Creating Your Own Blog Tour - Step Four - Thunderclap

Happy Monday, good people of the blogosphere! Today, it's all about Thunderclap campaigns. I know you've all seen them, but do you know what they're for or what they can do for your blog tour? I intend to show you, so grab those pens and notebooks and let's get going!

In this series:
How to Sign up Bloggers
Creating Promotional Materials and HTML
Finding Reviewers
Creating a Thunderclap Campaign
Throwing a Facebook Launch Party

Thunderclap. What is it?

Well, a Thunderclap campaign is you, asking for people to auto-share your content the day you want it to be blasted to the world. It's usually one or two lines that'll go on people's Facebook pages, Twitter feeds, and/or Tumblr blogs. Basically, it's a boom of content on day one of your tour.

You'll want to create this as soon as your bloggers sign up, so you can spend the time getting people to support your campaign. You have a max of 60 days to get your campaign supported and can choose either 100, 250, or 500. This number is important! If you don't meet it, your campaign won't go. But you can exceed whichever number you choose.

It's a great idea to have a master post with all the blog tour stops (and a short line of the content they'll have) listed at the bottom of your own tour post (you did remember that your blog should be counted as one of the many, right?).

That's the link you want to point your Thunderclap campaign to so everyone who makes it to that post can see the others.

But why a Thunderclap campaign?

Because your social media reach grows exponentially. Let's look at some numbers, shall we?
Without Thunderclap:

• 20 bloggers signed up to help with your tour and all of them post on time.
• Each of those bloggers has 250 e-mail followers (5k people).
• 50 of those followers on each blog are the same people (-1k).
• 100 of those followers on each blog don't read the content/posts (-2k).
• Out of the 2k left, we'll say 1k are readers of your genre.
• Those 20 bloggers may post to Facebook and Twitter, and probably have many of the same followers on those platforms, so we'll leave that number off for now to be reserved in our accounting.

Not a bad number, but you can do better.

With Thunderclap:

• 100 people sign up to tweet.
• Each of those accounts have 2k followers (200k people).
• 50 people sign up to post on Facebook.
• Each of those accounts have 200 friends (10k people).
• 20 people sign up to post to Tumblr.
• Each of those accounts have 200 followers (4k people).
• Out of 214k people, there are probably 10k that are unique and readers of your genre (that's less than 5%, and I'm being generous).

Now, if you look at the number of people you can reach with just a blog tour (1k), and the number of people you can reach with a Thunderclap campaign (10k), it's kind of a no-brainer, right? Yeah, you should probably do it.

But how?

Let's get into that now.

First, go to the Thunderclap website:

Click Login/Register:

Connect one of your accounts and give the proper permissions:

You'll see a screen like this:

Click Start a Thunderclap:

You already have your images, but feel free to look at some of the successful campaigns for ideas. Write up a tweet/post, and click Start:

Fill out the form (remember not to shorten your link), and then click create and continue:

On the last page, you're just looking over everything to be sure it's okay. Click submit, and wait. They usually get back to you with approval or denial within 72 hours.

Have you ever used Thunderclap? What were your results?

Well, that's all for today, folks! Until next time, WRITE ON!

Jo