Top 10 Tips

Top 10 Tips for Writers

1. Write wow content.
2. Writing is your job: Write every day—something. Be productive. Write as long as it takes to develop something worth sharing. Write when you don’t feel inspired. Write when you feel inspired. Just write.
3. While writing is mostly solitary, remember that it shouldn’t isolate you. The real world is the fuel to your writing. Engage with others. Spend time doing fun things, doing helpful things, doing hard things—be active in the world around you. Develop relationships with writers whose work you admire and whose opinions you trust. You need a team. Ask the writing team to take a look at your work when you think it’s ready. Welcome their feedback. Don’t be sensitive about their suggestions. If you have to explain it, it isn’t ready for others to review. Don’t argue with good advice. Ignore bad advice. Thank them. You really need a team whether or not you know it.
4. Learn enough about writing to know the difference between good advice and bad advice. Learn the craft. Go to workshops, conference, and critique groups. Read books about writing. Read books. Read online. Read magazines. Read books like you want to write. Read books in the genre you’re interested in. Learn grammar. Absorb enough to know when you can break the rules without looking like an idiot.
5. It’s all about the audience. It’s not about you. What does your audience want or think they need? Write about that—you can bring your unique experiences, talent, and perspective to meet your audience’s felt need.
6. If you feel like you just have to tell your navel-inspecting story regardless of the audience’s need or desire to hear the story, write it in a journal. Don’t put it in a book. Journals are for you; books are for everyone else.
7. Be a marketing maven. While you may dream about hiding away in a remote snow-covered cabin, pecking away at the glorious keyboard, you need to come back down to reality—you have to understand marketing. You are the best spokesperson for your resources. Develop a marketing plan that you can put into place long before the book is ready to launch. Understand that titles and front and back cover text and images are about marketing. Your website is critical. It’s your number-one marketing tool and your face to the public. Put the time, effort, and money into creating a great website. Blog at least two times a week and respond to comments. Build your email database. Be active in social media—Facebook and Twitter are the top two if you want to get the word out about your book, although Google+, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Pinterest have advantages. Figure out Hootsuite and other technical tools to make the social media and the website more manageable.
8. Delegate the things that you can so that you can dedicate as much time to writing and marketing as possible. Get to know smart techno-geeks to help with computer maladies. If you can pay someone to do something that steals your time, pay them.
9. Learn the power of white space. An accurate book does not need to provide exhaustive information. An understandable story does not need to include minute details. And an astute writer knows when to end. Learn what not to include and when to stop.
10. Give yourself permission to write a bad first draft. Write now, edit later.

Top 10 Tips for Communicators

1. Develop compelling content.
2. It’s about the audience—what do they need or want and how can you engage them? Engage their emotions and speak to their aspirations.
3. Learn the art of storytelling. Go to workshops and conferences, join toastmasters, and practice. Read books and articles. Listen to great storytellers. Develop a template that works for you. Glenna Salsbury recommends the SPA (story, point, application) or PSA (point, story, application) approach to talks. Share stories your audience can identify with and emotionally connect to.
4. Be an observer of people. Some of the best storytellers I’ve been around are those who watch people a lot. They notice details and wonder why people do the things they do.
5. Be a great listener and really hear what others are saying.
6. Clarity is essential. It’s a waste of your audience’s time if you can’t boil your point down to succinct take-aways. Be specific. Be understandable. If you’re speaking about a technical subject to a lay audience, throw your ego to the wind and forget about showing off how much you know. Tell them what they came to hear in a way that they can understand it and in a way that satisfies their felt-needs. Don’t be exhaustive. Just hit the high points.
7. Become a master at reading the crowd. Know your audience. Be aware of nuances. Watch responses. Notice the small reactions, facial expressions, and body language. Adjust your talk when you see them fading away or losing interest.
8. Have a plan B. Be intuitive and flexible. Adjust in the middle of a presentation if you notice that you’re losing the audience. But make sure the audience isn’t aware that you’ve gone to Plan B. Deliver what the audience is expecting—let them leave satisfied.
9. Care about others. Are you a “Here am I!” kind of person or a “There you are!” kind of person? (Disciplines of the Beautiful Woman, Anne Ortlund). Focus on the needs of others rather than on your desire to be heard or recognized.
10. Short is always better than long.

Top 10 Tips for Marketers

1. Develop incredible resources with wow content.
2. Author marketing is about communication. Understand the keys to communication: listen and really hear, observe, engage, share what your audience feels like they need, be responsive, be intuitive and flexible, care about others, be clear and understandable.
3. It’s all about the audience—what are their felt needs and how do you uniquely meet them? Identify how and why you are the one to tell this story or to offer this resource. Who is your target audience (those who you had in mind when you created your masterpiece and who will respond to your message or resource)? How are you uniquely equipped to meet the needs of your target audience?
4. Understand branding—it’s about the audience, not you. The audience determines your brand. You can have influence into how they see you, but ultimately the audience determines how they see you. Your responsibility is to provide a brand-consistent message.
5. The brand is about one message. What’s the message that is uniquely yours that others will identify as your unique message? Keep it simple. Keep it running through your resources. Stay on target.
6. Build relationships. With other writers, agents, publishers, distributors, audiences, organizations, networks, groups, and others. It’s not about becoming a pushy salesperson—it’s about recognizing your audience’s felt needs and meeting those needs with your unique resources.
7. Your #1 marketing tool is a professional website. Blog at least two times a week; three times is better. This is where your branded message goes out. Write relevant blogs that can be re-used many more times with only slight adaptations. Your website is where you collect marketing data. Offer great free give-aways to build an email database. Connect your articles, social media, speaking—everything—to your website. This is your hub to your writing, speaking, and events. Your website needs to look great and be easy to navigate. Your blog should contain relevant content with a consistent brand message.
8. Engage others in social media. Be intentional about what you share. Keep in mind that it’s about what the audience wants—and they don’t want to know what you ate at lunch. Be active, comment, ask questions, provide useful content, keep the audience in mind, share what they are interested in. Share your blogs and link them to your website. Build your following by going to specific groups related to your interests and follow those groups. Like, share, retweet, quote tweets—be a good social media “friend.” Don’t be a constant commercial. Build relationships and build an intentional audience.
9. Build public awareness for your book through interviews, guest blogs, offering your book for reviews, entering contests, and writing articles outside your box of followers. Ask for endorsements and post those on your website and through social media. Develop relationships with the media and reporters. Pitch your story ideas to those media contacts. Radio, TV, magazines, and newspapers always need good stories. Pitch a story idea rather than your opinions, points, or information.
10. And offer a great story.