PUBLISHED AUTHOR OF How To GET STARTED WITH TWITTER For Absolute Beginners GET GOING AND GET GROWING

How To GET STARTED WITH TWITTER For Absolute Beginners GET GOING AND GET GROWING A Step-By-Step Guide Kindle Edition

So you may have been wondering what I have been up to and if I have fallen of the planet or something because I have been so quiet of late – No! I am still very thankful to be here and grateful that I have been able to write, finished and published book number two, on Kindle for Mac. This book is priced at only 0.99p for it’s launch which was yesterday – 8th April 2016. So proud to have finished this, published it, and be able to help a ton of people in the process. Thanks always for your support. The price won’t stay like this forever, so if you do want a copy, grab one now. And please share this post with your friends and anyone you feel might benefit from it.

After creating this book I have my twelfth Twitter account. @quirkybooksnet is my most popular account with over 4000 organic followers. I have never paid for followers. I have taught Twitter for Recovery from Mental Health for the Recovery Learning Community, that is part of the NHS, and taught how to use Twitter for business and pleasure; as part of my Quirky Training business – I fully know what I am talking about and will easily and confidently guide you through the necessary steps to get going and get growing.

This is the Ultimate Guide for Absolute Beginners Who Have No Clue About How To Get Started With Twitter!

You have heard of Twitter and how it is one of the most powerful communication tools on the internet. You have seen people on TV saying Tweet us. You have heard of businesses getting ahead of their competition because they are using it daily, and you would love to join in. But you are a bit of a techno phobe, and you just don’t know where to start or how to get going; and most guides around seem to blow your mind and confuse you all the more! You want something very easy that you can just follow along with, that will take you from A-B, and decipher what steps you are actually taking, so you can easily remember how to use Twitter and have a basic understanding of what is going on, long after you have put the book down!

This book will guide you through every step to get started, get going and get growing with Twitter. In an easy to understand step-by-step format, Social Media Expert Sandra Bellamy teaches you:

How to create your first ever Twitter account
What Twitter is and what it is used for
What a Tweet is and how to send one
How to add a profile and header photo
How to add a short bio with the option to link it to another site
What direct messages are and how to send and reply to one
How to Like, Retweet and Reply to Tweets
How to follow other Tweeters and search for more Followers
What @mentions are and how to use them
What Hashtags (#) are and how to use them
How to unfollow someone or block them
How To Gain More Followers, Likes and Retweets
12 Golden Rules for Getting the Most Out of Twitter

Buy it from USA

Buy it from UK

This is the essential guide every Twitter novice won’t want to be without.

Do you already use Twitter?

How are you getting on with Twitter?

Finding it hard to get followers?

The information in this book will help you.

I would love to have your feedback.

Until next time, keep embracing your quirky, and write soon

Sandra xx

When I write – I feel my whole soul is melted into me!

Hi everyone

When I write, I feel my whole soul is melted into me. I feel I am a personification of the word writer; and I am at absolute peace within myself. It’s like someone flicks a switch inside of me and I know this is how my life is always meant to be, for eternity.

I have been in my cave writing, editing, amending and adding to my Break Through The Barriers Of Redundancy book for almost two weeks. I took 12 days off from my day job to get my book finished and uploaded to Amazon as an e-Book. I am pleased to say that I finished the book on Tuesday; except for the re-formatting for Kindle, which I am now in the process of doing in the evenings after my day job. My two days off from my day job next week, I am working in my teaching job for over half day on Monday and I have a new client for my self-employed Quirky Training business, teaching Facebook for business on Wednesday for part of the day. So more often than not, I work 7 days a week nowadays. That’s why I currently have less time to blog and to visit blogs, so apologies for that.

I love you all dearly. Never forget that. I appreciate your commments and likes, and I appreciate you.

My book has been at least two and a half years in the making and so I am going to be extastic once it’s published, and it should help a ton of people in the process.

My Quirky Training business can be found at Quirky Training. It’s part of my education hub Quirky Academy offering. You can view it here: Quirky Academy. I teach blogging, Facebook and Twitter for business or pleasure. My number is 07932 768970 if you know anyone who may benefit from my training now, or in the future.

My main focus for these next couple of evenings, is trying to finish the re-formatting of my book to upload to Amazon. However long it takes, I won’t stop until I am a published by author.

Stay quirky and write soon

Sandra

My Grandma Bellamy – Gone but not forgotten!

Break Through The Barriers Of Redundancy Manuscript

My Grandma died a year ago on Friday 13th at 9.20pm. I was holding her hand when died and that was her dying wish that she told me about in February last year. I am so glad I fulfilled that wish. I am not going to dwell, as it’s too upsetting for me. I know she supported me 100% in my career. I have spent about 10 hours revising and amending my book today and I am going to continue to work on it. The book is dedicated to her and she knew that before she died.

As you can see it’s a mammoth book and a mammoth task to edit and amend it – It’s going to be an amazing book – I look at it and think, did I really write that? – Yep!

I am working hard to get it published in e-Book format on Amazon asap.

Write soon and stay quirky

Sandra

quirkybooks.net – New website coming soon

Hi Everyone

My apologies if I have not been blogging or commenting as much lately but I have some amazing news to share with you. Not only have I been having some time off from work to celebrate my birthday week but I have also commenced work on changing http://www.quirkybooks.net into a much more impressive author website which will incorporate an e-Book store in the near future. All books on this site will be my own written work. Book cover illustrations will be from a variety of sources including new illustrators.

This is an exciting time for both me and quirkybooks.

If you search for my website at the moment, you will see that it is currently under construction whilst I spend the next weeks adding content to my site. By June or July I hope to have my first e-Book available to buy on this site. I intend to self publish on Amazon too.

As always, I like to do things the quirky way, so rather than having books galore to start with, you will see books gradually appearing over time.

For my Birthday day, I visited the National Marine Aquarium in Plymouth and I hope to upload some photos I took there soon.

I have a lot of blog award posts to catch up with and I am very grateful for each and every one. Please bear with me, I will get around to officially thanking you and accepting them, although I may not be able to devote the time to contact all nominees individually due to my website preparation and new future work commitments.

Something magical is starting and I am thrilled to have you along for the journey. Thank you my friends.

Write soon

Sandra

What’s Holding You Back? – Skills and Experience – Beat Redundancy Blues

Hi Everyone

As you may know, I am currently working on my first e-Book about redundancy and helping people to get back into work and I have another WordPress blog to support this mission at http://www.beatredundancyblues.wordpress.com

I wanted to share with you my latest post from that blog, as the information is relevant to any job you go for.

So here it is:

Now that we have settled into the new year, you will probably have noticed a lot of posts about goal setting and how you need to take action in order to move forward with your life. These posts are an invaluable source of information and inspiration and they are absolutely right, if you want to achieve your desired outcome, you need to take the steps to get there by setting goals and then acting on them but in the next few posts I want us to take a look at what may be holding you back from setting goals in the first place.

Sometimes in order for you to move forward you must reflect on the past and assess the present to see what changes need to be made. If you keep doing the same thing then you will always get the same result. If you are not happy with the result then you need to change what you are doing and there is no time like the present, so what are you waiting for?

Let’s consider some of the things that may be holding you back.

Not having the right skills or experience

There is no easy way to say this, if you haven’t got the right skills and experience for the job role that you desire, in these difficult economic times, you need to either obtain them or learn to convert previous experience and learnt skills into transferable experience and skills and if you can’t do that then you probably won’t get a look in because the competition is so tough.

Do not be fooled by a job advert that states: “Previous experience is not essential as full training will be given for the right candidate.”

If the interviewer can get a person with previous experience who has the correct basic skills, the right attitude for the job and is the right fit for the team, then they will go with them instead of someone with little or no experience. When I was a retail manager I recruited my own staff and I advertised for the experience and skills that I required and yes I still got applicants applying with little or no relevant experience and as time is money in business, usually I would sift theses applications out on first look as I had a large number of applicants. Of the applicants that were sifted out there may have been some that had the right attitude or were a good fit for the team but because I didn’t put them through to the interview stage I would never know this, so having the right skills and experience is essential.

When I wasn’t working, on the odd occasion I would apply for a job that was out of my sector and one that I had little or no relevant skills or experience in, just as I thought, I would get a reject letter or worse, nothing at all. Upon analysis, the reason I got a rejection letter was because I appeared on paper to have some of the skills and experience that were relative to the job and some transferable skills but obviously not as good a offering as someone who blatantly had the skills and experience in that sector and therefore I wasn’t surprised I was rejected and took it on the chin. When I received no reply whatsoever, it was because on paper there were barely any skills and experience relevant to the role for which I had applied, so why should the employer bother to reply to me when it looked like I had randomly decided to ‘give it a go’. An employer wouldn’t like this attitude and to be honest neither do I and when I became a manager I understood that and if I were to apply for a job now I would always tailor my CV and Cover Letter to the Job specification and that’s why I get responses when a lot of other people don’t, so if you are struggling to get responses, now you know the secret, why not try it for yourself?

If you want to gain the skills and experience to get a job you desire, you need to do voluntary work, work experience and you may need to take a course as well.

To read about what else may be holding you back be sure to read the next post on http://www.beatredundancyblues.wordpress.com and whatever you do, stay positive.

Sandra Bellamy

Tell me how you have got on with job applications?

Still to come on quirkybooks.wordpress.com, The One Lovely Blog Award nominations.

Interview Tips For The Over 40s (savingsavvy.com)
How to survive life after redundancy: I’m just a job title – help! (yorkshirepost.co.uk)
Redundancy to self-employment – top tips (simplybusiness.co.uk)
beatredundancyblues is awarded the Very Inspiring Blogger Award (quirkybooks.wordpress.com)
3 Things That Will Get Your Resume Thrown in the Trash (thedailymuse.com)
Interview for what you can’t change, not relevant experience (vitakis.com)

Writing Resolutions

Hi Everyone

Happy New Year.

As the new year has just begun, it’s time to reflect on your writing journey throughout 2012 and think about how you can improve your writing or how you can make more time for your writing, or both. You need to consider:

How much you write?
When you write?
What you write about?
How long it takes you to write?
What things you could give up or do less of to spend more time writing?
How can you find ‘spare’ moments to write?

If you are writing vast amounts but not seeing an outcome, in other words you are not seeing a story forming, it could be that quantity has taken over quality and you need to have a re-think and focus on practicing writing shorter pieces in order to develop the quality of your work.

If on the other hand, you found it hard to get started on your writing and you hadn’t written much in 2012, then it’s time to get creative.

Grab a pen and ten sheets of paper. On each sheet write one of the following category titles:

Animals
Birds
People
Family
Jobs
Hobbies
Locations
Foods
Objects
Magic

You should have a total of ten pages, each with a title from the above list.

Next, you need to write anything that springs to mind under each title. For example, for animals you may write dog, cat, horse, pig or sheep.

For Birds you could write, emu, peacock, sparrow, finch, duck, chicken.

For family you could write, mum, dad, sister, brother, uncle, cousin.

For people you could write anything from a detective to a boy called Peter.

Write whatever comes to your mind for each title. Go crazy if you want to, the more absurd and weird the better. This exercise is not only good for unleashing your creativity and to get you thinking differently but when you get writer’s block or just crave for fresh story ideas, you can get inspiration from these pieces of paper and can make a story out of one or more of the things you have listed for each category or from just a few categories. This means you will have no excuses for not having a new year’s resolution to either write more or to improve the quality of your writing.

My new year’s resolution is to change my quirkybooks.net site into a much more sophisticated and attractive design, incorporating an e-Book store, so watch this space for future details.

Whatever your writing resolution ensure you have one because without setting any goals you won’t take action and nothing will be achieved. If you want to progress with your writing, you need a resolution. Good luck and let me know how you get on.

Write soon

Sandra

The Liebster Award – Thanks And Nominations

Hi Everyone

On October 25th I was Nominated for the Liebster Award by Wendy from searchingforthehappiness.wordpress.com, thank you so much Wendy, you have an awesome blog and I love following it.

I have recently been away in London and wanted to take time to think about who to nominate before I went ahead and did so.

For this award I have received 11 questions to answer. Hope you find out a little more about me and if you have any questions, please fee free to ask away.

1. What has been the most rewarding part of blogging for you?

Writing a guest blog post for a HR company and it got a mention in The New York Times
Writing a blog post – Any opportunity to write and I am ecstatic
Communicating with some amazing people
Having Author and Writing Coach Rochelle Melander, guest blog on my blog
Having competitions for people to win a copy of Write-A-Thon
A blog post from my other blog, http://www.beatredundancyblues.wordpress.com being featured as a headline on Platform 3 online newspaper from Switzerland

2. What have friends and family said about you having a blog?

My mum can’t even text, bless her, let alone go on the internet but she is pleased when I win an award. My dad picks over grammar, punctuation and spelling and tells me if there is something wrong, bless him. My friends are happy that my blog is successful and are very encouraging.

3. Has your blog helped you professionally or is your blog just for fun?

My blog has certainly helped me professionally. It has boosted my status as a professional writer and I have other writers following my blog that I feel so honoured by.

4. How long have you been blogging?

I started this blog in November 2010.

5. What state or country do you live in?

I live in Exeter, in Devon, in the UK.

6. What is your favorite hobby?

Writing of course, I adore it from head to toe and back again.

7. What is your favorite type of food?

I like Thai food, if I can get the place serving it to cater for my allergies. East St Thai restaurant in London is good at doing this for me. I also like Chinese food and the same thing applies.

8. Do you have a pet? If so, what type?

I have four extremely beautiful guineapigs who live indoors with me. Snuggles, Peaches, Daisy and Cinnamon.

9. What is your favorite book?

Childrens’ – I like the Gruffalo and all Mr Men and Little Miss books
Writing – How to Write a How To book
Business – How to Start and Run Your Own Internet Business

10. What is your favorite movie?

I like the dance movie “You’ve Got Served”, Dirty Dancing and Grease.

11. What is your favorite thing to do when you have free time?

Write
Go to the cinema
Spend time cuddling my guineapigs
See family and friends

It’s now my turn to nominate 11 blogs to win the Liebster Award:

http://thewhyaboutthis.com

http://inspireyourbusiness.wordpress.com

http://suewestwood.wordpress.com

http://shras789.wordpress.com

http://inspire1life.com

http://storiesbyclairevioletthorpe.wordpress.com

http://jessicaschaubbooks.com

http://diedreblake.wordpress.com

http://bookmust.wordpress.com

http://mjwrightnz.wordpress.com

http://www.feelgoodtribe.com

I need to ask all the nominees above, to please tell me a bit more about yourselves by answering the 11 questions below:

What first inspired you to start writing a blog?
What is the biggest challenge you have ever had to face when writing your blog?
If you travelled through time, what time would you want to arrive at and why?
Do you prefer to eat chocolate or sweets (or neither)?
Do you prefer to read or to write?
What is your favourite genre of writing and why?
What is your favourite non-fiction topic to read about and why?
If you could buy one book that would help you to solve a problem in your life, what would it be and why?
Do you prefer to write at night or during the day?
If you could be any character out of any book, who would you be and why?
Do you prefer to read a printed book or an e-Book?

Congratulations to all the nominees, I can’t wait to see your answers and which 11 blogs you have chosen to nominate.

Write soon

Sandra

Launch of quirkybooksnet Facebook Page – Guest Blogger Rochelle Melander here on 18th September

Hi Everyone

I have some exciting news, not only will there be a guest blogger, Rochelle Melander, Author and Writing Coach, blogging here on Tuesday 18th of September, the quirkybooks.net Facebook page was launched yesterday, click on the link below to view and to Like it: facebook.com/pages/Quirkybooksnet/144394649036836

quirkybooks.net is currently a basic site about me and my writing but in the next few months you will see it transform into a more attractive design, incorporating an e-book store. Join me on this extraordinary journey of creating an e-book store especially for you, as it unravels book by book.

My debut children’s picture book should be available to buy as an e-book on quirkybooks.net before Christmas and I will be writing lots of non-fiction, How to books, many of which, will help people who have been made redundant, to get back into work.

I already have ideas for different books I intend to write but in the meantime you can have your say about what non-fiction books you might like to see in the categories of redundancy/employment/business/writing/self-belief. By this I mean would you like books on how to get work in a certain type of industry? How to cope with redundancy? How to gain the art of self-belief?

Let me know what you think by commenting below.

Write soon

Sandra

Researching what your reader wants to read

Hi Everyone

Today’s post is in response to a comment from hutchagoodlife. To find out how you can research what your reader is wanting to read.

I recently wrote a non-fiction book proposal about redundancy and this involved a lot of research. This is what I did and what I would advise you to do, in order to increase your chances of giving the reader what they want and of getting published.

Google your subject – paying attention to the top 5 websites and browse them thoroughly
Use Google Keyword search tools for finding out what words and combinations of words are most searched for
Search the web in general for your subject matter and note and explore your results
Read as many books as possible, written by other authors on the subject/genre for which you want to write
Read books by the publisher/s you are going to submit your work to, to see what’s been done before
Look through magazines/newspapers, watch TV programmes on your subject
Devise a market research survey or questionnaire and find a suitable place to action it – then ensure you do take action by noting the results
Join social networking forums relevant to your subject and find out what everyone is talking about – A good one for me is LinkedIn
Go to your local bookstores and ask them for a print out on books that you can buy relevant to your subject, if there is a lot, choose between 5 -10. – Different bookstores will have some different titles that you can potentially buy but there will always be crossovers, which is when you can start to see patterns emerging of the most popular titles that you need to study
Go to visit your local library and look at books similar to or the same as your subject – Pay attention to how many times each book has been taken out – That way you can compare the most popular titles with the most unpopular ones and analyse why you believe they are better

The amount of time you spend doing each of the above, will most likely be different for a fiction book to a non-fiction book and although all are relevant, you may find that some work better for you than others, depending on what it is that you want to write about.

Whatever you are writing about, ensure you put a different slant on it, to what has been done before. Stay positive, stay focused and believe in your-self.

Good luck.

If you want any more help, please let me know.

Write soon

Sandra

A is for Appreciation of your reader (A-Z of writing)

Hi Everyone

Welcome to your A-Z of writing.

Over the coming weeks, I will be going through the A-Z of writing, giving hints, tips, information and advice on writing. Each post will start with a new alphabet letter, in sequence. I have just completed a Level 4 IAG Diploma. (Information, Advice and Guidance.) So lets see if I can put into practice, what I have learnt.

A is for appreciation of your reader. If it wasn’t for them, your audience, you would not be able to light up their life with your creative genius.

It is very important to: