If Saturday Is Alright For Fighting, Sunday Is Pretty Good For Questions
Every week I am fortunate enough to do a Q&A on a writing Discord (Story Valley, if you’re working on something, give them a look). I’ve been doing it now I think for about a year, if not longer. It’s a pretty good way to spend a Sunday afternoon (it’s every Sunday from 2pm until about 5pm, depending on the questions), and I enjoy answering questions from writers who are genuinely interested in launching their careers and getting published.
The questions range from the structural (like how punctuation works or what a certain part of writing is or isn’t) to developmental (how to frame an arc or how to unfuck a plot) to broad career development (querying, basic salescopy, the broad brushstrokes of what to do after you write).
This past Sunday I was asked a great marketing question about sales funnels and I gave what I thought was my best answer ever. It’s not that I struggle on issues of sales and marketing, it’s more like I tend to take a very long way around before getting to the really critical stuff.
Let’s talk sales funnels this week.
This past Sunday was different, I was pretty clear and effective, and I’m putting the entire question and answer here in a post for you. I’ve made some minor formatting tweaks to scrub out some Discord elements as well as the flow of chatter that Discord tends to encourage.
The Question
Question: What are the best platforms to grow an audience in regards to social media? Admittedly I’m still having trouble in that part of the process.
The Answer, part 1
Where are you already developing one?
I’m asking because it’s not the platform, it’s how you’re using it. There isn’t a best platform as though we’re ranking them. It’s more about strategy.
So follow-up — how are you developing one?
Question, part 2
Well probably not in the right way. With Twitter I mainly just talk to people and plug my book link when possible. I have a YouTube channel and 9/10 times I advertise my book there, but that strategy only really works if people open the video description. I have no earthly clue how booktok works, or how to promote with things like Instagram or Pinterest, though.
The Answer, part 3
It’s probably easiest to walk through each of the platforms you’re using and then address the ones you’re not.
How many sales funnels do you have?
And have you started grabbing email addresses from those funnels?
The Question, part 4
You’re probably gonna laugh, but I’ve never heard the term sales funnel before, so I probably have none.
The Answer, part 5
No, I’m not going to laugh at all. I’m going to explain how to create and use one.
A sales funnel is a series of pages or actions you lead the customer through in order to get something at the end. It’s part of a transaction of some kind.
There are different kinds of sales funnels, but those specifics aren’t really important right now if you’ve never heard of or used a funnel before.
The most basic sales funnel is this one:
1. Give me your email address
2. Get a newsletter
Sometimes it gets expanded to:
1. Give me your email address
2. I email you a freebie of some kind (usually a PDF or something very small)
3. Get a newsletter
A basic sales funnel like that is going to be responsible for about 40–60% of your conversion.
Conversion is the process of taking a possible customer and turning them into a paying customer. Giving you their email address was a start, but you’d prefer if they gave you money for a book. So a sales funnel converts customers and makes sales.
Social media, to some degree is going to serve as part of a sales funnel and as part of a conversion method.
People watch your videos, they interact with you, they eventually go to a website where they can start that funnel by giving you an email address or they go make the purchase (like from Amazon) by clicking a link you give them.
From what you’ve described, you have 0 funnels. You are funnel-less. Which is fine, everybody has to start somewhere.
1. You need a way to capture (that’s the term) email addresses. Two of the most popular methods are ConvertKit and Mailchimp. ConvertKit is a little beefier and cheaper when you’re getting started, but Mailchimp can be a bit friendlier if you’re new at this.
To capture those email addresses, you’ll make a pop-up or a page and put it up somewhere. Like on your blog or website. Or just get a link you can stick in the description of a YouTube video.
2. You need to provide something as part of the “give me your email” transaction. Maybe that’s a newsletter you put out regularly and consistently (mine’s every Monday, as an example).
Giving them a PDF or product in exchange (like people give away really low effort shit like “5 steps for making good dinners” or “25 ways to impress your llama”) is also an option, but you have to set that up and that’s a bit more complicated.
3. Then you need to convert them. Here’s the tricky part: a lot of people will do plenty of free transacting (it costs me nothing to give you an email address and a newsletter I don’t give a shit about that goes out once in a blue moon is basically meaningless to me), but converting them into paying customers means you have to not only give them a place to do the transaction but something worth more than their expense.
You can vomit a link into a YouTube video description all you want, but if I’m not engaged by the video, that description is a waste. You can tweet “Hey please buy my book” until pigs fly but if you’re not someone I regularly come to read and appreciate on Twitter, your post has as much value to me as those sponsored posts about plug-in planetariums or different casinos.
Which leads us back to social media.
Big question to ask yourself — What am I giving people (in addition to my book, no one’s coming to you just for your book) that makes them want to stick around and come back?
It’s not for emoji, it’s not for one joke you made one time, it’s not because you’re the 15th out of 16 other people, there’s gotta be some reason they come through. Find your reason (ideally you’ll have 2–4, but let’s start small) and make sure your social media, including YouTube, amplifies the reason(s).
Let’s use me as an example — why do I have around 2600 Twitter followers, 75 newsletter subscribers, 50 patrons, 300+ clients? Because I help people write better and just about everything I produce — podcasts, streams, audio, text, etc — goes towards that. Even when I talk about wrestling or video games or sobriety or politics or sex work or art or whatever, I’m within the orbit of telling stories, expressing yourself, and writing better.
So when people sign up for that newsletter, they’re going to not just get something tepid and infrequent, they’re getting something decent and intentional every Monday (and Patreon people get a bonus newsletter, depending on their tier).
When people come to the Patreon, they’re getting multiple things EVERY WEEK. That’s HOURS of content, and all I’m asking for is $2-$20 a month.
I’m giving them things worth more than their monthly support, so they stick around. They’ll get 3–5 hours of content a week and that’s not counting the Discord community where I will write answers even longer than this one.
This is exactly why and how Patreon pays my electric bill and buys cat food every month on the strength of the amazing supporters.
I’m not even talking about the actual paying work I do, the hours of coaching and streaming and the fact that even if you were a client 12 years ago you can pick up the phone and call me at 3:00pm on a Saturday and I’ll talk you through a writing, editing, or publishing issue. This is just extra stuff.
This is where I want everybody to get to — where they’ve got multiple arms to their creative success kraken. Still with me?
The Question, part 6
Yeah, just taking it all in. I may need to save all this in a file.
The Answer, part 7
Let’s go platform by platform.
Twitter — 280 characters. Needs to be more than just a sales link. It’s heavily algorithm-driven, so a lot of the “what’s going to get you noticed” is out of your hands and shrouded in bullshit, but consistency in saying something worth reading (and more than a sales link) is going to grow an audience.
I used to do daily writing threads. I’ve live-tweeted walkthroughs of movies. I used to use Twitter a lot. It’s still a viable space for promotion, BUT you gotta know that everyone’s promoting something, so sounding like everyone else is wasting your time.
Also, I don’t know if you care about this, but it’s really toxic as far as its culture and environment go, so if your feed is anything like mine, there’s a lot of garbage to sift through to find the stuff you want to remember or act on.
Facebook — No character limit (that I’m immediately aware of) but there’s definitely a different overall vibe, since Facebook is where we can find out who’s got a racist aunt or who’s ex suddenly thinks that the Earth is hollow and filled with lava gnomes.
But a Facebook group can be a closed space (meaning you need to jump a barrier or have someone else do something to get you in) where you can put a sales funnel BUT to do that, you need to actively use it in a way that fosters people conversing AND sticking around AND not just coming through to click a link.
But it’s Facebook, and your grandma might be on it, and it’s weird when your family members show up to your work shit.
YouTube — It’s a visual search engine. Which means that you need to be answering a question that someone would be asking and needing answers for. So what question are your videos answering or what problem are they solving?
The description for a video is nice (I fill mine with affiliate links and quick text blurbs) but I don’t come to YouTube to read descriptions, I come to YouTube to watch videos, so aim your videos to be the problem-solver and attention-getter.
They’re also sales funnels because of things like end cards (the things at the ends of videos) where you can get people to take actions. (Like when people say, “Like and subscribe”)
TikTok — It’s built around the attention economy, combining the concision of Twitter with the visual organization and draw of YouTube. Booktok is the section of TikTok where book reviewer and book opinion-havers and book grifters congregate to talk about books (and/or reveal they’re full of shit).
It’s pretty clique heavy so don’t plan on grabbing the hashtag by storm. Grow your audience consistently (hey look, just like newsletters!) and you’ll carve out some space there over time. Patience wins tiktok, along with some basic video savvy.
What other platforms did you want to talk about?
The Question, part 8
I’d say maybe Instagram? I post on there a bit.
The Answer, part 9
Instagram is trying to be TikTok, so apply everything I just said to Instagram AND add that static images are still a thing for cover reveals, teases, and hype building. Where should we take this conversation next? How can I make this easier for you?
The Question, part 10
Well I’ve gone ahead and copied everything you’ve said into a folder to refer to. I’d say I’m just not sure how to start a newsletter. I mean I write music, I’m a full-time dad, I do bodybuilding in my spare time, and I’ve been known to write stuff that miraculously gets finished. How do I get people to actually, you know, care?
The Answer, part 11
Amazing follow-up.
A newsletter is just like an email. You open the browser tab, you write in the box. You’ve done this before.
You cannot make them care. You can encourage them to care, but a lot of this is on them. And again, it comes down to what you’re offering. You do all these things, you probably have something to say about any part of any of them. So you generate conversations around those things you have something to say about.
Off the top of my head:
1. Why write music? You’re a full-time dad. What’s so important about music?
2. What do you use to write music?
3. Is there a part of parenting you’d change but never admit to another person?
4. Is it really important that I get great definition in my triceps if all I do is pet a cat?
5. How the fuck do you possibly find time to do all those things, let alone any of them (or any 2 of them) well?
Buried within your interests, pursuits, and passions are seeds you can foster into conversations. Even if those conversations are one-sided because you’re writing an email and they’re reading it, it’s still a conversation.
Do it consistently and do it authentically in your own voice and you will over time grow an audience.
If you build some elaborate artifice around how you present yourself in a newsletter (like think of any of the white middle-aged women who fire up newsletters with GIFs and emoji and appropriated slang trying to convince other middle-aged white women to lean on their privilege and run up some credit card debt), you’ll still build an audience but you’ll have to adopt that character every time you write. It can be exhausting to not be yourself.
Consistency and offering something of value to the receiver go a long way here. Does that make sense?
The Question, part 12
I think that makes sense.
The Answer, Final Part
One platform at a time, figure out how you’re going to answer a question your consumer has (like: are you interested in a book about X with Y and Z) and offer plenty to the readers and viewers that those readers and viewers will be interested in getting in on that sales funnel.
Start there, THEN capture email addresses THEN go for the funnels.
I’ve Learned This The Very Hardest Way
This whole thing might sound like I’m an old expert at marketing, but I swear to you, marketing as a part of a business only really started clicking for me in the last year or so. It’s one of those things where I know the theory and have done okay at marketing by hook or by crook over the years and only recently have big things started coming together for me (like the podcast and the Patreon), and I’m grateful.
It’s my hope that this goes better for you. It’s my hope that you don’t spend as many years dog-paddling and barely staying above water. Marketing doesn’t have to be mysterious and it doesn’t have to be some complicated mega-process you can’t tailor for yourself.
You can do this. I know you can. Love you. Talk soon.