Spreading The Word

More On Marketing

In an earlier post I explained how I persuaded the Grumpy Old Bookman to give me a mention on his blog which led to a steady dribble of visitors wandering over from his site to take a peek here.

If I'm ever going to attract more readers to A Half Life Of One I need to build on my modest success and increase my readership. Here’s how I propose to do it:

1 Write interesting and amusing posts that will encourage people to return here regularly. I hope these regular returnees will subsequently promote interest in this site by word of mouth. So tell a friend – if you have one.

2 Widen the scope of my viral marketing to encompass more literary bloggers (you have been warned).

2 Devise a new viral campaign that will attract the interest of bloggers with broader (but allied) interests (ie librarians, philosophers, footballers). In other words, people who already have a predisposition towards reading. (All right, I lied about the footballers).

4 Launch a guerrilla marketing campaign aimed at sites populated by visitors with little interest in reading but which attract wide audiences. I will then attempt to turn a proportion of the subsequent (probably illiterate) visitors into readers.

Since this whole blog is by way of an experiment I’ll publish the stats regarding site visitors on a regular basis and you can see for yourself if the strategy is working or not. You can also suggest improvements, and if you wish, adopt the methodology for your own use.

If I was doing this with my own business I would also take a long hard look at the product I was promoting. For a start I would want to ensure that it was a commodity that people actually wanted to buy. Since the product in this case is A Half Life Of One, and it probably is a pile of crap, you can see I have a problem here. At some point or other I’ll probably have to junk the book and put something more saleable into the shop window. I’ll postpone that difficult decision for a couple of weeks if you don’t mind.

It’s interesting tho’, isn’t it. I’ve hardly started and already I’m confronting the same problem faced by any conventional publisher stuck with a book that won’t sell.