I had the opportunity to interview Jared Shockley with Empower Small Business for an hour long podcast. I’ve used his consulting services for my technology plan, and he offered to share some insights about how other authors can have a web presence -- and can even do it for free!
He was great about speaking in "plain english" so that us non-techies can easily understand. Before we started, I also sent him links to a few authors' websites so we could talk about them. By the way, all the author sites we discussed except Meg's, are involved in the upcoming 2008 Emerald City Writers' Conference (and Meg, just hollar if you have time to stop by!)
These are the broadcast notes for the Jared’s podcast.
Blog Services. You can start a blog for free, here are a few examples of where you can go:
Live journal
Blogger
Windows Live Spaces
Windows Live Writer - no need to go site-to-site to do your updates -- just write your update once, and it will update various sites automatically!
Social networks are also a way to make friends with common interests. Some are more popular in certain areas of the world, so research that aspect to target your audience. Here are a few that Jared mentioned, and I included popular countries for each network at the time of this posting.
Facebook - Worldwide
Myspace - worldwide
Bebo - US, UK, NZ, Pacific Islands
Skyrock/Skyblog - Europe
Hi5.com - Latin American and Asian teens. Popular in Cyprus and Romania
Orkut - popular in India and Brazil
Friendster - SE Asia
Cyworld – S. Korea
Linkedin - Business and IT professionals
Authors Den
Websites. If you would like to follow along as we discuss authors' websites, here are the URLs we went to:
Dona Sarkar-Mishra
Shelli Stevens
Meg Cabot
Delilah Marvelle
Cherry Adair
Allison Brennan
RSS Feeds and Podcasts can set to be auto loaded into devices such as:
Itunes
Zune
Miro
There is usually a free section to sign up on search engines such as:
Yahoo
Google
Microsoft Live
And if you would like to take your internet plan to another level, listen to Jared’s special offer for those listening to this podcast! You can email jared at this address.
I’d like to thank Jared for his insights and expertise – he really cares about seeing people realize their dreams and hopes that technology can help make that happen.