6000 and Marketing

Marketing is not a dirty word. Without it nobody would know you exist. The person who said that "if you build a better mousetrap the world will beat a path to your door" was only partially right - they have to know your mousetrap exists otherwise they won't know where to beat the path.

This is why new writers are told to network and why social networking is considered important. People have to know you exist - it's how you put yourself out there.

Back in April I noted that the number of people looking at my Shooting People profile hit 5000, and now it's just passed 6000. That's a smidge under 100 per week which is pretty good.

I don't use Twitter at present, but I have been reading up on it and studying it, seeing how I can use it (or not). But what I do is blog (like this), and I can also examine the statistics of how many people read my blog.

However I also had this blog tied in to automatically post to my Facebook account. Which means I could not count anyone who read the blog there - because there are no statistics. So, what to do?

I notice that other blogging screenwriters write their blogs and then put a note about it on FB (often via Twitter) with a link to the blog page, which means their blog page count is accurate. So I spent half an hour yesterday finding out how to disable the auto-posting to FB - got there eventually but it wasn't easy - so that I can do the same.

And then there's link shortening using a service like bitly.com. You've probably seen shortened links, but one of the clever things about them is that bitly provides statistics as to how often that link is clicked. So I converted all my major web links into shortened links and replaced them on my various websites and profiles. So now when someone clicks one of those links to go from one page to another of my pages, I'll know about it.

Why bother?

Once you're an established writer it probably matters less - because the access to your potential market  becomes easier and can become more focused. But as someone starting out you need to be communicating to every possible contact you can, so how do you know you're succeeding if you have no way to measure it?

Of course what you really want is someone contacting you and saying "I've read your stuff, would you like to write something for me?" but that becomes more likely if you're contacting more people.

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What's on the turntable? "September" by Earth, Wind and Fire (let's boogie!)