Before I do, please allow me to point to a couple of resources that hit the net in my absence.
1. Free Online Marketing Help For The Technophobic Author- L. Diane Wolfe published a guest post from me on her Spunk On A Stick blog. While there, check out her Circle Of Friends series and the release of the last in the series, Book V.
2. 8 Tips on Creating an Army of People Who Will Market Your Book- Dana Lynn Smith has published a guest post by me on her Savvy Book Marketer site that can help you find people to help promote your book.
I would appreciate it if you could check out these sites after Piotr's post on this site. Now, let's see what Piotr has to say about mobilizing your blog...
5 Reasons Why Writers Should Mobilize Their Blogs
By Piotr Kowalczyk
Mobile Web is growing fast
According to a study by Morgan Stanley, there will be over 1 billion "heavy mobile data users" by 2013. It's a major trend: people switch from desktop activity to mobile activity. On the other hand, mobile readers are disappointed when using mobile web. Non-mobilized pages are too slow to load on cellphones, they look ugly, and most importantly – they are unreadable.
Social sites dominate mobile web
A report by Openwave shows that four out of ten top mobile destinations are social networks. Why is that so important for a writer? Because probably for most of us social networks like Twitter, Facebooks and alikes are an effective way to communicate with readers. Ask yourself a question: how many of the readers of your blog and potential buyers of your book are opening your messages from a mobile device? In my case it's a prevailing majority.
Links from mobile apps
And here comes the problem with links. If you tweet a link to your site, which is (still) not mobilized, it’s OK when a reader opens it from a computer. It can be disastrous when opened from, let’s say iPhone's Tweetie. The reader will probably never try it again. You loose a chance to be read – and to be retweeted.
Do yourself a favour and open in a cellphone's Twitter app a link to your blog you recently tweeted. Is it readable? Does it load well? Does it load at all? As a reference there are two iPhone screenshots of my blog: mobilized and non-mobilized.
Mobile feed readers
In fact, loading problems with articles I tried to open from my Tweetie have made me switch to read on an iPhone RSS feeds instead. A mobile feed reading app is a guarantee, that you'll have access to a readable form of subscribed blogs.
It's a good idea to make a full text of your post available for feeding. However, if for some reasons, you choose the option to show only an excerpt, we're back with a link problem.
Future habit of reading
And here comes the most important part. It's about a change of a reading habit. Reading electronic content goes mobile. Ereaders, smartphones and tablets help with this process. Technology doesn't stick us to a desktop computer screen any more. E-books become mo-books. I start a day from reading Twitter updates on an iPhone – before I start a computer. I read on the iPhone a book or feeds in the evening – after I shut down my laptop. That's why I fixed a major issue – my blog being a missing (or broken or slow-loading) link in the mobile reading experience.
A reader (especially the one who reads fiction literature) will never be back to read an e-book on a computer screen, if he tried it once on a mobile device. Why not being there with all what you need to say to make YOUR book or writing being chosen for a mobile reading pleasure?
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Piotr Kowalczyk - tech-fiction writer, self-publisher and e-book enthusiast. He strongly believes in mobile e-books. They can bring the joy of reading to those, who don't feel like consuming books the old-fashioned way. His dream is to be a default fiction author for any mobile device with e-reading capabilities. His zany, ironic short stories are like ultra-slick easy-to-brake gadgets - showing how deeply our lives depend on technology. Currently he runs litexperimental projects including One Picture Stories, created solely on an iPhone, as well as Hashtagstories - told with a sequence of Twitter hashtags.
7 comments:
Hi Tony .. good that you're back. Thanks to Piotr .. that's a really useful bit of advice .. and so good to know about
Thank you - I've noted ..
That would mean I'd need to get a phone that could do all that! I still have one of those simple, no-frills, just had voice-messaging and caller ID phones.
Piotr, Thank you for your post. I have visited my blog on an iPod It's a great thing to do so that you have an idea what others are seeing.
Hey Tony! I was searching for sites to include in a power point presentation I'm adding to my online marketing seminar, and I see a quote by you on the Savvy Book Marketers site! LOL. Carolyn's too. That's kinda neat. Did she ask for a quote or did you offer?
Have you read her books? Which one would you recommend? I've actually not read any of Dana's books. (Despite the overload of marketing books on my shelf!)
Hey Diane,
I have read almost all of Dana's books and have done reviews of them on my site. Depending on what quote you are seeing, they were either from reviews I have posted or sometimes people send me pre-publication books that I read before they publish and give a quote on.
About which one of Dana's books I would recommend depends on what you are looking for. She always teaches me things on each subject I read. Some, she has very specific knowledge on that you just can't find many other places like her book on selling to libraries.
Hope that helps.
I've just discovered another great tool to make a web content friendly for mobile readers. It's TinyRead http://www.tidyread.com and it's much better than Google Mobilizer if you think of sharing your blog posts at mobile platforms like Twitter or Facebook. Is does one great thing - readers can save your link for further reading - and have it always with them (as they always carry their phones:-)
That was a good idea, you have good points there. I would consult this one to my friend and think if I could do that.
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