140 Character Conference

Have you heard about these? They're popping up around the country. I went to a local one on Tuesday. It was supposed to teach me how to use the new social media to do marketing for my business or product. It didn't. It seems all the presenters care about is how many Twitter followers they have. Yawn. I mean it doesn't matter. Most of the presenters never worked in any job with "Marketing" in the title. Now I'm not saying that in order to be a good marketer you have to have experience, but you do need to know the fundamentals. And the fundamentals are that you need to make sure that you are reaching the right person with the right message at the right time. And that you utilize all available marketing options that you have and don't limit yourself to one (just because it is cool.).

In other words if I am selling car insurance and I'm telling you how good the coverage is and how cheap the rates are and you don't drive - you're going to hit the delete key. (In the old days you would have hung up on me.) I would rather get my message across to the right person (a licensed driver who owns a car) at the right time (right before their premium expires), with the right message. (Save on your premium with my plan.) Right message, right person, right time.

How to do that is the challenge. Do you do it by getting 50,000 followers. Maybe, perhaps a couple of them meet the criteria. The rest of us will hit the delete key. More challenging is to hone your message and deliver it to the right person.

How do you do that? I don't always know, perhaps when I finish watching season 1 of Mad Men this summer I'll pass it along.

Pricing - tough choices

I received a note from Amazon Digital Publishing the other day that they discovered that my book, For Sale in Palm Springs was available for free at another book sellers. That's right Amazon. I made the book free at Barnes & Noble, Sony, Kobo and Diesel. Why? Because those platforms are not as popular as the Kindle and I was hoping to stir interest in the series by making the first book free. The second reason that I made it free is because I could. That's right, my distributor Smashwords has a $0.00 price option. Amazon does not. But, now that they have discovered that I give that book away at those site, they have decided to follow suit. What does that do to "sales"? Well, so far this month more than 3,500 copies have been downloaded. Wow! So how do you follow that up? Well, I decided to reduce the price of my other 4 books to $0.99 (minimum price on Amazon.) That means that on each book that Amazon sells I will receive $0.35. Y'all need to buy a lot of books in order for me to be able to pay for the electricity to power my computer that I use to write these. But then I read that some woman in San Francisco is earning $10,000 per month from selling books at $0.99. I'm going to have to buy one to discover her secret.