Cindy Ratzlaff

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

Platforms and Personal Branding for Authors

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Congratulations. You’ve written a book. Now you’re about to take on a new job; Chief Marketing Officer of the Brand of You.

“I just self-published my first book and I need help marketing the book.”

Every week I received at least one email from an author that starts like this, “I just self-published my first book and I need help marketing the book.”  I always respond to the author with the following questions:

  1. What are your goals in publishing this book?
  2. What is your platform for helping your ideal reader find your book?
  3. What is your current plan for letting your ideal reader know your book exists?

The first question informs the entire approach to book marketing and promotion. The second question lets me know if the author has any way to let readers know the book exists. The second question lets me know if the author understands the concept of “discoverability.” The third question helps me guide the author to focus on the actions that they will most likely be able to take to help them achieve their goals.

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Brand Building Strategies | Identify Your Social Media Goals

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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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4 Powerful Digital Platform Updates Your Brand Needs Now

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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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4 Free Tools To Turn Quotes into Content for Social Media

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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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5 Strategies to Boost Your Brand Visibility and Rank Through Search

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by Cindy Ratzlaff

Ranking through search engines like Google, Bing, YouTube and others should be one of your goals. After all, if people don’t find what you’ve written, you’re a diarist, not a teacher, coach or business blogger. There’s nothing wrong with that. But if you’re creating products, services and content as a business and want to increase your search ranking and help new clients discover you, there are a few visibility and ranking strategies to keep in mind.

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Use Facebook Interest Lists to Grow Your Page and Social Influence

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A consulting client recently confessed to me that his Facebook news stream is overwhelming him and he’s ready to give up on the brand visibility strategy we’ve outlined for building his personal brand through social media. I asked him to make a list of the top 25 people he’d most like to do business with, be on stage with or have as a strategic partner.  He was able to make that list in just minutes, of course, because when he focused on his business goal, it was easy to identify those people most likely to be a part of that goal. This social media strategy technique saves him time daily.

Strategic Influence Building

I showed him how to put each of those top 25 influencers into a Facebook Interest List, which we called A-List Influencers.  Now he can filter his news stream each morning and quickly scan the posts of the people he most wants to connect with and add to their conversations, comment, compliment, create value and in general develop a relationship with these highly desirable contacts. Facebook will always revert back to the standard news feed view but any time he wants to check in on his A-List Influencers, he can do so with just a click.

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Turning Likes into Leads and Leads into Customers

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The promise of social media as the top of a profitable funnel can be the shiny object of marketing tools. Converting “Likes” to leads, however, requires a strategic use of social media rather than thinking of social media simply as a broadcasting tool.

A conversion focused social media strategy should bring a lead into the marketing funnel, capture the lead, create the opportunity and incentives to convert the lead (through either a sale or a partnership or a request for further information), engage that new partner/client and motivate the partner/client to transform into a brand evangelizer by providing them with the tools and incentives to recreate the cycle.

Social Media is a massive permission based marketing opportunity for entrepreneurs.

Social media platforms are where a large pool of potential clients spend their discretionary time. Developing a brand messaging strategy to engage with these potential customers requires understanding the language spoken on each social platform and integrating the social campaign with off-line campaign.

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YouTube Adds Easy InVideo Branding | Entrepreneurial Toolkit

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*Editor’s Note: The video you feature must be hosted on YouTube.

YouTube quietly added a new feature to the platform that will help small businesses, cash strapped start-ups, entrepreneurs, authors, speakers and coaches promote their brands, in just a few simple steps, across all of their YouTube videos.

InVideo Programming allows users to insert a branded logo or even another video into the corner of all currently uploaded videos on an individual’s YouTube Channel, all at once.

Branding With a Logo or Video

Imagine that as a small business owner you are creating short informational videos and posting them to YouTube. Next you share them through e-mail or through Facebook and even your business website* (your video must be hosted on YouTube, even if it’s featured on your website).  Now with InVideo Programming, you’ll be able to embed another video into the corner of your informational video–say an announcement about a big launch, sale or special event–and ever consumer facing touch point for the original informational video now becomes an invitation to view the special announcement video in just one click.

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4 Great Marketing Ideas Your Business Can Use Now

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Every day thousands of fantastic articles and marketing ideas for entrepreneurs and small business owners come streaming onto the web, and throughout social media. What’s a busy entrepreneur to do.  You can’t read everything.  You can email yourself great links to articles you want to read later or save the links to a private circle on G+ or even bookmark them for handy reference. I use the G+ strategy most of the time and add sites that regularly deliver to my Google Reader account.

For those who haven’t yet figured out how to scan the headlines and save the best for later, here are a few ideas are so creative and useful that I want to make sure you don’t miss them.  I’ve added short introductory paragraph to tell you why they’re worth your time to click through and read and possibly save. But all of these have ideas that you can use, right now, to amp up the action on your marketing.

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Genius Spot | Entrepreneurs Success Tips

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Identifying your “genius spot” is an important business asset. Knowing what you’re good at and more importantly, what you’re not good at, will save you time, money and frustration.

Entrepreneurs must learn to play in their Genius spot.

Start up entrepreneurs must often be their own financial advisor, tech expert, sales force, marketing and publicity team, and personal assistant. All responsibilities that a larger company would delegate to a full time employee.  Doing these things yourself can leave an entrepreneur with little to no time to do what he or she went into business to do in the first place.

Making the commitment to find your genius spot and put the majority of your energy and time there can accelerate your business growth.  Outsource those things that drain your time and energy to make room for your genius spot.

Ask yourself:

Which tasks in my business day absolutely must be done by me and no one else? Most likely the answer to this question includes creating your product concepts and delivering your services.

Which tasks could be done by someone else under my supervision? This could include your bookkeeping, mailings, design work, implementation of your marketing plan, and your legal work.

Which tasks can be completely outsourced with very little supervision by me? Perhaps, computer and software updates and maintenance, travel arrangements, supply ordering, printing.

What is the cost of continuing to do everything myself? The cost of doing it all yourself could be the failure of your business as you burn out or produce less.  Compare that to the cost of outsourcing some tasks and the cost comes into perspective.

Virtual assistants, temps, freelancers and other options are used by Fortune 500 companies when needed to supplement their workforce and keep productivity and performance at peak levels.  Consider whether you ought to borrow this success tip from the big players and outsource some tasks.

Let’s inspire one another. What could you outsource, right now, to create space for you to play in your genius spot.

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