Many up-and-coming authors are using MySpace to promote their books. Here are several rules of thumb for using MySpace as a publicity tool:
- Try to keep your MySpace pages streamlined and clutter-free. Make sure that anyone who sees it can easily discover your book and, if interested, buy it quickly. Put “buy this book” links so they’ll appear on each page.
- Keep your name in front of people by posting frequently to your MySpace blog and by sending a bulletin of the blog entry to all your Friends. But don’t abuse the privilege – if you post too frequently without something of value, your Friends will quickly decide to ignore you – or delete you from their list of Friends.
- Ignore folks on MySpace who try to sell you something you’re uninterested in, or those who try to hook up for a date. Unless you’re interested in this, it’s best to focus on the Friends who find value in your ideas and books. When you set up your MySpace page, it’s easy to make clear you’re not there for dat-ing – that way you’ll eliminate a lot of spam from unwanted “Friends.”
- Don’t feel obligated to accept every Friend who zaps an invitation your way. It’s best to concentrate on having 50 friends who truly connect with, rather than having thousands of Friends you quickly forget about.
- To leverage MySpace as a professional asset, it must look professional. Your potential Friends will check out your existing Friends, so your MySpace utility will be undermined by having too many friends who have no connection to your niche. It’s find to have some oddballs in there, but be certain you have a clear connection with your Top 8 Friends.
- To keep the hits coming, you’ve got to maintain MySpace. Throwing together a page and never visiting or tweaking it will do little good.
- Don’t promote your MySpace profile at the expense of your own domain. MySpace is a great networking tool, but you don’t want to depend on it exclusively. Perhaps someday MySpace will go out of business, or begin charging high fees, or you may decide it no longer fits the image you want to project. Even if MySpace is currently your primary online tool, you can purchase an important in-surance policy for only $9 a year by registering your own domain name—www.MyName.com or www.MyBookTitle.com and pointing the traffic to your MySpace URL (your domain registrar can handle this for you). You can always point the traffic elsewhere if you quit using MySpace. This way, you won’t have to start over.
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2 Comments
Those are great tips, especially about not depending solely on MySpace. Thank you for sharing.
Of all the friends I've accepted at MySpace, your friendship has become the most valuable. Thank you, kgcummings… Kathy