Friday, March 18, 2016

Marketing Tips - Spamming Considerately

When I first started the incredible Indie Author journey I was so excited that if I saw a group with anything writing related in the name I would join immediately. Obviously some of them were larger than others and I had significantly more friend names in a few of them than I did in the rest. The larger the group or greater the personal connection I had to the group the more often I would see posts from them and therefore those became my go to groups for promotions when my book went live.

There are advantages to having a comfort zone because you trust the people in those groups to help offer advice and you interact with them so you can do trades of your work with them confidently. There are a number of concerns though that can arrive when hiding within your comfort zone for too long. The biggest is that you are never reaching a new audience. By continuously sending the same images to the same people you will very quickly grow stagnant and could easily cross the line into annoying. Not only will those trusted advice givers no longer care about the book your are so proudly posting but they may block all of your posts depriving you of answers when you are in need of assistance.

The lack of response can cause you to do exactly what I found I was doing, avoiding promoting all together. I wanted to get back to sharing my work but I realized I was hesitant to share the same images and links again even though a good deal of time had passed since the last marketing push I had made. That was when I thought about all of the groups I had joined back at the beginning. It is true that I had abstained from much interaction with many choosing to stay in my comfort zone but I was still a member of those groups and as I have grown I have become better at interacting with readers and writers of all levels and experience. So I decided to make a list of all the groups I was a part of to see where there may be more promotion opportunities. It didn't take long to see I had been missing a great amount of promotions.

I was a member of over two hundred groups. Thats right over two hundred. Now of course not all of them would be the right opportunity for me and my marketing but I needed to explore further to find out about each group to make the most of what I had. As it turned out I could promote in one hundred forty four of the two hundred twelve groups I was a part of. Some of them had scheduled days or limits on when and what you could post but all of them allowed some for of advertising at least once of twice a month, some of them every day if you desired. With that knowledge I made a spreadsheet (my OCD way of staying organized) that listed all of the groups, how often I could promote, whether they allowed posts about books, blogs and Facebook pages and of course any additional notes I cold find.

From everything I found I could promote my books, author page and my blog once per group per week and never drive people crazy with my over sharing. Plus now that I have three published books and a number of projects in the works I could mix them up so that I was promoting every day and still share new information with new people throughout almost the entire month. With my pretty color coded spreadsheet of groups I will be restarting my social media marketing press in the next month and tracking to see if my sales grow in response.

No comments:

Post a Comment