When You Stop Feeding Your Internet, Your Internet Stops Growing, a Post by R. Clint Peters

What happens if you just stop Tweeting, stop writing blogs, stop posting on Facebook?  To confirm what would happen, I stopped doing anything on the Internet about three weeks ago.  I didn’t tweet about the Author’s Club.  I didn’t write blogs about the Author’s Club.  In that three weeks, all I did was post a few book reviews on Nothing But Book Reviews.

The test results are in.  All Twitter activity stopped.  No-one retweeted anything, because I had not tweeted anything.  The email inbox’s relating to The Author’s Club suddenly were empty.  The club normally is informed if someone retweets a tweet on Twitter, or is followed by someone on Twitter.  Those emails suddenly stopped.  It was as if all interest in The Author’s Club had suddenly died.

The results could not have been more clear.  A few minutes a day can (and will) make a difference.

I think everyone wants to be successful as an author.  But, being an author is also a business, and it’s sometimes more difficult to be a successful “author business”.

Here are a few things you can do to make your “author business” grow:

1)  Maintain a consistent presence on Twitter.  What, you may ask, is a consistent presence?  The most basic recommendation I  have discovered is five tweets a day.  (Five tweets an hour would be better, but five tweets a day will result in a positive presence.)

One question to ask about Twitter is:  how many followers do you have?  The second question to ask about Twitter is:  are the number of followers growing?  Followers grow in direct proportion to the  number of Tweets you post on Twitter.  The Author’s Club hasn’t been Tweeting —- and the numbers of new followers have dropped off to zero.  (The club was getting 2-3 followers a week before I decided to start my experiment.)

2)  Maintain a consistent presence on blogs.  Blog about things dear to your heart and blog frequently.  Two years ago, a friend of mine started a blog about her back yard garden.  She posted two pictures every day, with two or three paragraphs.  Each spring, she started with clearing up the area she planned to plant, and followed through to the end of the growing season.  When she had health issues and could not continue to garden, her Twitter account had over three thousand followers.  Several volunteered to help her with her garden.

I keep asking for club members or anyone who reads this blog to submit something, anything, about what they are doing as writers.  Tell about how your book is progressing, write about the ups and downs of being an author.  Why?  Because there are actually other authors who’d like to know they aren’t alone in a sinking boat in the vast sea of writing, that there are other authors sharing their brick walls, potholes, and midnight brain freezes.

3)  Finally, check your personal friends numbers on Facebook and followers numbers on Twitter, and then follow The Authors Club (@authors_club) on Twitter, or like The Author’s Club on Facebook (http://tinyurl.com/ckjlhos).

Why?  It’s simple:  as authors, we can work as a single sailor in that sinking skiff, or we can band together, build a yacht, and sail into the storms together.

I can’t force you to succeed; I can only try to help you succeed.  Perhaps I don’t even have the tools to succeed.  I do know that what I haven’t done for three weeks hasn’t done anything.  I’ll report back in a couple days about what this post has done for my Internet presence.

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