Guest publicist Penny Sansevieri: The Power & SEO Behind Blog Commenting

Penny Sansevieri is CEO and founder of Author Marketing Experts, Inc., a best-selling author and internationally recognized book marketing and media relations expert. Her company is one of the leaders in the publishing industry and has developed some of the most cutting-edge book marketing campaigns. She is the author of five books, including Book to Bestseller which has been called the "road map to publishing success." In the past 22 months AME's creative marketing strategies have helped land 11 books on the New York Times Bestseller list. To learn more about Penny’s books or her promotional services, visit her web site at http://www.amarketingexpert.com.





For the past five or so years, we’ve organized teams to support an author’s efforts to increase the SEO of his or her website. We’ve done this a number of ways, but the biggest and most powerful was - and is - blog commenting.


When we first launched teams to offer blog commenting, most people didn’t have a clue how powerful this type of marketing was. Most Internet people did and have been doing it ever since. Now it’s become more mainstream, and everyone seems to want to jump on the blog commenting bandwagon. But let me caution you, because there’s a right way and a very wrong way to do this. I’ll explain both.

Creating a Blog Commenting Plan

The first step in blog commenting is creating a plan and, of course, knowing who you’ll be engaging with. Here are a few ways you can get started:

Deciding who to follow: Who will become part of your online networking tribe? These are the people influential to your industry. They might be competitors to you, or spokespeople. They might also be authorities in one way or another. Whoever they are and whatever they offer, it should somehow dial into what you are promoting. I recommend that you make a list of the top 5-10 names. Don’t go overboard for now. I’m sure there are more people you could engage with but to start, I want you to focus just on a few. You can grow the rest of your list from there.

Once you have your list, you’ll want to start following their blogs and also find out where they are appearing. This might mean commenting off of their website, I’ll explain in a minute why that’s important. First, let’s look at how you can organize this information:

• RSS feeds: This is the quickest and simplest way to get started. Subscribe to their RSS feeds and keep all of these in your online reader, or Google iPage. That way you can spend a few minutes in the morning going through your blog posts to see which ones you want to comment on. 
• Twitter: This is another great way to find content to blog on. Follow your favorites on Twitter and follow the links to their blogs. This will often give you great insights into the biggest and most popular posts on their website. Don’t forget to comment on their Twitter posts too!
• Google Alerts: Another great system for finding good content to comment on. Plug in the names of the folks you’re following. Also, enter their blog URLs too! Often bloggers will reference a blog post and not the name of the person blogging. Having this link as one of your Alerts will allow you to follow each and every mention of this blogger. So, why do you want to blog off their site? Anytime a blogger is featured on a website, it’s likely that site is one you’ll want to follow too. Or, at some point you may also want to blog comment on that site as well. It’s a great way to network with folks who might one day interview you or feature your book! 

Tips for a Great SEO Plan

Frequency: I generally recommend you try to comment on 3-5 blogs a week. I also recommend you spend no more than 30 minutes a day ferreting through blogs and posting, anything more becomes a time-drain that will prevent you from keeping up this work.

Engagement: Remember that each comment is no different than a post you would write for your own blog. You’d never consider writing “great post!” on your site and leave it at that, right? You should consider writing short but thoughtful posts for your blog comments. Offer additional insight, another perspective, or a link to where the reader can get more information. Don’t be salesy, that’s the first way you’ll get blasted.

Quality over Quantity: As per the above note: make it count. Don’t worry about the amount of posts you do, but spend the time considering the quality of the comment itself. You’ll find much better engagement and response when you do.

Where’s the Juice: The SEO juice from this strategy will be apparent in the incoming links that now direct to your site. Each time you post a comment it will ask you for your URL (if you’re already registered on a particular site, the login will remember your URL and post it in each comment). While not all blogs allow follow links, there’s a lot of debate on no-follow blogs and whether they are still good for SEO. What is “no follow”? No follow is a term used in the SEO world to describe sites that can block your outbound link (the link to your site), using a No Follow Tag. See here for more on no follow.

The No Follow essentially tells Google not to consider your link when ranking for algorithm. Even though you may get referral traffic, Google will act as if you aren’t even on the site. Meaning, you may get traffic from the link, but no “link juice” per se. This deters a lot of SEO people, but my take is this: If a link from a high-traffic site will get you traffic, why not post there? We still see a significant amount of traffic from links posted on No Follow sites. Also, keep in mind that search engines pay a lot of attention to social sites like Twitter and Facebook which are both No Follows.

The point being, a strong SEO plan should include blog commenting. Not just for the SEO benefits, but for the engagement and connections blog commenting brings with it. Consistent, high quality posts will not only bring you great traffic, but also fantastic connections as well.

Good luck!

Guest author Shelia Goss: Follow Your Dreams and Pursue Your Writing Goals

Shelia M. Goss is a national best-selling author and a 2012 Emma Award Finalist. She has thirteen books in print and seven ebooks. She writes in multiple genres: Christian fiction, romance, women’s fiction, suspense, and young adult. USA Today says, “Goss has an easy, flowing style with her prose…”  She's also the recipient of three Shades of Romance Magazine Readers Choice Multicultural Awards and is honored as a Literary Diva: The Top 100 Most Admired African American Women in Literature. To learn more, visit her website or follow her on Facebook.



Writing and wanting to be published comes with ups and downs. Sometimes it's easy to get discouraged when you have obstacle after obstacle against you. But if you feel that being an author is what you were born to do, you cannot let anything or anyone stand in your way.

So today, I want to talk about following your dreams and pursuing your writing goals.

You may be asking yourself: how can I achieve my dreams or goals of being a writer, if I'm working and going to school, have a family to take care of, kids and other responsibilities?

Here are a few things I've learned that will hopefully help you as you embark on pursuing your writing goals:

1. Remember, you only have one life to live. There are no do overs so why not pursue your dreams while you still have time. Don't let years pass you by and then you look back and say, I wish I had written that book. Now is the time.

2. Write it down. What is your dream or goal that you want to achieve? Write it down and place it somewhere where you can see it every day until it becomes a reality. Keep it in the forefront of your mind. Most importantly, if you want to be a writer, you must write. So write the story in your head down.

3. You must take a leap of faith. Know beyond a shadow of a doubt that your goal is attainable and put forth the effort that it will take to achieve it. That means take workshops, do your research, read books in the genre you want to write in, etc. Which leads to point #4.

4. Quitting is not an option. You will face obstacles. You will face rejections. Even after becoming published, you may get bad reviews. It's not going to be easy. But you can't allow the situations that will come up, to stop you from pursuing your goals in life. They may detour you, but don't allow them to stop you.

5. Set miniature goals in order to reach your ultimate goal. Simply set tasks that will lead you closer and closer to reaching your goal. Write a page a day. Then increase it to a chapter a day and before you know it, you will have completed a novel.

Set a goal to complete X number of pages or words by a certain date and don't allow anything to stand in the way of meeting that goal. A goal without a plan is just a wish. In order to make that wish into a reality, these are the things you must do.

     You must make plans.
     You must change your attitude.
     You must take action.
     You must focus.
     You must set boundaries with those around you.

Remember, You are never too old to pursue your dreams. Just don't let time pass you by. If I hadn't taken a leap of faith and pursued my dreams, I wouldn't be here today with more than thirteen books under my belt.

When you have a dream or a goal, you have to:

LIVE IT
FEEL IT
BELIEVE IT
and last, but not least, DO IT!

If you do all of those things you can ACHIEVE IT!

Discipline

I read an article in which a woman claimed that she writes 1,000 words every morning before getting her children ready for school. After that, she might write another 2,500 on some days, nothing on others, but each day she knew that she had 1,000 words under her belt.

I did a quick calculation. My children's books are usually about 15,000 words long. At that rate, I could complete writing two books each month (except February). What am I doing with my life?

I am not sure if this woman is typical of successful writers or not, but the article really brought home a single thought. You need talent to be a great writer, but it takes discipline to become a successful writer.

What are your targets for your writing? Are you meeting them?

Surprise!

I was talking to a friend the other day about poetry, and I pointed out that, when poetry works, it is often because the ending “surprises” the reader. Haiku may be the best illustration of this. Here’s a couple of mine: “After a hard rain, in the field, fish,” “Cat asleep on a pillow, dog.” Here are some better ones from the master, Issa (the commas are mine): “from the great bronze Buddha’s nose, a swallow,” “snow melting, village brimming over, kids.” But haiku is not the only kind of poetry that contains surprises. In fact, a lot of poetry does, especially poetry written for children.

Prose writing is the same way, and it’s not just surprise endings or sudden surprising plot twists. Those can be great and are absolutely necessary in some genres of writing. But surprise is a tool that can be used throughout an entire story. Here are some potential examples. For a horror story: the opening paragraph suggests a scarecrow hanging in an autumn field; the second paragraph shows us that it’s a human body instead. For a fantasy story: the opening paragraph shows a theft occurring; the following paragraph shows that the thief is stealing something “back.” For a literary story: the opening paragraph shows a mother and child in public with the child beautifully dressed and the mother so caring; the second paragraph shows the mother and child arriving home, and in private everything changes.

Like any tool, surprise can be overused. If the readers can never count on any stability in your work, they may well move on to someone who is not so variable. And, surprises need to develop naturally in the story, not just be thrown in for the very purpose of surprise. But surprise, at the right moment, is absolutely delightful to most readers, especially at the beginnings and endings of stories. I know it is for me.

The key to using surprise, I think, involves withholding information from the reader. Consider the horror story idea again. We see the scarecrow in the field from a distance. We pan in closer. We notice an anomaly. There’s blood on the scarecrow’s clothing. Then the realization hits us (is shown us by the writer), that the “scarecrow” is a murder victim hung up on a stake to simulate a scarecrow. This isn’t really enough for a whole story, but it’s a great ‘set up’ for a story. The question becomes then, how long can we stretch out the moment of final realization? For such a simple reveal, probably not very long. A paragraph or two, perhaps. But the more we stretch it without losing the reader, the more powerful it will be. Then, of course, we need more surprises to keep the reader reading. The victim is not only not a scarecrow, but is someone the main character knows. Perhaps it’s someone the character knows, but who they “thought” was dead years before.

I certainly haven’t worked out everything about this “theory of surprise” yet. Maybe some of you have thoughts or comments on the idea. What I do know is, 1) surprise is a powerful tool for evoking interest in readers, 2) surprise is something the writer needs to consciously (at least most of the time) set up ahead of time, and 3), surprise is based on withholding certain information from readers.

Sopa & Pipa—what does it mean for writers?

Last Wednesday I went online to do a bit of research for the second in my series of children’s science adventure novels. As a rule, I do not use Wikipedia for scientific information, since the system of entering information on that site exposes it to errors. But Wikipedia can get you in the ball park and does point you to more sources for gaining more accurate information. So I turned to Wikipedia. Much to my consternation, Wikipedia was blacked out. I did a Google search. The letters on Google were blacked out.

“What’s happening?” I asked myself. The words on the Wikipedia page filled me in. They were protesting SOPA and PIPA. What in the world are SOPA and PIPA?

Before then I had no idea that SOPA and PIPA were new legislation to be voted on by congress. SOPA which stands for Stop Online Piracy Act was being considered by the house, while PIPA which stands for Protect IP Act was being considered by the US Senate. Both bills would in effect allow U.S. attorneys general and copyright holders to enforce punitive actions against websites selling counterfeit goods or violating intellectual property rights. They would block access to websites containing unauthorized copyright material and content owners would be given the power to request court orders to shut down sites associated with piracy. Advertisers, payment processors and Internet service providers would be forbidden from doing business with infringers based overseas.

It sounds great for authors who constantly fight against websites pirating copies of their novels and selling them without their consent or remuneration. Sometimes these websites even offer the pirated copies for free. However, there is another side to the story. Many opponents of the bills suggest that it goes too far and limits freedom of information sharing. It threatens to shut down or censor legitimate websites that might inadvertently link to or display such content.

Massive protests were staged both physically and online. Wikipedia and quite a few other information websites blacked out their sites to demonstrate what would happen without access to information. Google blacked out its name but still
continued to operate. The biggest response however came from a group of hackers called “Anonymous” which shut down many government and entertainment businesses websites including the FBI, Department of Justice and Universal Studios. Millions signed petitions to stop the bill. Congress was inundated with calls and emails. In the end the bills were shelved indefinitely.

So what does this mean for writers? We depend on the internet for information and access, yet we stand to lose revenue with the peddling of pirated copies of our books. Many writers have complained and even tried to get some of the websites guilty of selling pirated copies shut down. Though some writers have had limited success in shutting down those websites and/or removing their books, it has been like a game of whack-a-mole. For each piracy website stopped, three more pop up.

Does the defeat of the SOPA and PIPA bill mean piracy websites are now emboldened to sell illegal copies of copyrighted material? Does it mean that the bills would re-emerge in a better worded, improved form that would indeed reduce online piracy without censoring free exchange of ideas and access to information?

What do you think? What does the proposed SOPA and PIPA and their subsequent defeat mean for writers?

Guest author Barbara Monajem: Hmm, does this story work?

Barbara Monajem wrote her first story in third grade about apple tree gnomes. After dabbling in neighborhood musicals and teen melodrama, she published a middle-grade fantasy when her children were young. Now her kids are adults, and she's writing historical and paranormal romance for grownups. She is the author of the Bayou Gavotte paranormal romances Sunrise in a Garden of Love & Evil and Tastes of Love & Evil, as well as three Regency novellas for Harlequin Undone: Notorious Eliza, The Wanton Governess, and The Unrepentant Rake. She lives in Georgia with an ever-shifting population of relatives, friends, and feline strays.





Last month, I submitted a full manuscript – a Regency – to my editor at Harlequin. A few weeks later, I got my revision letter. She wanted lots and lots of changes.

This in itself wasn’t a surprise.  I never get it quite right the first time, so thank God for editors. I’ve had four so far, and they’ve all been great at picking out what’s not working, at asking good questions, at putting me back on track. They’re not always right, but in this case she was 90 percent spot on. I suffered a minor twinge of dismay at having so much rewriting to do, but what really, really bugged me about this particular revision letter was that I already knew much of what was wrong with the story. Not consciously, or I wouldn’t have sent it in – but subconsciously, I knew, and had known all along. Thinking back, I remembered being uneasy about certain aspects of the story. I even recalled passages where I’d thought, “Hmm, does this work?” But those niggling doubts hadn’t registered strongly enough for me to do something about them.

This is a problem.  The more an author hones her craft, the more aspects of it should take care of themselves automatically. We learn to vary our sentence structure, to cut excess words, to stick to one point of view at a time, and so on. Catching what’s not working story-wise before sending it to an editor is just as important. Obviously, what works and doesn’t depends a lot on the genre you’re writing, but I’ve written for Harlequin before, I’ve received both acceptances and rejections, and I know more or less what they want.  I should get more and more efficient…right?

Hopefully so, but on the other hand, writers aren’t robots. We can’t write the same old stuff every time without getting burnt out or bored to death. We have to be willing to take chances, to listen to the muse, do something different even while doing the same. Which leads me to what I’ve been blogging about this month – my latest novella for Harlequin Undone, The Romance of the Toe Bone.

No , that’s not the real title. I knew Harlequin wouldn’t go for that. It’s actually called The Unrepentant Rake, which perfectly captures the hero’s personality. (He was a hoot to write!) But the story premise and the happily ever after depend on a holy relic that’s been passed down in the heroine’s family for centuries— the toe bone of St. Davnet, an Irish saint of the 6th or 7th centuries.

My muse loved the toe bone concept, and so did I!  It was so much fun. And yet, I was sure my editor would find it too weird – so sure that I forgot to look for St. Davnet’s staff when I visited the National Museum of Ireland last summer. (Duh! I wanted to see the staff anyway, and it’s not like I get to jet over to Dublin any old time I like.) I was surprised when her revision letter didn’t tell me to ditch the toe bone, and even more surprised when she accepted the revised story, toe bone and all.

Sooo… What do you listen to? Experience? Commonsense? Instinct? The muse? I hope to get better at this, but sometimes, I just don’t know.

One lucky commenter will receive a free download of The Unrepentant Rake.

Professional Organizers Can Help Writers

Professional organizers don't come cheap, but sometimes they can pay for themselves by making a writer much more productive.

I have used professional organizers twice, and they were a great help both times.

The first time, I had been living in New Orleans for almost fifteen years, and I had outgrown my home office. When a friend mentioned that she and a friend of hers were starting a professional organizing business, I commented that my office was a lost cause. Her eyes lit up. She said that they needed to get some practice jobs so they could get references and suggested that they give me a discounted price with the understanding that if I were happy with what they did, I would write a reference for them for their Website.

Dubious that anyone could help me, I still couldn't pass up such a good offer. The two women came to my office, crawled over piles and dug through the closet, took lots of measurements, and asked lots of questions. Then they came up with a brilliant plan that gave me lots more space and a more efficient work space. They even did all the work themselves in one day, shutting the door so I couldn't interfere. I was happy to write a good recommendation.

A lot of what they did for me was to make me question my assumptions. A few examples:

• I had been keeping every draft and every piece of reference material for every article I had ever written, or ever proposed, since I had started as a freelance writer. They convinced me that now that the Internet had been invented and information was easy to come by, I could get rid of many journals and all but the most recent background information for articles. 
• I had one table for writing and one table for editing, with reference books and basic supplies by each. That had made sense when editing work arrived by Fed-Ex or fax machine and I edited manually. But now that I edited mostly on the computer, they consolidated the two work areas into one. 
• I had all my bookcases and tables against the walls with a big empty space in the middle of the room that I used for storing piles of papers. They took my tables and arranged them in the shape of a U, making a work cockpit. From my chair I could now reach every project on every table as well as my printer and fax. The room felt bigger because my work area was neat and there weren't piles all over the floor; I had more work space because the "cockpit"  took advantage of the middle of the room; and I even had wall space for more bookcases. 

I went from having a messy, crowded office without enough space to work to a work space that saved me time and energy and suited my work style perfectly.

The second time I used a professional organizer was a month ago. We had lived in California for more than four years by then, and yet many boxes from my former office were still sitting in the hall, waiting to be unpacked. My major problem was that my office in California has no closets and is lined with built-in wood bookcases and drawers. They look beautiful, but I can't reach their top shelves, and they leave no space for filing cabinets. I was at a loss where to put books so I could reach them and how to store papers I would otherwise file.

The problem only increased over the succeeding four years as I generated more paper and started new projects. I had nowhere to file or store them, so the floor and every other surface in my office was covered with stacks of paper. I wasted 15 to 30 minutes a day looking for phone numbers I needed to call, notes I needed for a project, and other important things such as scissors, my calculator, my pocket knife, even my house keys.

I was overwhelmed and, some days, frustrated to tears. The mess stressed me out, but I didn't know where to start.

This time I found an organizer by searching Google for professional organizers near my Zip code and then reading the organizers' Websites carefully to see what types of jobs they did and whether they had experience with people with memory and health problems. I selected a company that listed "elderly people" as one of the groups it served.

The woman the company sent out was a former nurse who had seen worse messes than mine and was not intimidated.

• She took everything off the bookcases; I chose what books to keep, what to throw away (some of my medical and scientific books were so out of date that they were useless), and what to give to Goodwill. When she refilled my bookcases, I had room for books that were sitting in piles, waiting for a home. 
• She cleaned out my cabinets and reorganized them. 
• She convinced me that old computer, printer, and USB cables; old phones; and old phone cables should be boxed up and put in the garage, where they would be easy to access but not taking up limited drawer space in my office.  
• We went through all the piles of papers and still-packed moving cartons and we filled boxes and boxes with papers and junk I no longer needed. 
• With the addition of several files trays, my tall pile of "papers to do something with soon" became neatly organized by topic and urgency. 
• Once the hall was empty of moving boxes, I bought short bookcases for along the hall wall to store  books and papers for current projects. Now components of projects are together at a level I can reach, and the hall looks nice instead of as if we're preparing to move.
• My organizer took several empty plastic file boxes sitting in the hall and, using hanging folders I already had, filed important papers in them. I have no place to put the boxes except to stack them on the floor in the corner, but at least they look orderly and contained and I can find what I need.
• Many organizers—watch out for this if you decide to hire one!—want their clients to buy expensive prepackaged systems for organizing and filing. Personally, I don't care for nouveau-middle-class matchy-matchy decorating, and I certainly don't want to pay money for it. My organizer was similarly frugal. She organized my drawers and cabinets with things we already had around the house or in the garage, buying only a few attractive—and cheap—storage containers and file trays at Target. 
• Because my organizer didn't use a prepackaged system, she was able to organize my office and storage around the way I work and think, not around the way the designer of a prepackaged system did.

The professional movers who had packed us up in New Orleans had put things in boxes willy-nilly, without regard for what papers, folders, or books were grouped together in my office. Materials for a half-written novel had been packed in several different boxes. Thanks to the organizer's help in unpacking and sorting, I now have everything I need for that novel reunited.

My office is a haven again and no longer a place of stress.

This time, I received no friend discount or early client discount. I paid by the hour, and it was expensive. However, my organizer worked quickly and had excellent ideas for fixing my problems. I was amazed how quickly she got things in order, and I needed her for far fewer days than she or I originally estimated. I'm working efficiently now. I know where things are, and I no longer fret that I'm forgetting something I'm supposed to do. I don't have to climb over papers anymore to get to my desk or a bookcase or a cabinet.

As before, it was worthwhile to hire an organizer to get my office—and me—back on track. I expect 2012 to be more productive and lucrative than 2011, and hiring a professional organizer is a big reason why.


I'll be blogging again at Novel Spaces on February 6. Hope you visit again then.

—Shauna Roberts