Post #67 – Women’s Memoirs, Book Business – Kendra Bonnett and Matilda Butler
So are you getting into social networking and gearing up to promote your new memoir? Maybe your in the very early stages and just beginning to build a marketing platform. Either way, congratulations, you’ve taken an important step in marketing your memoir.
If you’ve recently started using Twitter, you might be wondering about those links that appear in people’s tweets that start out http://tinyurl.com/ or http://bit.ly. Weird! And why do they all start out the same? What’s the point? How do I do that?
Okay, let me explain. Oh, and the good news, this is really easy…you CAN do this.
Perhaps you’ve noticed that many of the social media sites, and especially Twitter, require you to limit the length of your posts. A tweet, for example, is restricted to just 140 characters…including spaces. If you have a lot to say, you can end up using all sorts of abbreviations and shortcuts: UR for your or you’re, 4 is shorter than for, R for are, and so on. Sometimes when searching for a shortcut I feel like one of those crazy extreme backpackers who drills holes in her water cup or pulls the cardboard roll out of the toilet paper just to save an ounce of pack weight.
The Tinyurl.com tool.
But “RU4 it” becomes pointless when you try to add a link that directs readers to your blog post or other website…and you most definitely should be adding links.
That’s when you need to turn to the URL shorteners. The URL or Uniform Resource Locator is the address of your website or blog post. Http://womensmemoirs.com is the URL for Women’s Memoirs’ home page. As you’ve also probably noticed, the URLs for individual blog posts can get pretty long. A URL shortener truncates a long URL by essentially reassigning a new, short URL. For example, the URL for this post is: http://womensmemoirs.com/memoir-writing-book-business/memoir-book-business-quick-tip-shorten-urls/ . I can’t possibly tweet that, but when I use Bit.ly to truncate the original URL I end up with something quite manageable: …and short.
The Bit.ly conversion tool.
Memoir Writers…You Need to Be Doing This.
Bit.ly, tinyrul.com and ow.ly are the most common URL shorteners used today, and all are free. There are two ways you can use them:
- Highlight the entire URL you want to shorten, copy it (Control-C), go to one of the shortener sites, paste (Control-V) the URL into the box as indicated and click the button. The rest is automatic. Once your new URL is generated, highlight and copy it and use it wherever words and characters are at a premium.
- Or you can drag the Tinyurl or Bit.ly tool to your browser toolbar. This is easy and very convenient. I won’t go into details but encourage you to read the directions on the site.
The Ow.ly conversion tool.
And that’s all there is to it. Now you can tweet and provide links like a pro.
Actually there is one more thing. You might be wondering why we use bit.ly instead of one of the others. Matilda and I used to use Tinyurl.com but for a while (about a year ago) use seemed to be outstripping the site’s capacity. The result, you’d create a Tinyurl and it wouldn’t work because the site was down. So we switched. I suspect Tinyurl has caught up to the demand. In the end, the decision becomes your personal preference.
book marketing
tinyurl
shorten url
memoir marketing tips
