Catherine Carrigan, two-time Amazon No. 1 best-selling author and medical intuitive healer, will be appearing on Ramajon Cogan’s Program for Authors on Saturday, Jan. 17 11 a.m. EST to 1 p.m. EST.

To attend please visit this link.

Enter in this room number: 262 152 215

I am writing a series of blogs in hopes of serving my fellow non-geeks and authors. My goal is that we may all connect more easily with the readers and global audience who need to hear our message.

Resources:

Ramajon Cogan, Tom Bird Publish Now Guru, (928) 514-1616, rama@tombird.com

Catherine Carrigan, Medical Intuitive Healer and Amazon No. 1 Best Selling Author of What Is Healing? Awaken Your Intuitive Power for Health and Happiness and Unlimited Energy Now, 678-612-8816, catherine@catherinecarrigan.com

Tom Bird, Writing Coach, (928) 203-0200, tom@tombird.com

Greg Keesey, Website Genius and All-Around Great Guy: (717) 819-1049, greg@silverknightauthorwebsites.com

Scott D. Smith, SEO Guy in London: scott@scottdsmith.co.uk

Robin Charlsen, Twitter Guru: (256) 432-4499, rcharlsen@gmail.com

Denise Cassino, Amazon Marketing Genius: (303) 838-3399, dencassino@gmail.com

Website where you can see how well you are doing on your social media: www.klout.com

Website where you can sign up to create a monthly newsletter: freeemailmarketing.solutions or Email Marketing Free Trial

Website where you can take online courses to learn just about anything to do with computers: www.lynda.com

Artist who designs beautiful logos and book covers: Mynzah Osiris, (928) 239-9328, mynzah@hotmail.com

Jared Doles, Social Ally Dashboard: (480) 878-5947, jared@socialallyusa.com

Part 1. I Am Not A Geek And You Don’t Need To Become One Either

I am not a geek.

I wanted to start with this point because many of us non-geeks and authors believe that a person must somehow be naturally gifted with computers to succeed at social media.

To prove my credentials as a non-geek I have to start with this story.

In 2010, I filed for divorce. Up until that point, my ex-husband had run my website and handled all my computer issues.

While I was working through the divorce, I had the blessing of a full-scale technological breakdown. My house phone broke. My cell phone broke. Two weeks later, my desktop Mac broke. And that was the least of it – practically everything in the house broke – the roof, the fountain, the hot tub, the ceiling in the bathroom. I could go on but it would be way too boring.

This is similar to a breakdown in healing work, when an individual experiences so many overwhelming challenges in their life that they are forced to change. I even write about the blessing of a breakdown in my Amazon No. 1 best seller, What Is Healing? Awaken Your Intuitive Power for Health and Happiness.

So back to the blessing. I went to the local Atlanta Apple store and was educated to the fact that the reason my computer broke was that I had been turning it off incorrectly for the previous four years!

The very kind people at Apple signed me up for their $99-a-year One-to-One training program so I could begin to learn the basics.

Although for years I had a website for my business, about this time a friend of mine encouraged me to start a blog about my work as a medical intuitive.

She said that my talent as a medical intuitive can not be taught or learned and that I needed to start communicating about what it is that I actually do.

The very kind people at the Apple store taught me how to set up a website all by myself.

This reminded me of when I trained my rescue dog Belle to jump through a hula hoop. The dog trainer explained that doing something she had never done before would give her confidence she never had.

Because the folks at the Apple store explained to me that you sometimes have to pay to use photographs on the web, I began to take photos with my iPhone to use in the new blog.

I took photos of my garden, of my orchids, on my walks, when I went to the Atlanta Botanical Garden or anytime I saw something inspiring or uplifting.

Lo and behold, I discovered that I really enjoyed taking pictures and that all my years studying art history at Brown University had finally amounted to something useful.

As part of the transition in my divorce, I had to take over the operation of the old website as well as the new blog about my work as a medical intuitive.

Greg Keesey, the website guru, was invaluable during this process. I can’t say enough good things about Greg. He is able to communicate with us right-brain types and has had my back more times than I can even count. He is reasonably priced, kind and patient.

I got on www.lynda.com and took basic courses on how to use WordPress. Later on, I also took a lynda.com course on how to do Twitter. I literally knew nothing.

During this time, I had a professional analysis of my old website. The report said that my old website failed every test there was. It turned out it was going to be cheaper to build a new website than it would have been to try to fix the old website.

So with Greg’s help, I built a brand new website, transferred over years of articles and free downloads, and continued running my new blog.

Although this was an incredibly difficult time, this new foundation building a blog about my work as a medical intuitive and rebuilding my old website set me up for success in the social media.

At the time, I had no social media presence other than LinkedIn.

When you go through a divorce, people say all kinds of unpleasant things and I had a deep fear and dread of the social media.

I didn’t start my Facebook page until February 2013.

I started a Twitter account probably in the summer of 2014, but I didn’t start working on it until January 2015.

In other words, like many other authors, I started from scratch, knowing so little about computers or the internet that I did not even know how to turn on my computer properly.

Today my Klout score is 65.

Jared Doles, my contact at www.socialallyaz.com, says that when you get to a Klout score of 63, you are in the top 5 percent of internet marketers.

To put this in perspective, Dr. Mercola, who runs a huge newsletter about natural health, has a Klout score of 72.

Deepak Chopra’s Klout score is 86.

Barack Obama is 98.

J.K. Rowling is 90.

Cassandra Klare, whose book City of Heavenly Fire is listed on Goodreads as the No. 1 most popular book of 2014, is 72.

Louise Hay’s Klout score is 65.

Esther Hicks is 61.

If you want to see the social media impact of any individual, just go to www.klout.com and enter their name.

The point of my relating all this is that if you set your mind to it, you can build a social media presence that will set you up for success in a relatively short period of time.