Have you had an AHA moment lately?

That moment when you see or hear something and your response is "AHA" can make all the difference in so many ways.  Specifically, I want to talk about AHA moments that we have as authors and the challenging task of marketing ourselves and our books in today's e-everything market.  Realistically, even if you get the best possible traditional publishing contract, to compete in today's market you have to learn how to use social media, blogging and websites to market your reputation and your book(s).

Whether you are a seasoned author or a newbie to the community, you are faced with a common problem.  How do you market and become a successful full time author and still have time to write?  It is absolutely overwhelming!  Then for the newbies there is the experience you go through starting out that can be quite daunting and many give up.  Often, just starting out, you have no idea where to turn or where to start and this is a formula for making mistakes that will haunt you for some time.

I don't have answers for all of those things but I do have an offer of support for you.  Having been the new guy and not knowing where to start and then working through how to market and, well, honestly, I still haven't quite found that balance to have enough time to write but I do understand how important those AHA moments can be as you learn and grow in your craft and in your marketing planning.  So, with my partner Roger Gerald Scott, we formed a blog site that is designed to give you support, inspiration, encouragement and is filled with AHA moments!  http://authorshelpingauthors.wordpress.com is there for you!  It is built by authors, for authors and contains tons of great resources to help you with many of your needs from writing, publishing, marketing, editing, etc.

The cool part about this blog's design is that when you submit an article that relates to the topics we are covering, you become a contributor to the site, a full fledged member of the AHA community and you will benefit from the promotion work done with that site for as long as you allow your article to be published on the site.  How do you benefit?  A few different ways:

1. your article, always belongs to you and showcases your writing skills and knowledge
2. your article has your credit line and a link back to your site at the bottom and the click through rates from our readers are pretty good
3. if you post an article on your blog or website that just talks about you being a contributor and has a link back to the AHA site, you have created a full circle back link that boosts you and the AHA site in search engine ranking
4. we promote that site everyday, always looking for new contributors, new places to advertise the site and tweeting and updating Facebook across several attached accounts for every single post that goes out through the site

Everyone's first response is, great, another account to manage, another task to complete, there are not enough hours in the day - I don't have time.  Wait...there is no account to manage and the task is much simpler than you think, most contributors already have content that is perfect for the AHA community and can repurpose that content in a matter of minutes.  Literally, you can take an article from your blog or website (relevant topics), copy and paste it into an email, slap a credit line with a link at the bottom and click send and you are done.  If you don't have content and want to get on the promotional train that we have running full speed ahead on a daily basis, simply write something...it doesn't have to be long or brilliant, just shareable.  Go see what's on the site, some of the contributors write fresh content, some repurpose and some had articles sitting in their files not being used at all.  Everyone tells us how much the love the content and the click throughs and daily view numbers are excellent...must be worth checking into?

You can contact me directly at aha4real@gmail.com to discuss your involvement in the community and we will help you minimize the time it takes to be a contributor while maximizing the benefits you can receive by participating.