• Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Linkedin
  • Instagram
  • Pinterest
  • YouTube

Cindy Ratzlaff

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

  • Speaking
  • About
  • Clients
  • Blog
  • Contact
Podcast Interviews

How to Make Podcast Appearances Work For You

By Cindy Ratzlaff December 4, 2020

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.

Read More

Social Proof is an important book marketing strategy.

Social Proof for Authors

By Cindy Ratzlaff March 30, 2017

In personal branding and book marketing, one term keep cropping up, social proof. Let’s look at what social proof is and how it can best be used to accomplish an author’s primary goals on social media; creating awareness of his or her book and driving purchases of said book.

What is Social Proof?

Social proof relates to the number of followers, friends, subscribers and connections an author has on their social networks and website. It also relates to the number of social interactions one has on their various social profiles. Every platform has an algorithm that surfaces your posts to more people based on the volume and velocity of engagement. So a post that has 30-40 likes and 10-20 comments within a few hours will most likely be seen by significantly more of your fans than a post that gets 5 likes over 3 days.

Read More

Facebook Call To Action Feature

VIDEO: Facebook Call To Action Feature

By Cindy Ratzlaff September 2, 2015

Facebook’s Call to Action Feature is a free, easy to use, under utilized, and extremely effective digital tool for creating more traffic to your website or sales page from Facebook.

Learn more about how you can leverage this feature in the video below:

Read More

Cindy Ratzlaff breaks down the rules for Facebook Boosts

To Boost or Not to Boost a Facebook Post

By Cindy Ratzlaff September 1, 2015

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.

Read More

Every entrepreneur needs to create a year long marketing calendar.

How To Create A Marketing Calendar | Business Strategy

By Cindy Ratzlaff August 2, 2015

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.

Read More

Facebook Marketing Tips

How to Market with A Facebook Personal Profile

By Cindy Ratzlaff July 28, 2015

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.

Read More

Facebook marketing hot spots for entrepreneurs

5 Promotional Hot Spots Every Facebook Business Page Can Use

By Cindy Ratzlaff July 5, 2015

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.

Read More

Social Media for Authors

10 Social Profiles Every Author Needs

By Cindy Ratzlaff June 14, 2015

Every author needs a platform, a way to connect with readers and let them know when their next book is ready to be purchase. So what is a platform? A platform is simply the reliable ways in which an author can connect with fans and encourage them to buy books.

Bestselling authors have a history of bestsellers, creating a kind of literary celebrity. That’s a platform. Some authors have national television shows, magazine columns or are regulars on nationally syndicated radio. These are platforms too. An author might have a commitment from Staples or IBM to buy books and give them to employees. That’s a kind of platform, too.

Until recently, the average author was out of luck if they didn’t have a platform. That was before social media and the power it has to excite, engage, build community and create media for authors.

Read More

Facebook Marketing Strategies

The New Rules of Facebook Marketing

By Cindy Ratzlaff May 31, 2015

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.

Read More

8 tips to help increase organic reach on Facebook

8 Tips to Get More Organic Reach on Facebook

By Cindy Ratzlaff April 2, 2015

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.

Read More

More Posts

Get Your Free Copy!

Free Author Branding Tips Download your free copy of HOW TO CREATE AN AUTHOR BRAND, from Cindy Ratzlaff’s Maximum Visibility Playbook™ for Authors, a 23-page workbook & step-by-step action plan.

Send my copy now!

Book Cindy to Speak

“Cindy is consistently one of the highest ranked speakers at our conference, which is why bring her back year after year.”

— Sally Dedecker, UPublishU

Learn More

Blog Categories

  • Book Marketing
  • Books
  • Challenge
  • Facebook
  • Marketing
  • News & Events
  • Personal Branding
  • Publicity
  • Publishing
  • Social Media
  • Social Media Strategy
  • Social Media Tools
  • Twitter
  • Video
  • Video Marketing
  • Videos

Get a free copy of "How To Create An Author Brand," a step-by-step guide for developing your brand message.

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Linkedin
  • Instagram
  • Pinterest
  • YouTube

Copyright © 2023 Cindy Ratzlaff. All Rights Reserved. Privacy | Disclaimer | Contact