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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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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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Speaking as a Marketing Strategy – Brand You

By Cindy Ratzlaff August 22, 2013

Public speaking is a cost effective marketing strategy and an excellent way to build your personal brand.

Speaking is like grocery store sampling – you reach your ideal audience at exactly the time and place when they are most interested in the services or products you offer. When you speak at an event, someone else does the work of gathering a crowd most likely to be interested in what you have to say.  You glean “authority” from the event host as they present you to their attendees as an expert in your field with valuable information to share. And, then you give them a powerful, delicious sample of what you’re all about.

The key is to make sure that the sample you give out is valuable, memorable, and information rich. You repay the event host for their confidence in you by over delivering to their attendees. You honor the time of the attendees by giving them exactly what they hoped to receive when they chose to give you their time and attention. When you deliver the goods, your exact perfect target market client knows that what they just received was only a sample and if they want more, you are the answer to their problems.

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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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Binders

Binders Full of Women | Top 18 Women For Business Advice

By Cindy Ratzlaff March 11, 2013

Every entrepreneur should have binders full of women (and men) who are resources, teachers, strategists, leaders, contacts and potential partners. Social media provides the digital version of a binder through Facebook Interest Lists and Twitter Lists. G+ has circles and Pinterest Boards. We’ve got Evernote to capture and save links, sites and notes and digital contact lists on our mobile devices that act as simple Customer Relations Management, or CRM, tools.

The resources, education and support I’ve gleaned from my Binders Full of Women = priceless.

Here’s a peek inside just one of my personal “binder,” my Top 18 Top Women to Follow for Business Advice. Each of these women share their expertise, advice, resources and opinions so freely that you’ll feel like you’re getting a mini-MBA just by adding them to your stream. These are in no particular order and every one is provides such valuable information, guidance and inspiration, I recommend you take time to visit their websites and see if what they talk about will help you grow your business.

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Money and Entrepreneurs | Setting Your Prices

By Cindy Ratzlaff February 28, 2013

by Cindy Ratzlaff

Entrepreneurs are people who have a great concept or product and a passion to bring it to market. But they may not be trained in all the areas necessary to survive and thrive in the start-up phase of a business. Not many people come to their own business with experience in sales, marketing, human resources, web design and development, supply chain management, graphic design, copy writing, creating a content marketing calendar and accounting.

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5 Strategies to Boost Your Brand Visibility and Rank Through Search

By Cindy Ratzlaff February 20, 2013

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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