Cindy Ratzlaff

Bestselling author, award winning brand marketing and social media pro, Cindy Ratzlaff, creates sales driving campaigns for authors, books and publishers.

How to Make Podcast Appearances Work For You

By Cindy Ratzlaff

You’ve written a book, and you’ve secured, or had someone secure for you, several podcast interviews to help promote your work. Well done. The exposure these podcasts can bring to you and your writing is invaluable. They live on the internet forever. Properly market your own interviews and you will help drive potential readers back to your digital homebase for a long time.  These simple actions will help make your podcast appearances work for you.

Gather Your Assets

Having a list of all of these social handles and tags in one place will save you time as you promote your podcast interviews. Gathering these assets in one place will also guarantee that you won’t forget any of these steps.

  1. Make a list of all of your social assets. For many this will include your website, your Facebook profile, your Facebook page, your Twitter account, your LinkedIn account, perhaps your Instagram and your Pinterest accounts as well. Each of these digital touchpoints will be used strategically to help share links to your podcast interviews.
  2. Don’t forget your host. Ask your podcast host for a list of his or her social handles. Every time you share a link to your interview on their show, you’re going to tag them so they see you are promoting your appearance, saying nice things about them as a host and encouraging your followers to visit their podcast. More often than not, they’ll retweet you, comment on your post, share what you’ve said and in that way, exponentially amplify your original post by sharing it with their followers.
  3. Remember your publisher and agent. Ask your publisher for all of the appropriate social handles for both the house and for the imprint and for any marketing people and/or editors who are active on social media. Do the same with your literary agency. When you create posts with links to your podcast interview, tag those important and influential publishing people who are invested in your success. Many times they’ll also retweet or share your posts, and again, amplify your appearance link.
  4. Create a street team.  A street team is a fancy marketing term for a select group of people who are active on social media, love your work, care about your success, and are willing to share good news about you. Make sure you text or email them with the link to your podcast interview the moment it’s available and ask them to share it with their social networks. You can write a suggested post for them (which saves them time), or you can send them a link to one of your posts and ask if they might consider liking it and sharing it on their preferred network. Ask them to tag you when they share so you can thank them publicly. This gives you yet another opportunity to share the link to the interview.

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To Boost or Not to Boost a Facebook Post

By Cindy Ratzlaff

To boost or not to boost? That is the question Facebook page owners ask me when they’re struggling with decreased reach and no engagement. Is it better to boost a particular post, or to promote the Page for Likes? The answer, as in every marketing question, depends on your goals.

If your goal is to bring more visibility to a particular offer, sale or promotion, you might benefit from boosting an individual post that includes a call to action or leads people back to a sales page. Or, if your Facebook business page fans have not been engaging with your page and your reach has dropped significantly, you might consider boosting a post you know will have a high perceived value for the majority of your fans.

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How To Create A Marketing Calendar | Business Strategy

By Cindy Ratzlaff

Every small business, entrepreneurs, author or brand needs to plan their marketing in advance in order to budget their resources. But what if you don’t have experience creating a strategic, goal-oriented year-long marketing plan? No problem. You can use the tips and tools listed below to map out your strategy for the coming year and take advantage of the natural promotional cycles built into every business niche.

Create a Marketing Calendar Like a Pro

Creating a marketing calendar puts a brand or product front and center so the marketing efforts reach the ideal customer or client. A marketing calendar provides a blueprint for a product launch, helping you develop brand awareness and increase visibility and cement your position as a thought leader in your niche.

Time spent creating a detailed marketing calendar directly correlates to your launch rate of success.

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How to Market with A Facebook Personal Profile

By Cindy Ratzlaff

While I think every author, brand or entrepreneur needs a Facebook business page, there is still a great deal you can do, right now, to optimize your personal profile to increase your personal brand visibility – and use Facebook more efficiently for your business.

Facebook builds in some terrific marketing features for business pages and every brand, business, entrepreneur and author needs a business page to fully take advantage of the rich ecosystem where more than one billion people log in every month. But did you know that your personal profile also has some great hot spots for promoting your business – without driving your friends and family crazy? Here are my four favorites and you can start using them to increase your brand visibility, today.

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5 Promotional Hot Spots Every Facebook Business Page Can Use

By Cindy Ratzlaff

With more than one billion people logging onto Facebook every month, entrepreneurs cannot afford to ignore the marketing implications.  Custom designed apps serve as mini web pages on a site with more traffic than most websites will ever hope to have. The large cover photo at the top of every business page is a digital marketing billboard and key promotional hot spots can help convert fans on Facebook into visitors to brand websites.

Every entrepreneur, author, speaker or small business with a business page has several key  consumer facing hot spots to share sales, specials, invite opt ins and even promote events.

Is your business page using these five promotional hot spots? Take this checklist and compare it to your page to make sure you’re using every available promotional opportunity built into the Facebook business page model.

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The New Rules of Facebook Marketing

By Cindy Ratzlaff

Facebook moved your cheese. When Facebook began rolling out the new news feed algorithm, downgrading reach for business pages and making it necessary for brands, businesses, entrepreneurs and solo-preneurs to “pay-to-play” to reach more of their fan base, there was gnashing of teeth, wringing of hands and groaning heard throughout the publishing industry and beyond. People threw up their hands and declared they were leaving Facebook.

But is that really the answer for authors, publishers and booksellers who want to help readers find their next book?

Facebook visibility, in my opinion, is a math problem first and a content marketing strategy problem second.

Facebook Visibility is a Math Problem

More than one billion users log into Facebook every month. That’s an enormous ecosystem for authors. The average Facebook user sees updates from only a fraction of their friends or the pages they’ve liked.

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8 Tips to Get More Organic Reach on Facebook

By Cindy Ratzlaff

You’re not imagining things. Facebook reach for business pages has decreased dramatically and Facebook isn’t denying it at all. In fact, they’ve been transparent about the need to deliver a profit for their shareholders and the new reality that business pages will have to bring some marketing dollars to the table to increase their post reach. Authors, small businesses and entrepreneurs do have to add some advertising dollars to their monthly budget but there are still ways to increase reach organically to supplement an ad budget.

So instead of watching your Facebook reach plummet, try these 8 strategies from my Maximum Visibility Playbook. These are just a few easy to implement ideas that you can use to help the very people who want and need what you create, find you.

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Brand Building Strategies | Identify Your Social Media Goals

By Cindy Ratzlaff

When someone asks me what the ROI of social media is, I always tell them it depends on their goals. Identifying the outcome you want from the investment you’re willing to make is essential to determining whether or not the investment is worthwhile.

Every business goal requires a unique brand building strategy. Goals first, strategy second.

As authors, publishers, small to mid-sized companies, and entrepreneurs either jump aboard or ramp up their social media branding efforts, it is prudent to think old school while in the social media marketing planning phase.

If a business were planning to spend $10,000 in print advertising, they would go through the exercise of goal setting as they prepared a creative brief for the advertising agency. Borrowing from that model to plan a social media campaign makes sense in that some aspects of social media engagement are really a new form of advertising, albeit a very sophisticated new form with multiple levels of psychology and strategy.

When writing a creative brief for an advertising campaign, some common marketing goals might include:

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Increase Brand Visibility with Slideshare

By Cindy Ratzlaff

Update: Slideshare is now owned by LinkedIn and is fully integrated into LinkedIn profiles. You can still use Slideshare as a separate platform and link it to your LinkedIn profile. By uploading your presentations to Slideshare, you can reach more people with content you’ve already created, saving you time, positioning you as a thought-leader, and garnering visibility on multiple platforms.

One of my favorite marketing visibility tools is Slideshare.net, a powerful platform for increasing brand awareness, demonstrating authority on a topic, making your stellar content work harder for you across multiple platforms and creating those all-powerful digital breadcrumbs leading back to the brand of you.

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8 Simple Ideas for Free or Low-Cost Publicity

By Cindy Ratzlaff

Every business owner knows the value of PR. It helps your ideal customer understand what you do and find you when they want your service or product. But most business owners don’t have a background in public relations nor do they have the budget for a professional PR agency.

The good news is you don’t need to break the bank to garner good publicity for your business.  If you’re willing to commit a little time and ingenuity, you can promote your company effectively and build your reputation as a business leader.

Here are eight simple steps you can take, on your own, to promote your business, book or service.

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