Writerly Things: Black Friday-Cyber Monday Promo Results

Hello my lovelies,

As you may (or may not) know, I did my first Black Friday through Cyber Monday promo....
and was very disappointed with the results. Because results are what matter, right?

Let's start with the good stuff:

I got several shares during my promo (thanks everyone on Facebook and Twitter who shared!)

I noticed something interesting on Facebook. I did not promote my posts as my budget is... limited at best. Facebook gave my promotional posts a lot less exposure than my other posts. (None got more than 20 views, even though most of my posts get 40+ views at any given time.) Very shady, Facebook!

I got a lot more engagement on Twitter, despite not promoting my posts. Makes me more inclined to spend my valuable limited budget there.

I got about the same number of views directly on my blog. I also shared on Pinterest and Google + and with several promo groups on Facebook, Google +, LinkedIn and Goodreads, but got no notable reaction.

Fortunately, I did not spend a penny, but I did spend upwards of 15 hours of effort in planning, promoting, and after analysis.

At my other jobs, 15 hours of work gross's me $300.

From my promo? $9.38

Ouch.

Back to the drawing board.

What are your top tips for promotion? Share in the comments below.

Writer's corner: The Balancing Act of Integrated Marketing

We've had strep at our house and so I found myself at home for 48 hours. What?!?! So much work to get done! I have really been struggling with balancing social media, blogging, writing, editing, audiobook production, and planning marketing lately. You can guess what has been getting the short straw.... Yup, marketing.

A part of me felt less guilty about this because I was running my adwords campaign and checking on it every couple of weeks. The campaign looked like it was doing well, as I have a .75% CTR on one campaign and a .36% CTR on the other... and yet, I wasn't able to see what it was doing for me. I saw a minor increase in sales, but nowhere near enough to pay for the click throughs.  My bounce rate is bad (98%) and I hate google analytics. It is a bunch of useless stats that are harder to comprehend than trying to read Chinese. (At least for me.)

So I spent those two days reading, reviewing, planning and plotting on how to work my marketing campaign and guess what I've got?

Well, I know that no single source of marketing is the magic bullet. I know that the key is to come up with a magical blending of social media, content marketing, email, and offline.  About six months ago I started paying for a subscription for Hootesuite and have been using that to manage my social media, but I recently found out that it has not been working. Here I thought I was sharing my posts across multiple platforms, when in reality half my posts were not getting shared anywhere other than twitter.... failing on the content sharing across social media. That explains why I haven't been seeing the stats growing.

I should be using my adwords to at least develo an email list, but I still haven't figured out how to do that. I have a Wix site and although there are some aspects that are very convenient about Wix, figuring out how to develop a landing page to offer a free sample of my book for an email address has not been easy.... that or I am entering febrile delerium...

And I don't know what to do with the email once I get it. The only "email list" I have are my blog readers, but I don't even have that. It is through blogger. They have my email list.  I have gotten a few email addresses from some of the blog hops I have done, but I don't use them. I should, but I don't.  I signed up for a free trial of hubspot before realizing that probably won't work for me (Beyond the fact that I can't spare $200 a month on Basic software.)

So I continue to muddle through,

What are your favorite marketing tactics authors have used? Share in the comments below.