Marketing With No Money - Part 5

So how are my marketing efforts progressing so far? In a nutshell, things are looking up. Sales of Battleframe are continuing to increase and traffic has just taken an order of magnitude step up. So what have I done?

In a word, the key would have to be engagement. I’ve started participating in the writing, gaming and science fiction communities. What’s really important is to be genuine about your interest in the communities and to not just spam them with advertising about your own product.

Think of it as if you are at a party and all you talked about was about your product or service. Pretty soon the people around you would get fed up and you would end up being by yourself....not fun! When you engage a community, be polite, participate in the conversation and do what you can to help the other people out. If you do this then you'll find that that many of the community members will reciprocate and help you.

A number of major forums have very strict rules about the number of posts that you need to make before you are allowed to mention your own product/service. My advice is to obey the rules, play the long-term game and enjoy the journey.

So the result of all of this work is that yesterday Battleframe was presented to nearly 1,000 people directly in my target market and this didn’t cost me a penny. One of the nice things about this approach is that the numbers are continuing to grow each and every day.

Yesterday I made the decision to start publishing pre-release episodes from Book Two of the Mindwars and already I can see that this has helped get the message out there a lot. I think that the reason for this is that people like to know that there will actually be a book two after a book one.

What’s my goal in releasing episodes from book two? I want feedback. There is nothing quite like a reader telling you what they think of something to make the final published manuscript that much better. I did this with Battleframe and the end product looked completely different from the raw episodes that I published every few days. Feedback has been really positive to readers that have now read both the initial episodes and the final novel.

So what are my next steps to growing my audience? One of the biggest challenges has been to entice people to sign-up on my site at michaelgilmour.com. Once they sign-up I can then more meaningfully engage them in a dialogue which ultimately will result in a book sale (hopefully). I have some free stuff that I’m giving away but it’s clear that I need to increase the carrot a lot more.

So I’m now developing an area of my website which will showcase the different book characters, locations, technology etc. I will make this information available to registered users only…..so I’d better make it really good! One thought I have is to engage my cover designing artist to create some additional artwork.

I’m a firm believer that the key to any good marketing is consistency. In other words, consistently update your blog, forum participation, content, writing, promotional material etc. It’s frustrating playing the long-term game and holding off spending money but it’s still really rewarding as I learn about a completely new market.

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Michael Gilmour has been in business for over 32 years and has both a BSC in Electronics and Computer Science and an MBA. He was the former vice-chairman of the Internet Industry Association in Australia and is in demand as a speaker at Internet conferences the world over. He has also recently published his first science fiction book, Battleframe.

Michael is passionate about working with online entrepreneurs to help them navigate their new ventures around the many pitfalls that all businesses face. Due to demands on his time, Michael may be contacted by clicking here for limited consulting assignments.