sallymurphy.com.au

Sally Murphy, Australian author

Five Minute Promo: Day 28

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Welcome to Day 28 of the five minute promo challenge. I’m still enjoying sharing these quick tips with you, so I hope you are also enjoying them. Over to today’s task.

5 Min Promo #28

Adelaide Salfie. Today’s task is to revisit your Facebook Page and add some new content. A photo of yourself, a link to one of your blog posts, something from your Feedly feed, or even a link to where the book can be purchased.

While you are there, see if there any of your friends not currently following the age who you think might be genuinely interested and send them an invite.

If you send me an invite I will definitely visit and see what you are up to – and I’d love it if you followed my page, too.

See you tomorrow!

Five Minute Promo: Day 15

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Welcome back. By the time you’ve completed today’s task you’ll be halfway through the 5 Minute Promo challenge (actually, if you want to be technical, since there’s 31 days, you’ll be slightly off, but hey – I’m a wordsmith, not a mathematician). If you’ve been playing along, hopefully by now you are seeing that this promo lark is not that hard – and can, in fact, be both fun and rewarding. To mark the halfway point, I’ve set you a nice easy task. Let’s begin.

5 Minute Promo #15

Sage Cupcake Earrings

An image I’ve posted on Instagram recently.

Head over to the Instagram account you created way back on Day 3 (and which you’ve hopefully been updating ever since) and follow 20 new people (or ten, or a dozen,  or as many as you can find in your five minutes). As with the task I set you a few days ago to follow new Twitter accounts, the point of this exercise is both to create mutual engagement as well as to see and find new material. The people you follow should not all be fellow authors – remember you shouldn’t be promoting just to other creators.

So, how do you find new people to follow? Easy. Press the ‘Discover’ button on your account and you will get a list of  suggested accounts – usually people who you already follow on other social media platforms, or people followed by other people you follow. You can also search using the search book. Pick a search term you are interested in, then scroll through the results and look for people to follow.  If you’re not yet following me, feel free to do so why you’re there and I’ll try to follow you back.

Enjoy, and I’ll see you tomorrow.

Five Minute Promo: Day 14

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Welcome to day 14 of 5 Minute Promotion. One of the keys to promotion is to change it around every day so that you find what you’re doing interesting and your followers are seeing new content regularly. Today’s task sees you creating new content for your blog.

5 Minute promo # 14

Editing is a lot of hard work - but you shouldn't need a hard hat!

Editing is a lot of hard work – but you shouldn’t need a hard hat!

Set your timer for 5 minutes then sit down and put together a quick blog post about the editing process. It can be very specifically about editorial changes you made to the book you are promoting or, as I’ve done, a bit more general. Either way, make it a quick posy, then proofread it, add a relevant picture if you can and post it. Now you have content which you can also tweet, pin or link to it via your Facebook page. 

As always, after you’ve posted, let me know and I’ll try to visit and leave a comment.

 

Five Minute Promo: Day 7

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Day seven of the five minute promo challenge means we are more than a quarter of of the way through. Thanks for coming back – and, if you’re new here, thanks for dropping by.

Today’s task is one which could be done in as little as five minutes, or could take a whole lot longer. But, because I promised that each task would be five minutes (or less), I did a test run to make sure it was possible. So, here goes:

5 Minute Promo #7: Make a Book Trailer

A book trailer is a short ‘film’ adverting your book – like a movie trailer, though usually much shorter. It can be as simple or as complex as you, your talents and/or your budget will allow, including sound effects, acting, voice overs, visuals and more. If you are going to do all that, it will likely take you much, much longer than five minutes, but, if you use a simple tool such as Photo Story, and images you already have on hand, it can take as little as five minutes. Here’s my five minute effort:

I like using Photostory because it’s free, very simple to use, and creates it’s own music, so there are no copyright issues. I use my own pictures or ones from my books, so that again there are no copyright issues – and, in this case, because I already had them, it only took me five minutes to arrange them, add text and music, and create the video. The end slide I created in Paint. If I had more time I would have made it longer and probably included a voice-over, which is simple to do in Photostory.  There is a good explanation of how to use Photostory here.

 

As I said earlier, if you want to take longer than five minutes, there is no end to what you can do. Here is a longer trailer I made several years ago (in fact, the very first book trailer I ever made):

And here is much cleverer Booktrailer made by a wonderful teacher:

( created by Julie Hembree and shared here with permission.)

Anyway, the timer is ticking, so off you go and make your own booktrailer. When you’re done, upload it to Youtube, then post it on your website, your Facebook page and Tweet the link. As always, if you leave a comment here, I will check out what you’ve done. Have fun!

Five Minute Promo: Day 6

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Set your timer and get ready for today’s 5 minute task, because I’m going to jump straight into it. Yesterday I promised the last day of getting you to sign up for social media platforms, so today I want to suggest you do something quick and easy – and it’s about signing something rather than signing up.

Day 6: Creating an Email  Sig Line

If you are like me you probably write and send dozens of emails every week. Some are writing related and others aren’t. But every one of those emails can bear an advertisement for your book or books. If you email your child’s teacher about her homework -and there’s a signature line? Your teacher learns about your book. If you forward a referral to your doctor? Your doctor learns about your book. If you send a query to a new ediotr? The editor learns about your previous book AND sees that you are willing to promote your work. It’s win win.

So, today’s task is to open up your email program and create a signature line which advertises your book (or books). Here’s a screenshot of mine:

EMail Sig Line

You can see mine has pictures, my name plus the URL of my website. You could use text instead of pictures, and you could add more links (for example to online bookstores). There’s lots of possibilities.

 

There’s a quick guide to creating a signature for Outlook: here. If you use a different program, use a search engine and you will find a similar guide.

So, what are you waiting for? Your five minutes starts now. As awlays, feel free to leave me a note, or tweet me and let me know how you go.

5 Minute Promo: Day 5

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Gosh. It’s Day 5 already. July is whizzing by. and, hopefully, if you’ve been following along, you’ve been busy spending a whopping 5 minutes of each day promoting your book(s).  If you haven’t, just twenty minutes (give or take a few) will bring you up to speed, ready to tackle day 5’s task which is (drumroll please)…

5 Minute Promo #5

Set up a Pinterest account. Yes, you’ve got it, I want you to join another social media platform. This is the last one, I promise (for now!). So, after you’ve read my few words, head over to Pinterest, sign up and you are ready to Pin. There’s simple instructions on how to get started here and instructions on how to set up a board and start pinning here. You might extend your five minutes and set up a board about your book. Here’s one I’ve set up for Sage Cookson’s Sweet Escape here.

Already on Pinterest? Your five minute task is to make sure your profile and account is up to date and, once that’s done, use the rest of your time to pin two new pictures to one of your exitsing boards. Easy peasy. Feel free to follow me, Sally Murphy Author, while you are there.

Pinning is easy and fun. Here is a sample of things I’ve pinned from this site:

Read a kids Book

A quote with photo – and, of course, my web address so people know to visit me.

And:

Looking at You 3

A poem I wrote, added to a photo I took and again with my URL and twitter handle.

 

 

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