(Not So) Wordless Wednesday

Facebook has given me definitive proof that the only way to attract attention to my writing is to post photos of babies and puppies. Duly noted.

Publishing Year One: Marketing Mayhem

Once you write a book, you have to take off your writer hat and put on your business hat. This is true of any creative profession. It’s not enough to just write, revise and edit. It’s not enough to put the paint to canvas. You must go and sell yourself to get anything that resembles success.

Like I’ve said before, I wanted to create this project without spending money—at least not a lot of it. There are so many free options for advertising out there that I knew I could find success without having a marketing budget. I was confident in that. But what I didn’t expect was for free advertising options to have a little bit of class and some standards for what they advertise.

Advertising Options

The main options I looked at were the free/bargain priced ebook newsletters I subscribed to. Most of them had the option to submit your book for free and they would choose whether they wanted to promote it or not. Fair enough. The problem with these newsletters is that they wanted to make sure they were providing quality products to their subscribers (nothing wrong with that). Most of these advertising outlets have a review minimum that you have to meet before they will consider your book. Usually it is 5-10 reviews with a four- or five-star rating on Amazon, or a combination of Amazon and Goodreads. To this day I still don’t have 5 reviews on Amazon and Goodreads combined (considering some reviews are cross posted). And you have to throw out the one less-than-stellar review the book received because it didn’t reach the 4-star minimum.

So this advertising option was out. I then decided to check out my own newsletter option. But there is a big problem with starting your own newsletter. If you go through a service like MailChimp, you are required to provide a physical address that appears on each newsletter. I didn’t want to give out where I lived and I didn’t want to rent a P.O. box where I lived (because, as we all well know, I still don’t want to live here). So I had to toss that option too. 

Social media is free, it’s great and you can utilize it in a hundred different ways. So that ended up being one of my main ways of advertising Unfolding Life. Conversion numbers are really hard to get from this, so I’m not sure how well it actually worked, but I did get new followers who happen to enjoy haiku. Whether they bought the book or not is another story…

Goodreads: Offerings to the Book Gods

The last advertising avenue I put effort into was Goodreads. After all, that’s where I first discovered some of the better self-published authors, and they were doing great on the site. I already had a large number of friends/connections on Goodreads, so I took a personal approach and sent site messages out about my launch day ebook giveaway. Surprisingly, a number of people wrote back telling me good luck… but they were also telling me that they don’t read ebooks, so they didn’t enter the giveaway. 

That’s when I put into place Goodreads Advertising Phase Two: hitting up the groups. I belong to at least a dozen groups, many of which allow shameless self-promotion, providing you post the message in the right category. I went through all of these, posting messages and trying to connect with others. I got a few bites, some people telling me it wasn’t the worst they had ever read after checking out Amazon’s preview (uh, thanks?) and others telling me they would definitely put it on their reading list. I offered a number of free review copies, and some readers surprised me by saying they preferred to buy it so they could support indie authors. But let’s be honest—if their reading lists are half as long as mine, I’ll be waiting a few more years for those reviews to come in. 

Without spending any money (other than on the copy for the giveaway), I managed to get a few people interested in what I had to offer. Would money have changed that? With a niche like haiku, I’m not so sure anything would have changed. Except I would be slightly poorer than I am right now. 

Tomorrow, we’ll take on the hard numbers.

Busy Month for Big Rewards

If only I was paid overtime. I have been taking on nearly double the amount of work lately not only put a bigger cushion on the bottom line, but to also fund some of the marketing expenses I will be seeing in the coming months. While I have found a lot of free advertising and marketing avenues to look into, there are still some really great opps that only money can buy: like well-placed ads, contest prizes, etc.

Although it seems daunting, I'm still excited about it. I'm finally seeing a project through to the end and I'm grateful that I finally found an idea that has kept me interested at every turn. Hopefully, I'll sell enough copies to fund my next project -- or at least enough to let me take a full weekend off one of these days. Although, when you love what you do, it's very hard to walk away. Even for a weekend.

Changing My (Non)/Writing Habits

I took a look at my work habits this week. Turns out I started spending a lot more time trying to find ways to get hits on my articles rather than just continuing to produce quality work. That's not good. I've read all of the advice and tried to follow most of it, but promotion is not my strongest quality. Although somehow I did manage to get my page rank of this blog up to 2, which is amazing considering I have had it since 2003 and this is the first time it crept up above 0.




But I also have to give myself a little credit this week. I managed to create a few more good work habits. I am able to stick to a schedule now, even when those little unexpected things creep up.I am meeting my daily published articles goals, work article goals and I'm still chugging away at the bids for bigger projects. I thought the hardest part would be the 500 words a day, but:

500 Words update: Technically I met my goals yesterday and today, although I wrote 500 words before midnight and 500 words after. This is another habit that doesn't need to continue. I would rather schedule my writing time first thing in the morning instead of up late. The writing gets a little crazy when I get tired.

Minimizing Advertising

Sometimes blogs and websites can get bogged down with advertising and lose its basic message. I decided to try and minimize the amount of advertising I'm inundating my regular readers with. This blog is about writing and how my life in constantly turned upside down in the pursuit of that. While ads may be a necessary evil, why draw more attention to it than I have to?

There will still be the occasional paid blog posts, but for anything that does not require a post, I'm adding it to my Hot Deals! tab so that if you want to take advantage of the offers, you can. If you don't, you don't have to look at them. It's a win-win for us all.

Need Advertising? Get A Great Deal

The #1 problem I see with many freelance writers is that they don't take enough time to promote themselves to find new clients. I know I have been guilty of this myself! So I thought I would let you guys know about a great deal that's come up through Sponsored Tweets. I have used this type of advertising myself and it works really well to drive traffic to your articles, websites, etc. Check it out:

Benefits of Blog Advertising

There are so many benefits to advertising on blogs. I did not realize how blog marketing could actually work for many businesses. At first I thought an advertiser would get one, maybe two hits from a blog post or cost per click ad on a blog. Even the most popular blogs couldn’t pull off that big of a profit, right? I was wrong. Especially after I watched Oprah one day and saw that a Mommy blogger earned quite a lot of money from sponsored advertising and marketing on her blog. Amazing!

I know that her situation is probably rare. Most people cannot earn a living by blogging along. Nor should they try. Blog advertising is a good way to earn a little something extra, but cannot be the backbone for your success. The blog itself should be your main concern when it comes to earning money from advertising.

The first tip for any blogger looking to make money with blog advertising is to make sure you write quality content. It does not matter how many visitors your get per day. If you content is not informative or useful in some way, you cannot build a base of regular readers. Regular readers are the ones more likely to check out your advertising in posts.

Along the same vein, whenever a blogger writes a blog post for money, it should reflect what the advertiser wants people to know about the product, but also how it personally relates to the blogger. You can start writing better reviews by carefully evaluating each paid opportunity and choosing ones that relate to your life and your blog.

And no one can ignore the power of SEO for blogs . If you have a niche blog, make sure to use SEO strategies to your advantage.

Paid posts should be a fun way to earn a little extra cash doing what you love to do anyway: blog!

LAST DESPERATE PLEA FOR A NEW LAYOUT

I promise this is the last time that I will post about getting a new blog layout. Anyone that can help me with a professional looking layout and be able to keep all of the elements on my blog after the switch will get a good deal: free advertising for any website FOR LIFE. This means that I will post an ad for your website/blog/webpage anywhere on my blog (top, bottom, side--doesn't matter) PERMANENTLY.

To help me out, all you have to do is email me and let me know you are working on a layout for me... I need to get this as soon as possible. THANKS!!!

Advertisers on Social Spark

I love the opportunities to blog about that I get at SocialSpark.com. So far, in the six or seven weeks that I have been taking opportunities here, I have made close to forty dollars. Not too shabby for a few minutes of work per week. There are many advertisers that get great exposure by getting people to blog about their products and services. And I think that even more advertisers should join the pay per blog bandwagon.

Some of the advertisers I would love to see participate at Social Spark are the brands that I have come to know and trust in my own life. I would really love to see companies like Dove come to Social Spark because not only do they have products that I trust and use, but they also have social programs that may not get as much promotion as they should. Many companies that we all know are like Dove. They not only give us the products that we have come to know and use, but they also give back to communities on a local and national scale with programs designed to enlighten people on important topics.

Even if they come to Social Spark to promote their good works instead of their products, they will find thousands of bloggers that are just waiting to share this opportunity. I know I would be very interested to write about it!