Although the majority of the traffic to your site will come through social media engagement, an author can’t ignore getting found through Google and other search engines. Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, refers to practices used to get a higher rank in search engines – in plain English, it’s the difference between being on the 1st or 7th page of Google results. But, you might ask, if I’m getting most of my readers through Twitter, Facebook, and direct contacts, why do I have to worry about getting found through search engines? SEO will help you keep focused on your keywords. Keeping your blogs within the scope of your essential phrases will ensure you don’t lose sight of your message. SEO will let new readers discover you. A single blog can be a source of major traffic to your site if it’s a high-ranking hit of an often-searched phrase on Google. SEO will ensure you are the #1 result when people search for your name. If you have a common name – or if there is someone else online with your name with a web presence – SEO is not optional. Googling someone is now as commonplace as shaking hands. If you don’t have search engines in mind when designing your site and making content, you won’t be the top result for your name. SEO will draw traffic to your site. Although Marketing Strategies are more than a numbers game, having lots of visitors to your site is always a good…

Once upon a time, you could make sweeping changes to your privacy settings with a single click of the mouse. Those times are now history – but by knowing all the different aspects of privacy on FB, you can better control who has access to your information on this platform. General Facebook Privacy Settings On the top right-hand corner, past the Open Graph search bar and the icons you’re probably familiar with, there’s an icon of a padlock. Click that, then click ‘See More Settings’.   Here is where you can change setting for your future posts and status updates. If you are going to be using your FB page as part of your marketing or social media platform, it’s a good idea to have this set to ‘Public’ – everything you share from here on out should be appropriate for the public’s eye. Unlike on your website, this shared content doesn’t have to be ‘on subject’ with your future book, but it should be appropriate for a general audience. If your past posts are less ‘public friendly’, here is where you change the general settings for who and how your past posts can be accessed. If people often post things that you don’t want on your timeline, you can also create settings so you can review posts and photos tagged with you before they are made public. Again, if you are using Facebook as an author identity platform, you’ll want to allow search engines to access your timeline. This…

If there were some easy ways to be more productive as a writer, would you want to know about them? If so, read on. “I write only when inspiration strikes. Fortunately it strikes every morning at nine o’clock sharp.” —W. Somerset Maugham In the above quote, Maugham is getting at one of the critical distinctions between professional working writers and, well, everyone else (which here includes students, hobbyists, people who don’t write at all, and those who approach you at parties, mildly drunk and grinning, to tell you that they hate writing because it’s too hard, but they’ve actually got THE MOST AMAZING IDEA EVER for a novel or screenplay – do you want to hear about it?). If you think of yourself as a working writer, or you aspire to that, then it’s worth considering the following seven hacks to help you be more productive: 1)  Separate writing into these distinct processes: WRITING: creating your narrative, finding the story, working through plot points, discovering character and voice, etc. EDITING: reading your work critically, and marking it the hell up REWRITING: taking your critical notes from editing, and rewriting to make your story stronger TYPING: if you’re able to write longhand, save the task of typing for days/times when you’re too exhausted to do anything else. It takes little thinking power, but still counts as writing. 2)  Pick one project and stick with it until it’s finished. Productivity suffers when writers flit from project to project. The good stuff always…