his regular use of social media to the tune of major publishers such as Random House and Penguin Books fighting over the rights to his works, and film icons calling to discuss movie rights. How did he do it? While the story was good, no one really knew him as an author, so a few years ago he started a Facebook page for his books. He posted regularly, sharing clips of his next book and discussing chapter ideas with friends. Happy to be a part of the process, those friends bought copies of the book and told their friends about it. Slowly at first and then with rapidly increasing speed, the author's Facebook page began to blossom out of his control and he had to create a new page just to handle the volume. As more people bought the book, his ranking went up on Amazon.com and by the time he reached number ten on the most popular science fiction Kindle books, publishers were already calling with inquires. StumbleUpon steps up in popularity The speed of social media growth isn't always to an author's benefit, however. With Facebook now boasting more than 900 million users, it's getting harder and harder to find new authors. Luckily, a search engine only recently celebrating a rapid rise in membership might hold the key to bringing fresh new faces to your author and book pages. StumbleUpon, a form of web search engine, has actually been around since 2001, but has only become popular in the past two years. A lot of this is due to the site becoming available on mobile platforms as well as on the web outside of a browser extension. But what's really amazing is that, despite a membership of about 25 million compared to Facebook's 900 million or Twitter's 140 million, it's already driving more than 50 percent of social media site referral traffic (http://mashable.com/2011/08/19/stumbleupon-social-traffic/). How to making stumbling work for you The way StumbleUpon works is by learning what you, the user, like to view. When you first open your account, the site asks you what categories of interest you prefer such as literature, astronomy, technology, crafts, homemaking, etc. Once you set up these basic parameters, you can click the "stumble" button in the top toolbar and the engine will take you to a website that matches your preferences. If you like it, you can click the "thumbs up" button on the toolbar. If you don't, you can click "thumbs down." The engine learns from your choices and takes you to sites more along the lines of your likes. Additionally, it draws from users with similar preferences and adds their likes to your stumbles. If you want to search a specific topic, you can enter it in the "search for an interest" toolbar. There's even an option to post a comment about the website you've stumbled on and to read other users' opinions of the site. It's basically an intuitive way to find just what you like on the internet without having to come up with just the right search phrase – and it's a great opportunity for little-known authors. If you have a website and blog, as a StumbleUpon user you can add your website and/or blog posts to the pool from which the StumbleUpon search engine draws. As an author, your preferences probably already show that you love literature and interests that relate to your particular genre. With the pages added to the Stumble selection, the engine looks for other users with similar preferences and adds your posted sites as a potential stumble. The more you use the site, the more specific your results become and the more targeted your preferred pages become to the audience you want. If you're not willing to wait for the process of propagation, however, there's also the option of direct advertising. By using StumbleUpon's advertising branch, Paid Discovery, you can pay to have your site included in user experiences. Even though paid websites only appear in up to 5 percent of a user's experience, considering the fact that the average StumbleUpon user spends about 7 hours stumbling per month, that's a lot of appearances. And since your site is your advertising – the user goes directly to it as a stumble – there's no need to create an ad. The stumble then works in the same manner as a regularly stumbled site. Users can like it or dislike it, and can post a comment on the site's comment page. The only difference is that a small indicator will appear in the toolbar stating "sponsor" for paid advertising. As an author, it helps to get the word out about your work in any and every way possible. And with StumbleUpon, you can truly begin to target the readership pool of your dreams. ------ -------- Tony Eldridge is the author of The Samson Effect, an action/adventure novel that Clive Cussler calls a "first rate thriller brimming with intrigue and adventure." He is also the author of the Twitter marketing book, Conducting Effective Twitter Contests. His new novel, The Lottery Ticket, was just recently released on Kindle. 
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