My virtual persona has now, end of May 2015, written almost 1000 tweets and has more than 3100 followers. About half the time when I put up a blog post and advertise it on Twitter, I get one blog reader. I post blog posts twice a week and have done that since november. On May 23 Wordpress notified me that I have made 50 posts.
But Twitter readers are fickle, they may read the post and then you do not see them again. You also note they are starting to use Twitter not as a messaging board or following the twitter stream of someone interesting, but as a search engine. People read your tweets, which they obviously found based on the hash tags you put in, but while they may retweet or favorite the tweets, they do not come back unless you use the hashtag again.
People are starting to use Twitter much like Google, so it would make sense for Google to buy them. After all, they are both in the business of using their great platforms to steal your attention and sell it to the highest bidder.
On April 24 I got the first reader from a search engine. I have not done anything to market the blog, no SEO, no pictures, Wordpress original boring theme. No wonder I only get one reader every day (myself excempted).
But now I know how many readers you get from Twitter. One. Not that I do not promote my posts on Twitter. But the barrier to making people leave Twitter must be pretty high.
Twitter users love Twitter and they stay there. If I want to sell something to them, a direct promotion may be more effective. I will find out when I try.
The Twitter users are a great crowd, though, except the spammers who try to sell you followers. But I never follow them back and they normally unfollow pretty quickly. Many of the tips people tweet about family travel are also very useful.
But that is not how you sell ebooks, and that is what I need to do. So the next step is to create a website with its own domain so people can find it and get more useful information than I can squeeze into a tweet. And give it a nicer design so people do not feel bored but entertained. Add a few pictures too. That is going to take some work and unfortunately I have to put in some money to get a domain name. So maybe I will try without it, but leverage whatever free templates and other resources I can find in Wordpress. Which is the platform of choice nowadays.
Automattic, the company that makes the Wordpress software, provides free hosting on their website, so I will stay with that. There are tons of free resources available, as well as those who you have to pay for. I will focus on that next, in parallel with editing down my book to a series of ebooks.
That may sound easy but it was not. Perhaps I needed the mental distance to be able to restructure my material. But now I have got going. I think it will be four or five ebooks. To make the same type of money that I would from a printed book, I would have to charge six to seven dollars each. So I have to figure out a way to make them worth that. Without pictures.
Yes, no pictures. Not that I do not have them. But I want to explore how to make something entertaining and engaging without photos. Or other pictures. Yes, that is probably as hard as it sounds. But it would be worth trying.
I will be able to add quite a few blogposts based on the material - but it takes even more editing. And it turns out to be hard to use a revenuesharing site, because as they get less ads, they tighten up their participation and content submission rules so much that it does not pay to work with them.
I think I have built that "know, like, and trust" factor that is required to make people buy from you, but I have not yet given enough enough to attract an audience. Perhaps I also should create some static pages around the most important topics. What is most important is of course not something I should determine, but my audience. And here Twitter might actually provide some guidance. People retweet your tweets (although not as often as I would like), and they mark tweets as favorites. That means they like them, and I should provide more of what they like.
And I should join Google Plus. Yes, I know it is puny compared to Facebook and Twitter, but that may already be a reason to join. You get more traction if you are talking to a smaller group, although it is not that small. Let us see how it goes.
Inga kommentarer:
Skicka en kommentar