If you are utilizing the internet to promote your book, your brand, or your business (and you should be utilizing the internet for these projects, even if you have a local business), you may find yourself overwhelmed.
If you spend all your budgeted internet publicity time on Facebook, you have, for example, ignored Twitter and LinkedIn.
If you don't yet have your own email opt-in list, are you unable to post a link to a great article you just read and you'd like to share with others? Shortcuts to promoting yourself across the internet Let's say you're juggling writing two or three different blogs.
Your posts are good and you'd like to share them with others who haven't yet found your blogs.
But you have no time to go around the social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, etc.
) and post the topics and links of individual posts.
What can you do? Check to see if the social platforms on which you are most active have applications that allow you to automatically feed the links to new blog posts into your page or update on those sites.
For example, you can use Twitterfeed.
com to feed your blog post links to your Twitter updates.
Now some purists believe that it is better to personally post a tweet with the new blog post link.
Others, especially those with more than one blog, like the idea of letting the new blog post links automatically feed themselves into the blogger's Twitter feed.
Your Facebook profile page allows you to add applications that will automatically bring in your blog feeds.
First, know that applications already added by you appear listed on your home page.
(Make sure to click "more" if you have several applications so that you see your whole list.
) If you don't have the applications mentioned below, search for "add applications" and you will get a long list of available applications.
One of the blog-feed applications is My Blogs: "My Blogs automatically posts all your external blog entries onto your Facebook profile.
" Only problem is that this application doesn't always work, and you can get a message about kinks being worked out between Facebook and the makers of My Blogs.
Another application is using Notes to import settings: "You can import posts from one external blog so that they appear along with your notes.
Facebook will automatically update your notes whenever you write in your blog.
" Now here's a handy application that's great when you're pressed for time.
You can sign up for an account at ping.
fm - and then indicate which of the social media sites you want to automatically update at the same time.
So, for example, if you indicate LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Plurk and Plaxo, when you do an update at ping.
fm, that one update is supposed to automatically go to all those places.
(Note: Be careful to keep to 140 characters if you are automatically updating to Twitter and Plurk so that your updates don't exceed the limit of those sites.
) Another handy technique is to join groups on LinkedIn and get automatic updates of questions asked in that group.
You can scan these LinkedIn group emails quickly and decide if a question is something you want to answer.
If so, click through to the question.
(Note: It's a good idea to do this as soon as questions get posted so that your answer is near the top of the replies.
If you're the 35th response to a question, you may not get as much exposure as if you were the third response.
) When you want to get the word out about other people's sites or articles One of the significant - and wonderful - things about Web 2.
0 is the encouraging of people to share information with others.
So let's say you want to let everyone know that Jane Smith is having a fantastic free teleseminar tomorrow.
You don't yet have an email opt-in list of your own to whom you can broadcast this info.
What do you do? You go on Facebook, Twitter and the other social media sites on which you're active (or use ping.
fm to hit all at the same time) and announce the free teleseminar in your status update function of each social media site.
You can always use tinyurl.
com or snipurl.
com to shorten long links before posting.
You can even ask people on Twitter to retweet the announcement.
Another way to share links to articles that you think are very valuable is to post the links on a social bookmarking site such as Delicious.
com (the periods are no longer part of the name).
You set up an account and then bookmark articles to your account.
By using tags such as Twitter, you create sub-directories of your account and then you can use a link to send people directly to those sub-directories.
What about links to articles you've written that are available on the internet? Let's say you post an article on EzineArticles.
com.
You can choose the site's application that automatically posts to your Twitter account when EzineArticles approves that article and it goes live.
Again, you could remember to do this yourself after you get the email from EzineArticles that your article was approved.
But why have to remember to do this when EzineArticles will automatically do this for you? On Twitter, for example, you can only include one linking URL in your profile.
And let's say you have some really interesting articles that connect to another website than the one that is in your Twitter profile.
You can join (or create) a Twitter group at Twittgroups.
com - and post links to appropriate articles in those groups.
The above are only a sampling of applications available to maximize your internet promotion.
And you do need to strategize how you are going to spread yourself through the internet and still leave yourself plenty of time for other activities.