An Overview, or, It might not be quite as obvious as you think

Now, most people understand what marketing is—or at least we think we do. But sometimes even marketing professionals can’t see the forest for the trees when it comes to the practice of marketing.

We all know that TV commercials and banner ads are a form of marketing, but they’re both different types of advertising, which is just one marketing tactic. The first things we think of when we think of marketing—search engine optimization, affiliate marketing, email, blog tours, giveaways—are also tactics.

Then what’s marketing? In my mind, marketing is getting your product into the minds of your audience, the people who are looking for your solution. Marketing can also help to persuade people to look for your solution, but a large part of marketing is connecting to a pre-existing audience, people who are either already interested in the type of product you’re selling or who have the problem your product solves.

Sometimes it seems like fiction authors are at a disadvantage here. Nonfiction authors frequently do have products designed to solve problems and benefit readers. Where do fiction authors fit in?

Just like with my characters’ goals in fiction, I was overthinking this one a lot. (It’s like a hobby.) I was so focused on trying to figure out what problem we solve for our customers. But really, we have it pretty easy! Your audience is built in: it’s your genre.

After all, you’re probably not going to want to put your product in front of people who won’t like it. (Sorry, there’s no such thing as “universal appeal.”)

And the problem that we solve? It varies a little bit by genre, but underlying all of them is that we give them an experience they want: excitement, fun, connection, contemplation, novelty.

Once you figure out those things, all you have to do is get your product (book) in front of that audience through tactics like those we mentioned before—but for the best effectiveness (not to mention your personal sanity), it’s best to pursue a unified strategy in your marketing tactics.

What’s your audience/genre? What experiences are your readers looking for?

Coming up: Features vs. benefits — and — Tactics vs. strategy — and — When should I start marketing?

Image, battle of Waterloo, by Ipankonin

So I set a goal to finish my revisions by May 25th.

Ha. Hahaaha. HA!

I set the goal because I was having a hard time getting motivated. But in this case, a deadline just made my problem worse. I wasn’t having a hard time focusing and working because I was lazy or distracted. I was shirking because I was on the verge of burning out.

Burn out, for me, happens when I push myself too hard just for the sake of being done. I find myself completely blocked. If I do may any progress at all, it’s just throwing something on the page so I can move on and be done with it, often not really improving the problems (or simply noting them and moving on).

I can work quickly, especially when I’m really excited about a story. But if I’m not excited about the story at the moment (or just overwhelmed by it), I need to allow myself to slow down. So I am. I might flirt with a story I shouldn’t be writing if something strikes me. I might just work on my crafts or play the piano, or explore another creative outlet.

But I still have good news for you: I’m going to do some website/blog critiques! Sign up in the comments before noon EST on Friday, and I’ll randomly draw three sites to critique. Website designer Ted Finch will also be on hand to critique the visual aspects of the lucky websites!

Don’t have a blog or website yet? Don’t worry! I’m also looking for one volunteer who doesn’t have a website or blog. We’ll be working together to get you set up, with the results posted as a tutorial! Again, this will be chosen at random from the comments left here before noon EST Friday.

The lucky winners will be announced on Friday. The critiques and tutorial will be posted starting June 6.

How do you avoid burnout? (Or just volunteer in the comments )

Photo by Patricia Espedal

In yesterday’s website review, Kathleen mentioned how important it is to convey your genre with your website. It can be hard, depending on the genre. Even some published authors’ sites don’t do it well.

Quick: Can you tell me what genre these published authors write in? (I took the name off a couple and removed outright genre identifiers because that would be too easy, and that’s not what this is about—it’s about looking at the graphics on their site to see if they convey their genres. If you’ve read any of them or recognize their sites, try to judge only by what you see here.

Links and answers to be posted in the comments!

1.)

2.)

3.)

4.)

5.)

6.)

7.)

8.)

Post your guesses in the comments! The person with the most answers right (without cheating) will win . . . something!

It’s that time again! Kathleen MacIver of KatieDid Design and I, Jordan McCollum of Marketing Pilgrim (and, of course, this website), are looking for volunteers to have your aspiring author website reviewed by two professionals!

If you’ll recall, we did a series of aspiring author website reviews in August and September. The series was so well received that Katie and I decided to do it again!

This time, because of the holidays and the like, we’ll be limiting the number of sites we can review. The reviews will run in December.

To sign up for one of the very limited slots, leave a comment on this post! Be sure to include the URL of your website in the URL box provided. If comments are closed, all the slots are full (but we’ll do this again in the future!).

Can’t wait until December? The free Guide to Aspiring Author Websites PDF from our last series is still available!

Photo by Sean Dreilinger

Today we have our final website review for La Belette Rouge: oh, the luxuries of going last. Have you been reading and making adjustments all along? Cheater .

(Remember, we’ll be doing more website reviews in a few months, so subscribe so you don’t miss the call for volunteers!)

Kathleen’s comments

Dear ‘Belette Rouge,’

I visited your site and I was . . . intrigued. It seems that you have a pretty wide circle of friends online, and that’s a good thing! The number of comments your posts bring shows that you’re doing something right.

But to be quite honest, I’m not sure what to review! I see from the series down on the left that you have blogged on writing . . . but that doesn’t seem to be the focus at present. Without reading the whole blog, I don’t know what you write, to know if it’s something I’m interested in. I’m not sure what the focus of the blog is, to know if it’s something I might like to subscribe to. I don’t know what “Belette” means, so that doesn’t give me any hints.

I’ll ask you the same thing I asked a few other blog owners . . . what is the purpose of your site? What is your goal? If yours is community (which you seem to be doing excellent at fostering), then I think your community would attract new participants more easily if your site clearly states what your community revolves around.

Give the site a clear blog description, and put something at the top of your sidebar, or above the posts that explains it a little more. [Also, a tag line displayed as part of the header can be a great help for quickly letting visitors know what your blog's all about—Jordan.] You might find new readership builds much faster!

I’ll be offline for most of next week, but if you’ve got a specific question, go ahead and ask it in the comments and I’ll reply when I’m back online.

Happy blogging!

-Kathleen MacIver / KatieDid Design

Jordan’s comments

Pages

Your blog is another example of a “lifestyle” blog, where you blog about your daily experiences from the mundane to the therapeutic. You have a great voice and wonderful humor that comes through in every post.

However, while you have a series on life as a writer, you don’t highlight any WIPs or works prominently on your blog.

There may be a good reason for this. If you’re purposefully blogging under a pseudonym, and you want it keep it that way, you may want to keep potential publication info away from your site so you don’t get your real name associated with your site. (Then again, maybe you should be writing under a pseudonym, too.)

But if you don’t have that aversion, you might consider featuring your works more prominently.

I might also suggest a menu bar—a single line of text underneath the header that links to the permanent features of your site. This is where you can put links to your About page, a page about your WIPs and writing credits, and possibly pages on the various areas of your site—writing, infertility, Francophilia, etc.

Sidebars

The top two elements in your sidebar are encouraging visitors to subscribe—nicely done. I might add a little explanation (or a link to an explanatory post) in the first Subscribe widget (if possible), so people know what it means to subscribe—something you do well for the email subscription link.

Your contact information is fairly prominent on each page, as the third element in the sidebar. However, because your header image is so long, that contact information is below the fold. I’m torn over whether that’s enough. But it’s good that you offer several different ways to connect with you.

Also, your sidebar is quite long. I really like that you’ve been highly selective about what badges and honors to display. However, there are still a lot of links there. When visitors come across a long list of links, their eyes are likely to gloss over—they can’t focus on any single link, so they don’t bother looking at any of them. (A lot of links on a single page may also dilute the value you’re passing along to the sites you link to, in search engines’ eyes.)

If you want to make the links in your sidebar stand out more, you might consider having fewer of them. Don’t worry, I’m not saying you should just ditch links to your favorite blogs—but over 200 links on the main page is kind of a lot to handle. Instead, you could consider a single post, linked in your side bar or menu bar, for all your favorite links/blog roll. You can still use the same headings and divisions on the page, too.

Your own search engine presence, however, is fantastic. Your blog is #1 for [belette rouge] on Yahoo, Google and Bing (and also #2 on Yahoo and Google and #3 on Bing). The rest of the top ten results are all about you—your Facebook profile, your blog on various blog sites, friends’ mentions of your blog.

And obviously, with that many followers and that kind of discussion on each post, you have a fantastic community on your blog.

What do you think? Would you rather have a popular community on a lifestyle blog under a pseudonym where you wouldn’t want to promote your writing, or an author website with your real (or publishing) name?

Photo credits: question—Svilen Mushkatov; no pictures, please—StillSearc; glassy eye—Michelle Mangum