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Cindy Ratzlaff

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

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Social Media Strategy For Authors

Brand Building Strategies | Identify Your Social Media Goals

By Cindy Ratzlaff March 12, 2015

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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Slideshare Branding Tips

Increase Brand Visibility with Slideshare

By Cindy Ratzlaff March 10, 2015

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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Social Marketing for Authors

By Cindy Ratzlaff July 25, 2014

Romance bookResources for authors to help them reach more readers by Cindy Ratzlaff.s are consistently one, if not the, bestselling genres in publishing. Why? Perhaps it’s because romance writers understand the importance of networking. They create writing groups, attend writing conferences, read each others books and share their love of reading at the drop of a hat. I had the honor of addressing this year’s Romance Writers of America Conference in San Antonio, Texas this week to speaking about social marketing strategy for authors and the complete slide deck of presentation is online and available to view or download on my SlideShare Account here.

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Facebook Marketing For Authors

15 Simple Mostly Free Facebook Marketing Tips to Try Today

By Cindy Ratzlaff February 24, 2014

With more than 1 billion people on Facebook, the sheer volume of potential clients and customers makes this platform worth your marketing efforts. But building a following and making sure they see what you post has become a bigger challenge as Facebook continues to tweak the algorithm in favor of advertising and big brands. But do not abandon the platform just yet.

Here are a few nifty, mostly free, tips and tricks to help your content attract, engage and retain a fan base so that when you have something to sell them, they’re still listening. For more ideas on the specific how-to aspects of content marketing on Facebook, you can employ most of the ideas in 8 Ways to Get Your Posts Seen in the News Stream easily.

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How Authors Can Make Social Media Quotes

Add Quote Images to Instagram with InstaQuote

By Cindy Ratzlaff December 2, 2013

Everyone using social media needs a content image strategy, a plan for creating the large number of branded images needed to feed the content monster that is social media marketing. If you’re a regular reader, you’re already experimenting with these four free image creation tools. My prerequisite for recommending a tool is that it has to be easy, intuitive and free. And I give bonus kudos when a tool saves time by allowing you to post directly to Facebook or Twitter right from the tool.

I’ve just tried a brand new free tool I think you’ll enjoy because it’s not only super easy to use, but it allows you to post directly to Instagram.

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How Authors Can Make Sales With Social Media

3 Ways to Drive Social Sales

By Cindy Ratzlaff October 9, 2013

Turning fans and followers into clients and customers is the next step in building a Maximum Visibility Platform that connects customers to your products. These three steps are easy to implement and often overlooked but can have an immediate impact on visibility, growth, sharing and conversion.

If you want fans and followers to becomes customers and clients, make sure they know exactly what you’re selling and how to purchase it.

How to Drive Social Sales

Design an environment that smoothly, comfortably and easily guides the fan or follower to your offering and makes a compelling case for making immediate purchase decision, and reward followers and fans with a special discount or added value. Then invite them to share their purchase and share that special offer with their friends thereby helping your biggest fans gain status in their friend’s eyes because they’ve discovered and shared something before everyone else. Here are three ways to increase social sales by creating a social media customer-centric experience.

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Authors Grow Facebook Likes and Social Media Marketing

4 Ways to Jack Up Your Customer Experience Marketing

By Cindy Ratzlaff October 4, 2013

Social media has entered the grammar school years and is no longer an infant. Businesses who’ve been using social media well are learning that the journey from friend and follower to loyal customer must be a skillfully curated one. The customer experience must be crafted, nurtured and adjusted to fit the tastes of the fan base if a purchase action is to be solicited at trail’s end.

In the infant years, it was enough to make an offer on Facebook or Twitter and provide a link to purchase. That still works, sometimes, for brands who have already established trust and have a history of delivering on their brand promises. If, however, you’re new to social media marketing or are an emerging new brand without a long track record and hundreds of reviews to do the selling for you, paying attention to the environment you create will decrease the time between “hello” and “yes, please” in turn fans into customers.

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Author Branding

4 Powerful Digital Platform Updates Your Brand Needs Now

By Cindy Ratzlaff September 26, 2013

Blink and your social media marketing strategy will be out of date. The rapid-fire tweaks and updates to platforms can leave your brand’s marketing messages looking dated and, even worse, invisible unless you keep on top of what’s hot, what’s new, what’s trending and what works.  Here are four important recent changes to help you stay on top of your social game.

Finding and learning to use the newest digital tools and techniques can be as simple as finding and following those early adopters who live to try new things. ~ Cindy Ratzlaff

Pinterest adds a New Rich Pin for Business Accounts

Pinterest business accounts already have access to a suite of free analytics and the ability to use Rich Pins to enhance the information appended to a pin. From a marketing perspective, this is huge. In addition to Recipe pins, Movie pins and Product Pins, Pinterest announced this week the newest Rich Pin tool called Articles Pin.  Articles Pins will help you create boards for “Pin it Now, Read it Later” use and include headline, author, and story description, helping pinners find and save stories that matter to them. If you create something for sale or write something for general consumption, you should consider converting your Pinterest account to a Pinterest Business Account and enabling the Rich Pins tools. Details and information are available on Pinterest’s Business Hub.

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3 New Pinterest Strategies for Entrepreneurs and Authors

By Cindy Ratzlaff June 2, 2013

Pinterest Logoby Cindy Ratzlaff

Earlier this month, I was invited to attend the first ever Pinterest Partners Event in New York City. The founders of Pinterest briefed us on some excited new opportunities for businesses and invited several major brands to present case studies on successful campaigns they’ve run using Pinterest. Although this event was for enterprise level companies such as Target, Sephora, Nordstrom and Sony Electronics, the lessons learned from their case studies can benefit small business owners and authors as well.

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4 Free Tools To Turn Quotes into Content for Social Media

By Cindy Ratzlaff April 8, 2013

Garnering a Share from fans, friends, subscribers and followers is the new top goal in social media. Like takes a back seat; you still want likes but your brand needs shares in order to create the kind of viral visibility that was once known as word of mouth promotion. Facebook values shares as a more reliable indicator of a deeper relationship with your followers than just a like.

Facebook rewards brands for posting pictures by giving those posts higher EdgeRank.

Unless you’ve been living in a cave, you know that social media users love inspirational or educational quotes. Your brand can benefit from the quote craze, garnering exponentially more likes and shares than the tip or quote alone simply by creating an attractive poster for the quote. By poster, I simply mean placing the quote on a nice background or block of color to create a pleasing that others will find desirable to share.

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