Advice from the Experts

In my last blog post, I shared tips for starting up a cookbook business. Since I began my career in 1975 many things have changed. Amazingly, more things have changed in the last three years than the previous thirty-four. A HUGE dynamic of this change is the advent of the Internet and social media as marketing and communication tools.

Here are a few stats and facts:

• There were 18.4 BILLION searches conducted in March in the United States
• Google makes up 66.4% of the search market in the United States
• Facebook has roughly 900 Million active members
• Top 5 most visited sites are Google, Facebook, You Tube, Yahoo and Baidu

It’s simple…customers are using the Internet to find what you have to sell so you need to be there!

During our recent Cookbook University we invited two dynamic individuals as guest speakers.  Molly Hodgin is Director of New Media for Thomas Nelson Publishing and she had some fabulous tips. Adam Malone owns his own web site development company and also shared some good insight into the social media phenomenon.

I am going to break their tips up into two two blog posts. Here is part one:

Tip 1. You must have a website

• Give your cookbook prime real estate on the front page
• Capture e-mail addresses of prospects and customers via registration of some sort
• Create traffic - ads and social media should lead customers back to your website - SEO (search engine optimization)
• Track what works

Tip 2. Be Savvy with Social Media - Focus on Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest

• DO create a fan page and Twitter handle for your cookbook.
• DO encourage your members to like the page, follow the Twitter feed, and post a link to the page and Twitter feed on their own time lines.
• DO assign someone from your organization to maintain the page and feed.
• DO post new content every day/every other day.
• DO encourage users to interact with your content.
• DO create a Pinterest account for your organization or cookbook
• DO assign multiple members of your organization to pin to your boards.
• DO follow all of the members of your organization and repin their content.
• DO track your re-pins and “likes” to see what your followers are responding to.

Watch for the next post where I'll share tips 3 and 4 from the experts.