Those who follow my two blogs regularly may have noticed that I’ve been quieter than normal for a couple of months. The reason is I’ve been researching and experimenting like a mad thing. Late last year it hit me all of a sudden that I wasn’t happy at all with a few things on my site and general set up. So I sat down and wrote a list of what I wanted to do and, to my dismay, realized that most of what I needed would require the services of a professional web designer.

My heart sank. My already tight budget  didn’t allow me to consider that possibility. I live and get taxed in Greece, after all, and if you don’t know what that means these days, oh – how blessed you are!

So, knowing I had no other choice, I put on my virtual student hat and got to work. Other than learning a lot online, I also had the assistance of my wonderful author friend, MM Jaye, who imparted information with generosity of spirit and gave huge amounts of her time brainstorming with me as well. Before I knew it, I was learning new tricks fast and effortlessly.

The result? All the things I wanted to do I’ve now begun to implement at zero cost, other than heaps of my time, of course. I began with adding to my site a couple of plugins to solve some commenting and sharing issues I had.

I feel compelled to add here a little tip just for the sake of those who, like me, set up their site using Simon Whistler’s online tutorial: check out the plugins ‘Postmatic’ and ‘Better Click to Tweet’. The former now allows my visitors to subscribe to follow up comments (before, they were never notified their comments had received replies). The latter plugin now allows me to set up scripts for people to share my posts on Twitter (like the one you see at the bottom of this post). As you know, the set up we wound up with via the tutorial doesn’t allow custom scripts when sharing a post. Now, at least, I can create the tweet of my choice so people can share it.

Anyway, I am still working on a couple more projects, and hope to finish sometime this spring. I won’t disclose all my big plans today, but will announce the first two changes that are now underway:

Author services on EffrosyniWrites

There is now a new page on my site called, FOR AUTHORS. There, I invite any fellow writers needing help with copy-editing or proofreading to give me a try. Three successful enovel Authors already have repeatedly. I choose not to name them here even though I am eternally grateful for their trust. They tell me I have an eagle eye for catching typos and that I am meticulous with my advice. Plus, knowing from first hand experience money doesn’t come easy to authors, I offer my services for small donations that are a fraction of the going price. Message me privately and find out more, anytime.

Furthermore:

My professional background of 20 years, other than involving administrative and secretarial work, also involved translations to/from Greek, so that’s also on offer. Although I can think of many ways I can help authors for a small donation, I will highlight here my suggestion to make copyright-free, eye-catching images to accompany your tweets and FB posts. See a small sample of what I can do below but on the page FOR AUTHORS you’ll find more images.

(click any image to enlarge)

It is a known fact that images encourage engagement on the social media. If in doubt, check the infographics online or simply see this Twitter tip. It clearly states adding an image to your tweet will increase engagement by 313% !

FREE & Bargain Deals

The second project I am thrilled to announce today is that as of Friday, February 26, I will be posting weekly to promote FREE & Bargain Deals. At the moment, I am only considering submissions for a small donation of $5.50. In the page FOR AUTHORS, you will find the details of what the promotion entails. You will also find some traffic stats for EffrosyniWrites as well as Twitter Analytics data for my account, @FrostieMoss. This is my strong point on the social media so the promotion I’ll be offering is based mostly on Twitter.

Here is a tweet I got recently from my tweep, Theresa Snyder.

Since last October when I blogged our interview that featured her Moroccan Room (her whimsical writing space at home) I never stopped tweeting the post as I loved it so much (what’s not to like about Theresa, right, fellow tweeps?) Anyway, from October till now the post has got 19,900 views, and the tweet still gets RTs as if it were brand new.

For me, this is a great reward because of all the hard work involved. Because I’ve invested so much time on Twitter for the past 2.5 years, my account drives traffic that makes a difference, be it to a post on my site or the sites of others (Kindle Ninja and Molly Greene spring to mind here, for example, if you know them!)

Anyway, these are my news for now! My next projects include creating a new landing page for my newsletter and an ARC reader list, so I’ll be playing around with Mailchimp and Google Docs for a while. New announcements will be made here before anywhere else so watch this space! I hope my next implementations will give a few ideas to those among you who are authors. If you’re not following this blog, go to the side bar to follow from today (via email or feed).

Do you have a promotion coming up? In the page, FOR AUTHORS, you will find the submission form if you wish to try my new service. As mentioned earlier, the start date is February 26th. I look forward to putting your books in front of thousands of new readers!

Before I go, I wish to say a big thank you to the two people who’ve been my rescuers on a day to day basis. I’ve already mentioned MM Jaye, but also wish to thank Nicholas Rossis who helped me enormously setting up a Facebook pixel on my site the other day. Also, his support to me with Socialoomph is priceless, as always.  Maria and Nicholas, this is to say, thank you for being my friends. You guys make me feel truly blessed and honored with your kindness and generosity. 

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