Feb 04
AndrewA Writer's Blog, Business, Life in Digital
It sounds irresistible in theory. A completely free marketing campaign that reaches potentially millions of prospective customers. But how do you know if it works? (Click here for part one or part two of this article)
There are some obvious answers. 1) It works if your friends forward your message to other friends and their friends forward it on to people who you would never reach otherwise. For instance, the best viral videos get 100,000 hits or more, usually within the first few days. 2) If you have a subscriber-based service (like a podcast or mailing list) you can measure success in the increase in subscribers that you gain and keep. 3) The most obvious of all: did you see a spike in sales?
Depending on how technology-savvy you are, you can gather a lot of hard data on the success of your campaign. You can track the number of times an e-mail was forwarded. You can google search for your campaign keywords and see how many results pages come up related to your viral campaign. You can use some facebook metrics to track the popularity of your fan page. You can use twitter search to look at the trends for your particular keywords (by the way, trend tracking is available even if your keywords aren’t appearing a lot – they do not have to be in the top ten most popular trending topics for you to track them). In addition to that, your website can have a hit counter, google has its own analytic package, and you may be able to track clicks through any of the social networking tools you end up using.
Here’s a strong caveat: if you have to beg your friends to help viral your message, then you already don’t have a strong campaign message. It doesn’t hurt to ask them to spread the message along, but the true success of viral marketing is to get other people to do the work for you. Remember, what you have at its core is a word of mouth campaign. The success of your campaign is grounded in your ability to create a message that people want to share on your behalf. You are capitalizing on a culture of endorsement for your product. Whether you achieve that through humor or creating a thought-provoking message or some other catch that makes your pitch shine, it is really the power of your message that propels it to viral stardom. But the vehicle that takes you there is other people’s interest.
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Writer’s Income is a weekly blog that covers all aspects of writing for publication. Topics include writing, publishing, and marketing with an emphasis on doing all the work yourself.
About the author
Feb 02
AndrewA Writer's Blog, Business, Life in Digital
It sounds irresistible in theory. A completely free marketing campaign that reaches potentially millions of prospective customers. But how does it work?
A viral campaign at its heart is a word of mouth campaign. (Click here for part one of this article) You create a message to advertise your product and send it out to as many people as possible. The vitality of your campaign depends on those people then forwarding your message on to others – specifically potential customers you wouldn’t reach otherwise.
To design a campaign, you first need to look at the specifics of the product you are selling, the time available to produce the message, the resources available and how best to reach your target audience (since you should always pitch to them first). Start by writing down your top-level outcomes. For most of us it would be “to interest new customers in purchasing my product” but there could be other outcomes for you as well. Perhaps your outcomes are “to get people to sign up for my mailing list” or “to announce a special sale starting soon.”
Then decide how you want to get the message out to potential customers. Videos, weblinks, comic strips, podcasts, and sound clips are all viable viral vehicles for your campaign messages. But it helps to work within a medium that you are comfortable with. Videos tend to be looked on as a universal medium for viral marketing, but if you don’t know the first thing about putting together an effective video message then you might want to start somewhere else.
Once you’ve have decided what kind of message you are going to create, you need to figure out how to present your pitch. It helps to create an outline or even a storyboard to plan out how your message is going to look, feel or even sound. Then look at the overall scope of your campaign and ask yourself:
1) Does the message make sense for the product?
The best campaigns not only make obvious connections to the product, but the campaign actually makes sense for the product being pitched. Dancing babies are great, but what do they have to do with what you are selling?
2) Is there a clear call to action?
A call to action is a specific instruction for the customer to take action after viewing the message. It can be to direct them to a sales website. It can be “come by our store today.” It should be very specific and it should match your top-level outcomes.
3) Is the message eye-catching?
This is the short-attention span generation. You need something within your message to get your audience to immediately take notice. The good news is that for viral campaigns, it’s not necessary to keep their attention for very long.
So what happens if your product isn’t glamorous, exciting or particular flashy? What happens if you don’t know the first thing about marketing? What happens if you just are not familiar with the technology to start a viral campaign? Then ask yourself:
1) Is this the type of marketing project I should be embarking on at all?
2) Should I pay someone to do the work for me?
3) Do I have the time and resources to complete the campaign myself?
My recommendation is to create a sample message – short and sweet – as a test run. For instance, create a 20-second video clip using your phone’s video recorder and post the video to YouTube. Ask your friends to watch the clip and provide some feedback. Or draw out a comic strip with your pitch and post it online. Ask people to leave comments about it.
By trying it out, you also take the process from start to finish and possibly identify some pitfalls that maybe you weren’t aware of. Here’s one that you may not have thought of: what if Facebook isn’t working the day you want to link to your campaign on the site? Technology fails all the time, websites go down, internet connections are lost. A test-run gives you the opportunity to see where things might go wrong before you spend a lot of time and energy on a large-scale campaign. I would also recommend keeping a list of all the things that may not have worked the way you expected them to so you can plan for it next time.
Finally, before you move on to a full-blown campaign, ask yourself:
1) Is it clear what I am selling?
2) Is it clear how to purchase my product?
3) Is it visually interesting?
4) Am I achieving my top-level outcomes?
If the answers are ‘no’ then tweak your campaign. Once you are comfortable with your test message, it’s time to move on to the full-length pitch.
Part three will look at how to measure the success of your viral campaign.
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Writer’s Income is a weekly blog that covers all aspects of writing for publication. Topics include writing, publishing, and marketing with an emphasis on doing all the work yourself.
About the author
Jan 31
AndrewA Writer's Blog, Business, Life in Digital
It sounds irresistible in theory. A completely free marketing campaign that reaches potentially millions of prospective customers. But does it work?
Viral marketing is a word of mouth campaign using one of the various free social networking sites, of which facebook, youtube and twitter are probably the most heavily played to. You post a link or a video to the site and your friends share the link with their friends and you’re in business. Instantaneous increase in your potential audience ten-fold.
But does it work?
Viral marketing, whether it’s a video or a web link or a photograph, relies on volume. It requires buy-in on a scale beyond your circle of friends and their circle of friends. It works by the sheer numbers, the likelihood that if you can reach enough people, someone is going to buy.
Viral marketing is completely contrary to the notions of conventional marketing. The whole point of marketing is to focus in on your target demographic and pinpoint your advertising to people who show a bent for buying your product. You aren’t marketing to make friends, gain fans or followers. You are trying to convert sales. Most viral marketing is completely untargeted. The people receiving your message may not be the ones you are trying to reach.
But does it work?
In a sense, word of mouth is the best way to sell a product. Unsolicited testimonials are hands-down the most effective type of marketing. Viral marketing taps into the notion by having your friends recommend to their friends whatever you’re selling.
But the untargeted nature of viral marketing means that your message may get lost along the way. You may be missing a call to action that urges people to make the purchase. As long as facebook and youtube and twitter are free, the only cost to you is your time. So yes, if you can make sales by this means and had minimal or no costs to launch a campaign, then the return on your investment has the potential to be high.
In part two, we’ll look at some ways to maximize your viral campaign. In part three, we’ll look at ways to measure your success.
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Writer’s Income is a weekly blog that covers all aspects of writing for publication. Topics include writing, publishing, and marketing with an emphasis on doing all the work yourself.
About the author
Jan 30
AndrewA Writer's Blog
I recently completed and then shelved a writing project because it was missing something. Well, let’s face it, if you had read it you might have suggested it was missing a few somethings. My editor did.
That’s how it goes that even when you know what needs to be there, you can spend months writing and still not quite capture it all.
But these really aren’t nebulous components. While it does depend on what kind of story you are writing, unless you are James Joyce, you are virtually required to include the following:
Someone to Love
The word protagonist is sometimes defined as “the hero” and sometimes more simply as the central character of the story. But it’s not enough for you to create a central figure around which everything rotates. Your book has to have a character your reader can love and admire.
A lot of writers get halfway there but then fail to make the spark. Whether you treat your character like an old friend, a lover or a parental figure, you have to inspire absolute devotion in your reader. It’s just like real life; you are a lot more invested when you care about the person.
In the book I wrote, I’m not sure I ever quite got there with my main character. I liked him, but even in 150 pages, I never quite connected with why you should like him, too.
And someone to hate
The best stories have the best villains. I’m not a big fan of the notion that villains need to have that nugget of goodness on the inside. If it makes them more interesting, go for it. Just remember, your villain’s job is to antagonize. Not just the other characters, but the reader too.
Does every story really have to have an antagonist?
One of the biggest flaws of my work was the missing villain. My character was mad at the world and he took it out on his friends. So I never quite settled on who was the bad guy. Was it him? Was it “the world”? Was it his friends even? You know, it doesn’t necessarily matter who the bad guy ended up being, but the fact that I didn’t know the answer pointed out a huge problem.
Storytelling of all types is about creating a bubble of empathy. Your job is to transport the reader into this world so completely that it blankets out the real world. While they are reading the book, they are in the book. It always, always, always starts with the characters.
A central thread
For the work that I shelved, I never fully developed the thread. I know that more than anything else, I was missing the core that kept all the individual chapters bound together.
I’ll give you an example. Dungeons and Dragons has been the template for epic fantasy since Lord of the Rings was published in the 50’s. (The series of books based on Dungeons and Dragons is officially called Dragonlance). If you pick up any of those titles, the books are massive tombs filled with dozens of central characters each with their own stories to tell.
But the brilliance of the works is that any one individual book has its central thread that you can trace from the first pages to the last – regardless of how many characters come and go, how many different locations they travel to or how many pages the book is.
For most books, the central thread is the plot. It’s the answer to the question ‘What is the book about?’ But it doesn’t have to be. Sometimes the connecting thread is a dominant theme or a character. Writers need to be more skillful to pull this off. But ultimately, think of it as the wick in the center of a candle. Without one, there is nothing to burn.
My work is shelved not because it lacked a central thread, but because I wasn’t skillful enough to pull it off. It’s hard to invest so much time into a project and then abandon it, but it’s important to know when it’s not good enough at that time. There may come a point when I dust it off the shelve and try again with that story. I now know what’s missing, I just need to make sure next time I get it all in there.
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Writer’s Income is a weekly blog that covers all aspects of writing for publication. Topics include writing, publishing, and marketing with an emphasis on doing all the work yourself.
About the author
Jan 21
AndrewA Writer's Blog
Step 1 Write a book
It’s essential to the process of publishing to have written a book.
Writing a book is easy. Writing a book that people want to read is a more complicated process. People are finicky. Their tastes run the gamut of what may be appealing to you as a writer to topics that you are either unqualified to write about or simply not interested in. There are a lot of books on the market. At any time, if you are serious about quantifiable success in writing, you are competing with 2.5 million other published book titles. That’s why step one is to have your book finished.
Step 2 Figure out if it’s good
This is more difficult than step one, believe it or not. How do you do it?
Seek criticism from someone you know
People who know you will tend to be overly optimistic about your book’s chances. This may make you feel swell, but what you need is a reasonably honest assessment of the book’s readability.
Readability and marketability are different things. Readability should equate to the quality of the product regardless of genre, mass appeal, topic or other barriers to sales. A good quality book gives the reader a feeling of value. It effectively conveys your message, whatever that message may be. It should be memorable. So hand over your draft to a friend or (if you’re brave) your mother and ask her to read it. Don’t ask if it’s good. Ask these three questions:
1) Did you feel like you wasted your time while reading it?
2) What was the central theme you got from reading it?
3) What’s your favorite part?
Believe me, if your reader can’t remember their favorite part without re-reading the manuscript, you got a problem worth fixing.
Seek criticism from a professional
This can be harder simply because a professional almost always costs money and almost always has something better to do than vet your manuscript for quality. However, if you have either a professional editor or a professional writer willing to read your work, this is a must. Don’t ask them anything in particular. Just say, “Your feedback and any advice would be greatly appreciated.” Don’t insult their expertise by insisting you know better what kind of advice they should give. And thank them for their time, even if you don’t get anything useful for it.
Submit it to an agent
This is a brave step. This also covers ’submit it to a magazine’ or ’submit it to a publishing house’. The problem with taking this route is that you are more likely not to hear anything, or anything constructive, back at all. And where does that leave you?
Step 3 Learn to edit
Even if self-editing is not your strongest skill, it’s something you should always be working on.
Different genres have different requirements for success. For example, fiction needs a beginning, middle and end. It needs characters, settings, dialogue, action, climax, resolution. These are obligations to the reader. Writing is definitely about aesthetic strengths, and editing is about improving the appeal through technical adjustments.
Figure out what strategy works best for you. Some people need to read the manuscript aloud as they edit. Others need to read slowly, taking each chapter as its own entity. One way to improve your editing is to edit other people’s writing. Take a class on writing that involves self-critique as well as peer-critique. A lot of metropolitan areas have adult education centers where these kinds of classes are reasonably priced and very effective.
Step 4 Learn to copyedit
Nobody, nobody, nobody – not your editor, not your agent, not your mother – is more invested in your work than you.
People sometimes have a brilliant eye for spelling errors, but copyediting your work is still a skill you need to have for yourself. Copyediting is usually the last stage before submission, but you should practice along the way. It is primarily the act of identifying and correcting spelling mistakes, word usage and other grammatical and semantic errors that change the meaning of your sentence/paragraph to something that is unintended.
If “its” and “it’s” meant the same thing, there would be no reason to copyedit. But they don’t and the use of one versus the other changes the meaning you are trying to convey. That is why we look for mistakes.
Here is some advice. Read the book backwards. Read each phrase, then the whole sentence and work your way from the last page to the first page. It is an excellent way to practice copyediting. It is tedious and effective.
I am not saying you should not have someone edit your work. I am saying you should find the mistakes first.
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Writer’s Income is a weekly blog that covers all aspects of writing for publication. Topics include writing, publishing, and marketing with an emphasis on doing all the work yourself.
About the author
Dec 18
AndrewMovies
Last night, we watched An Affair to Remember. I slept through 60% of it but the parts I saw made me recognize that Deborah Kerr’s character could be No. 2 on my list of the biggest movie bitches who were portrayed as virtuous. Mary Poppins in No. 1. (Don’t even tell me she doesn’t manipulate Mr. Banks into taking his kids to the bank and then “suggest” to them that they donate their toppins to the bird lady knowing nothing good would come of it – all because he dressed her down for a tea party on the ceiling…I’m just saying.)
Terry McKay (Kerr) ditches a fine looking boyfriend who clearly wants to marry her and happens to be excessively wealthy for a sketchy playboy played by Cary Grant who apparently never had to earn an honest dime in his entire life (his current girlfriend is a rich heiress). Granted, Grant is a hunk. But he’s also manipulative and full of shit (and in 1957, pushing 53).
As the story goes, not only is McKay dishonest with him, she saddles her otherwise fine looking boyfriend (played by Richard Denning *hunk* – and ten years younger than Grant at the time of filming) with the responsibilities of her convalescence (long story short – car accident) even though she doesn’t love him and couldn’t afford the care without his money. So she encourages his unrequited love while she recovers with the hope that she can eventually make up with Grant’s character. And of course, she’s perfectly honest with her bf that she’s using him, just to twist the dagger deeper into his back.
In other news, Kerr in this movie is exquisite looking. It’s like she’s made of porcelain.
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