New WordPress Series Now Available

I’m pleased to announce the launch of the new WordPress series of e-books from Just the FAQs. The first set of three e-books details everything you need to know about creating, optimizing, and running a site on WordPress.com.

The 90 page Reference Manual covers every aspect of WordPress with screenshots and detailed descriptions of each element and link available.

The 30 page RSS Feeds book guides you step-by-step through setting up, fully customizing, and optimizing the feeds supplied on some WordPress.com templates or setting up feeds with FeedBurner and installing them on your site.

The 14 page Quick Start Guide takes you through the essential steps of customizing the look of your new WordPress site, making your first post and creating more pages on your site.

The books are available individually or as a full set with special savings.

Another full set of books on WordPress.org sites is already in the works and will be available later this fall.

Be sure to subscribe to the RSS feed to be notified when new books and updates become available.

Dana Lynn Smith on Just the FAQs Podcast

On the Air - Just the FAQs Podcast - featuring a variety of guests working in the business of writing
Dana Lynn Smith is a book marketing coach and author of The Savvy Book Marketer series. She has a degree in marketing and 15 years of publishing experience.

Dana joins us again to talk about why Twitter and Facebook are such valuable promotional tools for authors and how to really take advantage of these powerful networking tools. If you’ve ever wondered what the heck you should be tweeting about or whether you should be promoting through a Facebook profile, page, or group, you’ll find the answers here.

The show airs September 17th. Visit Just the FAQs Podcast page for more details and links to Dana's new books.

Protecting Your Site Copyright and Domain

The two most important things you can do as a site owner are to ensure that you own your site's copyright and domain name. As a matter of convenience, many site designers offer to set up your hosting and domain for you. However, in doing so, they also list themselves as the owners of both. If the design firm goes belly up, or if you want to switch designers, you may loose the right to use any part of your site or, more importantly, loose the right to use the domain name you've built your business brand on.

Find out how to protect yourself and ensure that you own your site and domain name. Read Protecting Your Site Copyright and Domain on Just the FAQs Resources.

Protecting Your Email from Spam

Bloggers and website owners use many different tricks to curtail having their contact information harvested by spam bots while still making it easily available to humans. Spam bots are a spin-off of the same sort of automated programs used by search engines, which are called spiders because they crawl the Web gathering information about site pages. The spiders collect data primarily from meta tags in the page’s code. These include the description and keywords meta tags. Spam bots, on the other hand, look through the page’s code in search of terms like “mailto” or the “@” symbol. These are dead giveaways that an email address is contained in that part of the code.

Find out how you can foil the spam bots from getting your email address. Read the full article Protecting Your Email from Spam on the Resources page.

Video Marketing Made Easy

Video marketing is one of the hottest emerging trends and is quickly replacing text-only article marketing as a way to drive traffic to your site.

You say you don't have the money for a slick, high-budget production? No problem. Folk-style video has become so common that even the most reasonable efforts to make it a quality production will stand out. And, there's another perk to making your own videos. They will have a genuineness and sincerity factor that high-budget productions can't match.

If you’re a little intimidated by the learning curve and expense of equipment you’ll need to produce a video, don’t be. The best way to get started with video marketing is to make a movie trailer for your product from still shots. The software to do this is free and may already reside on your computer.

Visit Just the FAQs Resources page to read the full article on Getting Started with Video Marketing to see how easy it is. The article contains several links to help you find the right tools to get you started today.

How Hot is the Online Video Market?

According to a recent article in Scientific American, "video files will be part of 90 percent of all consumer Internet traffic (that generated by households, universities, and Internet cafés) in 2013." This statement is part of a report issued by Cisco, which is the leading supplier of networking equipment and network management for the Internet.

Cisco issued that report just one day after Apple announced that their next iPhone will be able to not only record video clips, but will also be able to edit and send them via email or upload them to YouTube using voice commands.

What this means is that it will no longer be enough to provide great text content for online marketing. As a promoter, you'll have to make it visually entertaining as well. Fortunately there are a lot of free or inexpensive applications available that you can use to make your own videos. In fact, if you're on a PC, Windows Media is already available to you. There are even more programs available for MAC users.

You say you don't have the money for a slick, high-budget production? No problem. Folk-style video is so common that even the most reasonable efforts to make it a quality production will stand out. And, there's another perk to making your own videos. They will have a genuineness and sincerity factor that high-budget productions can't match.

Do you already make your own videos? Share your set up and tips by leaving a comment.

On the Air with Dresser After Dark

On the Air - Just the FAQs guests on Dresser After Dark

Every Wednesday, I’ll be a guest on the nationally syndicated radio show Dresser After Dark, hosted by Michael Ray Dresser. The show features authors and experts from all over the country who offer solutions to the listening audience on all types of lifestyle matters as well as business and financial areas of interest. Michael Ray is a thought provoking radio talk show host who is well known for getting to the heart of the issue at hand.

Here’s the lineup of topics for July.

July 8 – Online Marketing Lingo
Does the geek-speak of online marketing confuse you? You’re not alone. Join us to learn the lingo.

July 15 – How Hot is the Online Video Market?
If you don’t have a video online, you’re missing out on one of the hottest marketing trends. Find out what you need to know to get started.

July 22 – Protecting Email from spam
Can you display your email address on your blog and still protect it from spam? Yes, you can. Find out how.

July 29 – Protecting your site copyright and domain name
What all site owners should know to protect themselves from a very expensive pitfall.

Are You Annoying Your Facebook Friends with Tweets?

Twitter is full of tips from folks suggesting that you can easily feed a single post to multiple social media sites. While this may be convenient for you, it may annoy your followers.

Consider the fact that many of your viewers participate in multiple social media sites. If you use applications to feed your tweets (posts from Twitter) to Facebook, your followers are seeing duplicate information.

One of the tenets of article marketing is to post fresh content in multiple places. It's not a good idea to post exactly the same material on several sites. Many busy marketing folks tend to ignore this advice when using social media and it's coming back to haunt them. It can lead to loosing followers on Twitter, Facebook, or both.

In a post titled Stop the tweet spam! Two ways to filter Twitter into Facebook Eric Eldon recently published remarks on his blog that exemplify the problem. In it he also gives marketers ways to adjust their Tweet feeds so they can reduce the double entries on Facebook and other social media sites.

The trend among viewers is turning. If you want them to follow you on multiple sites, either provide fresh content for each one or cut down on the spam.

A little tech help with The Writer's Coach

Just the FAQs has been invited to join Suzanne Lieurance on the last Wednesday of every month for her weekly teleclass, Build Your Business Write. I'll be answering questions about technical issues you face when trying to establish an online presence for yourself and your business.

Once you register, you’ll receive an email invitation to this event.

Join us for this informative teleclass Wednesday night and don’t forget to submit a question you would like to have answered during the call. There will also be special discounts on Just the FAQs eBooks for those registered.

New Seven-Part Series on Writing and Selling E-books

Children's author Katie Hines has invited Just the FAQs to guest post on her blog about writing and selling e-books. The seven-part series titled What I Need to Know About Writing and Selling an Ebook, is a preview of articles that will appear later this year on the JTF site.

Each post will cover different aspects of writing and selling e-books including:

- Print or Digital Format: Which is Better for My Book?
- Target Audiences for E-books
- Maximizing the E-book Format
- Costs Involved with an E-book
- E-book Layout
- Selling Your E-book Online Using PayPal
- Protecting Your E-book File

A topic from the series will be posted every few weeks and runs through July.
Visit Katie's blog now to read the first post.

Free Resources

To help you get started with online marketing, free downloads have been added to the More Resources page. You will find the Articles and Tip Sheets great sources of handy information to get you up to speed on blogs, RSS Feeds, Article marketing, Web sites and more.

There's also a new section of recommended books, including Book Marketing in the Digital Age by Yvonne Perry. This new eBook gives sample screenshots and more than 100 links to helpful sites that serve as examples to further explain the text.

Tips and how-to information include: creating an online media kit, blogging tips, getting traffic to your site, virtual book tours, social media and networking, using video for book promotion, getting author interviews, and the benefits of podcasting.

Just the FAQs eBooks are on the layout table and will be available soon. Subscribe to the RSS Feed to receive the latest updates and announcements.

Do You Help Authors?

If you are in the business of helping authors, you know the importance of online marketing to their career. But many creative folks are uncomfortable with the technical aspects of establishing an online presence. That's where Just the FAQs can help.

If you advise your clients to start a blog, add RSS Feeds, get a Web site, or begin an article marketing campaign, now you can give them easy-to-read resources to get it done.

All Just the FAQs eBooks are written for folks with no prior technical knowledge. There is no complicated "geek-speak" and no coding script language to decipher. All chapters are clearly divided into topic sections and use colors and symbols that appeal to creative folks.

If your clients can click a mouse, with the help of Just the FAQs eBooks, they can have a presence online. Suggest they follow this blog or visit the Just the FAQs Web site for more info.