Collectibles Still Collecting Sales - Auctiva Learning Center

Collectibles Still Collecting Sales - Auctiva Learning Center

Analyze your Flock for Targeted Tweeting

I've been using Twitter now for the better part of a year but I'll be honest: I have little idea of how successfully I'm using it. By one measure--number of followers--I'm doing pretty well. I have close to 300 followers now. Yet I'm bothered by a simple fact. Many of my peers in the writing community of thousands of followers. What to do?

This has to be a common question for Twitterers. You send your tweets out there (experts suggest you tweet 4 to 20 times a day) but do they really hit the mark? Are your followers glad they're walking in your digital wake?

Aside from noting the sheer number of followers you're amassing, you can also track how often your messages are re-tweeted by others. Obviously, if others are resending your tweets then they've found your messages valuable. Great! (These retweets, are called "mentions" and are easy to track with a free tool called TweetDeck.)

Now, proceeding from there, what can you do to build your base and keep your followers fed?

Try TwitterSheep (and, in case you're wondering it does feel strange to type such words). With TwitterSheep you can get a quick visual fix on your followers' interests. Just enter your Twitter username in the box to view a tag cloud built from the bios of your followers.

When I did that I found out something surprising that I can use to tailor my tweets in the future. As an author of many books about e-commerce I assumed most of my followers were looking for tweets about eBay, Amazon, monetizing web sites, and so on. Not so much. eBay was there in the cloud all right, but so small had it been a non virtual cloud it would have created merely a puddle. A downpour, however, would have resulted from tweets about social media marketing and related topics.

So much for tweeting about eBay.

I'll use this information when I choose my topics for my future tweets. Most of the time, that is. I still like eBay.

Jobhunters: Quick and Easy Social Media Tips!

* Twitter seems silly at first but you get better at it as you use it as a business tool.

* LinkedIn means you have your suit on. Act the part. But smile once in a while too.

* Facebook is a great research source for you, but for your friends and others also. So for biz purposes (like job hunting) create a business page and make sure there's nothing there you wouldn't want your next boss to see. And keep all politics and anything at all controversial out of it.

* MySpace is sorting things out now so there are better places to spend your time. (Time: that thing you used to have more of.)

* When it comes to searching for a job, be open to anything. Even paper classifieds may work for you. As they (Larry and Woody) say, "Whatever Works."

Can You Find Your Next Job on Facebook?

Can Facebook help you land a Job? Can ice cream make you skinny? Could things really work out that way?

Well Ask Annie from Fortune Magazine recently gave some answers to that question. We’re happy she found our book How to Get a Job on LinkedIn and Other Social Networks such a key source of information!

The article also discusses whether Twitter can help you find work. Par for the course, links to the article were all over Twitter. Thanks for all those tweets and re-tweets. It’s an amazing phenomenon.

For more, here’s the link to the Fortune article: Can You Find a Job on Facebook?

Best,

Deb and Brad

Can Top-Rated Seller Program Help eBay?- Auctiva Learning Center

Can Top-Rated Seller Program Help eBay?- Auctiva Learning Center

Quick and Easy Tips for Online Book Promotion

A new author recently asked me for some tips on promoting books online, and since I've coauthored books about YouTube (How to Make Money with YouTube) and LinkedIn (How to Get a Job on LinkedIn and Other Social Networks) I had some ideas to share.

But first...There's no sure-fire way to guarantee sales through online promotion. Internet marketing, however, helps a good book get noticed, reviewed, and bought.

Here are some strategies:

--Write articles for online publications such as American Chronicle. Article marketing works...these articles really get read and each one can include your bio.

--Encourage people who like your book to write reviews on Amazon and B+N.com, but don't "push."

--Create an Author's blog on Amazon.

--Tweet about the subject of your book, but don't be overly promotional and be sure you are giving your followers something of value for their time.

--Create a blog, tweet about new entries. Umm, that's what I'm about to do.

--Use your LinkedIn profile to promote your book and yourself as an author, but again don't let it read like a pure commercial.

Other strategies include creating a YouTube video. See the above referenced book. :)

For more strategies, try following other authors on Twitter who are social marketing gurus. You'll need to use tools that let you search Twitter to find such authors. Try Twellow.

Good luck!

5 Ways to Jump-Start that Job Search!

Need some fresh ideas to re-ignite a stalled job search? Here are a few that will help.

1) Get in touch with coworkers with whom you worked well in the past, and who respect your work. Perhaps they know of an opening at the company they're working at now, or have heard of openings somewhere else. Don’t call and ask outright for work. That can make people uncomfortable. Just reconnect and update them with your status in an upbeat way. It's also better to start with people you know than to cold call or otherwise approach “strangers.”

2) Don't discount any source of jobs. Lots of people focus on the Internet these days and let it go at that. Sure there are many great resources there, such as SimplyHired http://www.simplyhired.com/, one of our favorite site, which lets you search thousands of different job sites all at once. But lots of other people are using those sources too. Also try to pinpoint sites that are geared to your specific profession (for example, Mediabistro (http://www.mediabistro.com/) has lots of jobs for writers and editors that you won't find elsewhere. Surely your profession has its Mediabistro equivalents.

3) By all means get on and use LinkedIn (http://www.linkedin.com/). We can't write an article about job hunting without including perhaps the best tool for job hunters to come along since the computer itself. Register, create a complete and compelling profile, start answering others’ questions, and become a regular presence on the site. It keeps your name in front of the people who can help you. In the case of LinkedIn, that’s 48 million of the most-connected professionals you will find on the Internet.

4) Get out of the office. There's so much you can do from home these days that some job hunters rarely leave. That's a mistake for your task at hand, but also your mental and physical well being. Push yourself away from your desk and take some "field trips." Check out local book stores, for example, and see what the latest job-hunting books have to offer. Just grab a bunch, pull up a chair and start taking some notes. How to Find a Job on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and Other Social Networks is one book you may find useful.

5) Take some time to review your past accomplishments. It's disheartening to look for work when it sometimes seems that seems everyone else has a job, so you need to keep that self esteem high. Won awards in the past? Have you amassed letters of recommendations? Review these things them for an ego boost.

I know job-hunting is hard, and certainly there will be days when you feel discouraged. But take heart…there’s blue sky ahead. I once read that a job hunt results in a long series of NOs followed by a YES. You need to get those NOs before you can get that one blessed YES. So keep at it in ways that work for you.