Things I'm Doing That Cost Me Nothing..But Brain Cells

I get so many offers in my inbox ~ "one of a kind" book promos, limited-time discounts on book marketing kits, Zoom seminars at a low, low price. I scan each email, because I have a lot of free time, but then I delete it. Once in a while, an offer looks interesting, but then I snap back to reality and realize that a) none of these schemes has worked for me in the past; and b) I can't afford to purchase anything.

Being fresh out of money is, in some ways, freeing. It makes it easy to resist temptation. I remind myself that I'm just as well off now as I was when I laid out money for these super-duper opportunities. The downside is, at least whenever I purchased a book promo, there was that delusional thing called "hope". Not that it lasted long. I don't want to be a downer, but authors, don't bother buying promos from any site that has an animal in its name (doggy, camel, monkey, rabid squirrel ~ okay, I made a couple of these up). I swear any new entity is going to have a hell of a time coming up with a handle, since all the wildlife names are already taken. Soon they'll have to transition to plants. Venus flytrap would be an appropriate one.

And do I really need to buy a marketing kit that tells me to start a newsletter? Or to "get on a podcast"? As if either of those things would ever happen. 

The last time I moaned on here about marketing, I said I was pretty much done with social media, and I haven't changed my mind. While it's free, it still equals nothing as far as book sales, and even if I was the most popular social media loser of all time, I'd still be a loser.

So, I'm now concentrating on using my words. Words cost nothing. I pulled up the list of 100 New Blog Topics for Fiction Writers I'd saved and managed to cull about six or seven of them for future use. The "News" section of my author site has been woefully underutilized, because all I could ever think to add there were the ubiquitous "Rah, rah, rah, buy my book!" posts. Not exactly scintillating copy. Now, though, I at least have a few ideas that I could possibly pull off. 

The first one I chose was to create a list of book club questions for Running From Herself, which I saved as a shareable PDF. I knew nothing about book club questions, having never belonged to a book club (although I wouldn't mind it, given the right mix of people), but there are a lot of resources online; BookBub has a good list. Between that one and a few others I found, I came up with 25 decent questions, and I was proud of myself. Will that list ever get used? No. But I'm not sure that's even the point; I just needed to add new content. I know it sounds silly and naive, but I need to feel like I'm doing something to advance this novel. My goal is to write a new post every day until I run out of ideas. 

A bigger goal is to learn more about SEO, so those posts actually get eyes on them! I always dismissed SEO, because it sounded far too complicated for someone like me, but I discovered that there are baby steps one can take that do make a difference. Just by inserting a few keywords into my blog's settings, the number of visitors to this blog has increased. (If only that worked for KDP keywords.) 

If, like me, you don't even know what the letters "SEO" stand for, here is a nice background article about it. What the article and others like it fail to show is how to format the description, presumably assuming that everyone knows. Well, I, for one, don't. What goes between the brackets? What terms am I supposed to use before the ">" or after the "=" symbols? And where do those symbols even go? I did manage to find some actual examples here. I need examples, people!

While I'm a complete SEO novice, I have seen results, so if you want more visitors to your author site, it's worth taking at least a little time to get to know it.

This, in a nutshell, is what I'm currently doing in the absence of advertising dollars. And most of it is stress-free. That's something I can get on board with.