A key component to all of my publishing and marketing strategies is a high-performing, search-engine-optimized website to serve as a hub for your marketing efforts.
A website is also a great way to share stories, multimedia productions, and special offers.
I will create a website for you, optimized for what you are doing.
For Authors
Here is what an Author Website can do for writers:
Provide information about you and your books.
Offer your books and related products for sale.
Get invitations to speak on podcasts and stages.
Publish excerpts to attract people to you and your books.
For Speakers
A Speaker Website is designed to get speaking gigs for you.
Most will like an Author Website plus the following elements:
Speaker Sizzle Reel.
Key Speaker Topics.
Speaker Booking Forms.
For Storytellers
A website is a great platform for sharing personal, family, and business stories.
For Artists
One of the first websites I created in the 1990’s was the Shared Visions Gallery, which let me to create websites for artists and galleries.
Here are the key parts of an Artist Website:
You artist bio.
Beautiful presentations of your art.
Lists of galleries where your art can be seen.
Ways to buy your art.
Attract invitations to exhibit to exhibit your art.
Invitations to do commissions.
Special Offer
Here is my special offer to create a branded website designed for what you want to accomplish with the site.
Here is the process:
We meet to discuss your goals.
I register a domain and create a WordPress website branded to match your style and goals.
I register the website with Google Search Console to get your site found in searches,
I combine my comprehensive marketing strategies with Conversion Alchemy by my Total Traffic and Conversion collaborator, Roy Dickan.
Conversion Alchemy is an AI tool that actively acquires qualified leads from searches and site visitors.
We add them to a mailing list in Kartra and subscribe them to an email sequence. It works very well.
You can use the leads for future email campaigns.
The Golden Marketing Sales Machine combines landing pages, blogging, social media, and YouTube to dominate your online presence and attract people to you and your offers.
Dominate Your Niche!
Who Is The Golden Sales Machine For?
This comprehensive marketing approach will work for any person, entrepreneur, or company that offers something that people will pay for, including:
Authors
High-End Coaches
Entrepreneurs
Professional Practices, like Dentists and Therapists
Real Estate Investors
Course Creators
Artists
Musicians
Network Marketers
What you do:-)
The Main Components
Here is the basic approach:
Create a Compelling Offer
Create a Compelling Landing Page or website with buttons to make an appointment or purchase, as appropriate for your offers.
Create an Email Sequence.
Create Conversion Alchemy Campaigns to acquire leads and subscribe to the email sequence.
Create an Opt-In for the landing page that subscribes the person to the email sequence.
Create blog posts based on the email sequence, optimize them for Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and submit them to the Google Search Console. Each blog post will have a call to action.
Create Social Media and YouTube posts based on the blog posts with links to the blog post or landing page.
Boost posts with paid advertising.
This approach will bring traffic in days for your success.
I am working on a book and training program if you want to implement it yourself.
Or we can work with you or implement it for you.
Busy professional practices will want us to implement and run the Golden Marketing Sales Machine with Conversion Alchemy for them.
What Does Done-For-You Cost?
I am offering an Introductory retainer of $388 per month that includes all the moving parts and a modest budget for Conversion Alchemy leads and Facebook post boosts.
We can review the results near the end of the month to make adjustments for next month if needed.
Are you using live streams or podcasts to get your message out and attract people to your products and services?
You can leverage the differences between live videos and podcasts to multiply your audience and influence.
I use the Power Podcasting Practice to get my message out to LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, Apple Podcasts, iHeartRADIO, Spotify, Amazon Music, and more.
I have been using this to put out information about my Writing For Fun Adventure I started from scratch just over a week ago.
You can see the results by searching for ‘Greg Dixon writing‘ on Google Search. I am not the only Greg Dixon and there are other Greg Dixons who are writers, yet the first two pages of search listings are mostly mine.
How do you show up in searches?
The Power Podcasting Practice
Here are the tools and practices that I use.
Create a splash image like the one at the top of this page. I use screen captures and PhotoShop. Canva and other programs can create images for your branding and messaging.
Set up a LinkedIn Live Event.
Upload the splash image.
Provide a compelling title.
Write show notes with a link to the next steps for the audience.
List guest speakers
Set the time.
Submit.
Invite guest speakers through LinkedIn.
Set up StreamYard Studio Live Broadcast. Restream would work too.
Choose the destinations for the live stream. I use LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook Profile, Facebook Pages, and sometimes Instagram and X.
Often, when discussing reasons to write and publish a book, I say that writing itself can be fun, cathartic, and rewarding.
By writing, I mean any form of writing ~ not just books. Novels, poems, songs, screenplays, courses, articles, blog posts, marketing copywriting ~ anything!
So I have launched a program called Your Writing for Fun Adventure, including a website, blog posts, podcasts, broadcasts, a book, and weekly group discussion sessions to encourage people to write and explore a range of writing projects for fun or for profit.
One of the easiest story projects you can do yourself or with my help is to create a slide presentation with photos and captions identifying the people and events.
I have created dozens of these presentations for birthday parties, weddings, and memorials.
The most recent was a tribute to Rocket Norton at the recent Rock Beats Cancer benefit concert. The five-minute presentation is mostly photos with some video.
A happier project was to put together family photos for my son’s wedding. He grew up in North Vancouver and his bride grew up in the Maritimes with the wedding and reception in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia.
The photo slideshow with a music background started with baby photos of each and pictures of activities as they grew up separately (with many interesting parallels).
I included photos of parents, grandparents, siblings, uncles, aunts, and cousins with captions for the names, relationships, and events. It was an excellent way for each family to learn about the other family.
We looped the video on a large TV at an Aunt’s house between the wedding ceremony and the start of the reception. Many people watched and commented on relatives they had not seen recently.
We also projected the video as part of the reception.
We used Google Drive to collect the photos from both families.
I used PhotoShop to crop and restore the photos, though Canva and other photo editors will work for this.
Today, I will use Apple FinalCut Pro to assemble the photos with transitions, captions, and music. Any video editor would work for this.
I can put it together for you. I will need the photos and notes about each photo for the captions sent by email or uploaded to a Google Drive folder.
The finished presentation can be embedded on a web page or played on most modern televisions from a USB Memory Drive.
Memory Refresher for Seniors
A great use of these family presentations is for seniors and others who are experiencing memory loss.
The photos and videos with captions and possibly a voice-over can be a fun way to refresh memories of family members and events.
Digital Photo Frames
There are many ways of presenting these photo presentations, including inexpensive digital photo frames for your loved ones.
I have used Atticus to format books for clients and for my own projects for a few years.
Atticus does a great job formatting all of the standard trim sizes for Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) and IngramSpark, as well as an eBook format for Kindle and other readers.
The Atticus platform is also great for writing. It is chapter-oriented, and reorganizing chapters is as simple as dragging up or down in the side panel.
Using Grammarly or other writing assistants provides a powerful writing and editing environment.
There is no extra step between the writing and formatting stages. All done with grace in Atticus.
Collaboration
Atticus creator Dave Chesson said he was working on the ability to collaborate on book projects. It has been on my wish list for a long time and would simplify the editing and review process.
A few weeks ago, Atticus sent a notice about a major update to the software. Dave Chasson didn’t say what the update was but said we could probably guess.
Sure enough, that was it was the collaboration feature that was new.
While it is too late for this year, here is how the collaboration feature would have saved A LOT of time and trouble with Tales From The Turkey Table by Bill Allman.
Bill called me in late November last year to say he was ready to go with Tales from the Turkey Table.
Given that we often were able to take a finished manuscript to formatted and submitted for printing in a few days ago, I said we could do a quick edit pass and format for printing.
Given that Bill is a good writer and editor himself, we assumed it was ready to go. And for what we were doing, it was.
The writing style and punctuation was quirky, but very readable. I certainly was not going to be heavy-handed with editing.
Although the formatting was tricky, I created PDF that I sent out for review.
Some of the most minor things like the table of contents not fitting on a single page became a sticking point.
Then various friends started complaining about minor things. Editing by committee is usually a bad idea because people have opinions that are often wrong and not helpful.
Assuming that the author had done a thorough read of the review copy and considering the time crunch, we submitted, printed, and sold copies.
After Christmas, the author decided to do a close review and edit to make it better.
Nearly a year later, he said he was done with the edit comments in a PDF with comment tracking enabled.
I spent a good week applying some 550 minor changes.
Now we have time to print for Christmas and get into retail shops.
Now that the collaboration feature is available, here is what we could have done last year and this year that would have saved much time and trouble:
I would have set up the author and editors as collaborators and reviewed the text and formatting within Atticus.
Atticus would track and report changes and comments.
The author could have made most of the changes himself, which is far easier than explaining the changes.
All collaborators and editors can review the formatting within Atticus and export PDFs for closer review.
Once approved, the formatted book will be ready for submission and printing.
Working With Book Clients Moving Forward
The writing and formatting features of Atticus are all I need for my books.
The collaboration feature makes working with new book clients easier regardless of stage. I can help with book development, writing, editing, and formatting.
So I will encourage, if not insist, to get the book project into Atticus as soon as possible and collaborate there. That means that the author and editors would need their own Atticus accounts.
Linda Hollender commissioned us to capture her father’s life story. We usually shot videos, but Robert was reluctant to speak on camera.
Instead, we used a microphone and a smartphone to record his story, which we transcribed and assembled into a book with photos that he gave away to friends for his birthday party that year.
Last year, Linda gave away copies at his memorial service.
See tellyourstory.productions/robert-hollander/
The Rocket Norton Vault
I worked with Vancouver musician and author Rocket Norton for decades on many projects, including concert promotions, publishing his books, selling his How to Coach Baseball to Kids video course, and driving a Lincoln Town Car for his driving service.
Much of that I collected into a multimedia portal called The Rocket Norton Vault.
I also helped promote three cancer benefit concerts related to his battle with cancer. Rocket organized and performed at the first two concerts. The one this year served as a memorial.
I had the honour of creating a memorial video shown at the concert.
Preserve Your Personal and Family Stories
My encouragement is for you to capture the stories of your loved ones while they can still share. Our time on earth is fleeting.
You can start with taking photos, video, and audio with your SmartPhone at family gatherings. I have created videos on the process in the past and am working with new resources to help you.
I am also available to craft new and existing content into story productions.
