Marketing Viral (Photo credit: Wikipedia)One of the biggest marketing mistakes is lack of focus. If you don't know exactly where you're going and how you're going to get there you can waste a lot of time and resources getting lost along the way and perhaps not reaching your destination at all.
First you have to decide exactly what it is you want to market. Is it your book, a product, a service, a belief? What is the exact thing or component you want to sell? What is the ultimate goal beyond that specific thing?
If you're an author, your current book may be foremost on your mind as it well should be. But is that book the most important thing you want to consider? If it's the only book you ever plan to write that may be the case, but if not you might want to think about the next book and the ones after that. The current book is the frosting on the cake and you the author are the cake. You are the real substance of what you should be marketing. Establish your brand so you become more recognized than your book so that when subsequent books come along the reading public will come to attention because it's your book
After your product and the core of your campaign is established begin to focus on who your target audience is. If you start an advertising campaign where you just start spending money randomly without any clear thought process involved, you may be wasting a lot of money trying to reach people who don't care. In other words if you are trying to market an extraordinary new automobile accessory you may fall flat if you buy a booth at a bead show.
An example close to home for me is the A to Z Challenge. When I came up with the idea in 2010 I had a week to get people interested. I started posting my idea on my own blog every day in order to reach the few readers that I had at that time. I then began to leave comments on other blogs with a note to lure them to my blog posts. Within the week I had 100 bloggers signed up to join me. That was the key: I had an idea that seemed like a pretty good one and I focused on reaching out to the bloggers who I thought might be interested. In the third year of the Challenge, with the help of a dedicated team of bloggers committed to this Challenge and many other bloggers interested in being a part of something big, we've turned the April A to Z into an established event. My focus combined with the added focus of others resulted in success.
Dreams are where successes start, but focus is the fodder that fuels the flame.
A bunch of F words in one blog title:
For my F tribute I'm breaking my own rules for a blogger who's always breaking the rules--and besides they're my rules so I can break them if I want to. Stephen T McCarthy's blog may be political, politically incorrect, and always well-written, but Ferret-Faced Fascist Friends is always focused. I attribute my beginnings in blogging to Stephen T. McCarthy. He may not have entered his blog in the A to Z Challenge in 2012, but he is here in spirit and often in comments. Thanks for your continued inspiration and support my Friend.
I'll also recognize Munir who faithfully has been visiting my blogs and leaving comments for quite some time. Her blog is aptly called Focus.
