You have created your brand as an author. Now it is time to promote this brand. Promotion is best done by networking and showing your presence on social media. There are certain rules you should follow that are essential to the success of your brand that you are creating with your writing persona.
Your writing needs readers and it is up to you, too, to find them. If you use publishing sites they will do a certain amount of promotion, but you have to put in some footwork of your own. If you blog, then you are completely on your own and self-promotion becomes the one and all. Just sitting back in your chair and being proud of your creation doesn't get you anywhere.
The amount of work you put into self-promotion is up to you. It depends on how much time you are able to allocate to it and on how earnest you are in your goal to create your brand as a means of earning money. If you want to earn money, you’d better not be negligent of this aspect of web presence. Your placement on the search results on page 100 will not bring you any attention at all.
Promoting your articles can be done on Facebook, Twitter, Mix, Reddit, Instagram, Ping, and countless other sites. When you open accounts there, be consistent. Stick to the name you chose for the brand and use the same profile picture you use on your publishing site. You want to be visually recognized when your avatar pops up, and you want your name to be recognized if your article or profile comes up on someone else’s page or in search results.
I use the same picture on Facebook and Twitter as I do on Google and my blogs. On Facebook, my name is identical to my publishing sites, too, but on Twitter that is not possible. There I just used Stutenzee to make it clear that it is the same person.
Don’t try to be everywhere at once, it can’t be done. Try some and discard the ones that don’t work for you after a trial period. Replace the ones you discard with something else, and concentrate on the ones that bring you views. So far, I am using Facebook and Twitter; the results are satisfying in two different ways. Twitter brings the views, Facebook brings personal contacts. The time you spend on promoting your articles should not come at the cost of your writing time; being unable to produce further quality work can't be part of your planning.
Be strict with yourself when using these media resources. You are not on Facebook to play or chat. Restrict your social intercourse to the polite minimum. On Facebook, you can get away by placing a few likes here and there and sending out happy birthday messages from time to time. This makes you seem to be attentive and keeps people in contact with you. Answer serious messages, though, it is impolite not to respond to someone addressing you. On Twitter you can get away with the occasional retweet or some random answers to direct tweets.
On Twitter, I convert the necessity of paying some attention to people into a bonus and randomly retweet tweets that are directed at me. I used to say thank you for retweets by others while including the original tweet in that thank you; now with 60k+ followers I stopped that.
When you make contact with someone, make sure that there is text in front of the @; if you have the name of the recipients first, only they can see it. People often ask me to retweet something they find important, usually charities. If it isn't against my world view, I usually comply; I do not, however, correct their mistake of putting the @stutenzee first.
All these social media demand some time from you; you have to build up your followers and friends to get an audience for your messages. Don’t overdo it. It is something that can be done in between other things or while you sip a cup of coffee and rest your brain or legs. Once your account has a certain following, you may even go easy on promoting it further. I ignored my Twitter account for three years completely (i.e. no activity at all), and my following only dropped from 44,000 to 39,000.
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