Day 4 of the Author Marketing Superpowers Bootcamp: Stop marketing your books. Do THIS instead...

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So this is our Reader Growth Engines talk. I'm super excited to dive into it, and the first big thing before we even cover, like, what a reader growth engine is,
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is to cover actually what our job is when marketing our books, 'cause I think marketing can feel really intimidating, 'cause it actually feels like we have to do the marketing.
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We have to go out and do the selling of our books and get everyone to buy in, and it feels like this endless task. We have to always market. It never ends.
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In reality, that's- s- doesn't have to be true, and I actually think what
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great authors do and great f- actual marketing looks like is not actually doing the marketing itself necessarily, but building a system that markets your books for you, and that is exactly what a reader growth engine is.
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It is supposed to be that system for you, and what's beautiful about a reader growth engine is there's not one growth engine that exists. I like to think about it a lot like Formula 1.
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I was recently actually at a NASCAR event, and I was down near the pit. Thank you, Christopher Hopper, for that. But each of these race cars are literally like their own customized engines.
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There's some similarities, and we're gonna talk about the similarities that a lot of these engines share, but how you choose to run the race of authorship and how you choose to build your readership
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is going to depend based on who your readership is, what your story is, what exactly your business model looks like, which is why I'm, like, super excited in the second half to dive in with some of you personally and actually work through what that might look like for you.
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But that's ultimately what a reader growth engine is, and I, I know this, like, from talking to a lot of authors, it's like you, you launch, and it's this scary moment of, "Okay, we launched, and then what happens," right?
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"What do we do after that? How do we keep drawing up attention?" And in reality,
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I like to think about the launch as the moment in which you're just trying to validate whether this thing has story-market fit, whether this story is even worth actually building a growth engine for.
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And then after launch is when it actually gets exciting and when you can actually start to get more readers.
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But before I even get into what a growth engine is, we have to talk about some more of the misbeliefs I think a lot of us have around marketing, and these misbeliefs I know I used to have.
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So first one was that we have to market ourselves using multiple methods. Have to master Facebook ads, Amazon ads, TikTok.
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I'm going to share in the end of this talk how doing multiple things can be really good, but doing multiple things at a high level is how, like, a seven-figure author goes to a multiple seven-figure author or tries to hit eight figures, which there are quite a few indies now at the eight-figure level, which is exciting.
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They're not necessarily sharing the numbers publicly, but I can guarantee you there are, there are indies who are hitting that mark now, which is really exciting, and very high seven figures is certainly a thing.
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That's incredible. I'm so happy that's a thing. But why are you worried about getting to eight figures when you still need to make your first $1,000 and $10,000 and then $100,000?
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Like, you gotta start somewhere, and for most people, until you get close to seven figures or $100,000, I just don't see that much benefit in diversifying between multiple marketing methods.
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And what we'll talk about is you really build a growth engine around one way to market yourself and one way to market your books. So Amazon ads and Facebook ads are relatively different growth engines.
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TikTok's a different growth engine from Meta Ads, and Meta Ads is a different growth engine from doing something like a podcast, and all of these can work and be great,
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and they can feed into each other, and it's beautiful. But building multiple growth engines at once from start is really hard. It's like trying to, again, build a fleet of race cars when you don't even have one. Now,
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another thing we often get into is even if we look at one method, whether it be Facebook ads or Amazon ads or TikTok, we think that, like, more is the answer. And getting more reps in, like practicing more, is huge. But
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ultimately, it's the small improvements we make along the way that lead to exponentially greater returns, and one of the biggest mistakes I see is people will post content on, let's say, TikTok, and they'll keep posting and come up with a new idea and make a new post and do this in a new post, but they're not looking past at the data
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of how they're performing. Or they'll post these Facebook ads, but they're not really paying attention to which ads are winning and why.
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Or they'll go into podcasting, but again, they'll not look at which episodes are doing well and why, and it's a really big problem, because what ends up happening is you end up doing
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marketing, and you're trying to build this growth engine, but you're not doing anything to actually optimize it and fine-tune it. You have this broken machine that you haven't even really looked at yet.
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So that brings us into the third thing we do, which is we don't look at the data, right? We need to see what's working for other authors.
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Go to Facebook Ad Library, see what people are running in terms of Amazon ads, and try and figure out, like, what are they doing that's working? What can I do that's working?
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And specifically, like, if it's Facebook, you wanna see what ads have the highest CTR, because the ads that are getting more clicks oftentimes mean they're going to convert better. That's usually the case.
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If it's not the case, then there's another issue there. But when it comes to driving traffic, that's a good thing. On TikTok, what videos are driving the most retention? And if you're not getting a lot of retention, why?
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An even better question is what Facebook ads are getting a lot of reach and a low CPM but also have a low click-through rate?
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That might mean that Facebook ad is really relevant, but it's just not optimized yet, so you've hit something great there. And then likewise, what Facebook ads have a high click-through rate but low reach?
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That means they might be a engaging ad but to a smaller group of people, which isn't a bad thing, but then you wanna figure out how can we create a message that still resonates with a large group of people and is engaging enough for people to click on?
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And that same thing goes for TikTok. You can have TikToks that are super low retention but reach a wider audience than your average TikTok. That's an indication again that something's going on here.
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I-- That's, like, the biggest thing to know is just literally plotting out where are you getting views?Where are you not?
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And the, the Author Hub bonus is going to try and systematize that for you so you can actually see, okay, this is my marketing content that's performing at an outlier level.
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But the takeaway here is that to actually refine and go look at the data and strategize and improve in one area takes a lot of work, and it's not that more marketing's the answer or more channels, it's actually focusing on doing one or very few things at a very high level.
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Because the incremental return of doing just a little bit better is huge, and why that is, is there's this other... It's one of the other superpowers, but it's the power law, and the visualization's perfect.
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I, I should have actually put it on the slide, but it- it's essentially an exponential curve where you have all these books, all the books plotted on the X-axis, and the Y-axis is how much sales, right?
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Or, or you could invert it, right? But regardless, there's infinitesimally small number of books that are getting a lot of the sales, and same thing works on social media platforms. Same thing works with ads.
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Like, all the way down there's more essentially results coming from very few. It's like the Pareto's principle of the Pareto's principle. A really good book about this is called The One Thing.
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The One Thing is about how everything in life, business, science, you name it, your personal life, your relationships, goes back to one thing, the Pareto principle of the Pareto principle. So
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let me zoom out here and bring this more practical. Do we really think that the best-selling books are 100X better than the average book? Do we think a winning ad is 100X better than the average book?
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It definitely is not.
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But those small little improvements that take you up a little bit can lead to you, again, you move a little bit forward on that graph, and that's 5X more sales, 5X more sales, 'cause it's exponential, the return, and that's for everything pretty much in the world, and definitely in media.
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Everything in this whole industry you could even touch, that's the principle. So that's the most foundational thing to understand. Now, the next thing is what is a reader growth engine?
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Now that we understand there's these things at play that we misbelieve about marketing, what does a reader growth engine tell us that's different?
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And a reader growth engine's essentially just a scalable way to drive readers into your reader journey, and I included the superpower for reader journey here, and the whole goal is to get more results with less proportional increase and effort.
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So I don't want you working 100 times harder to get 100 times more sales.
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I want you maybe working two times harder or three times harder, or maybe even not harder at all, which sounds insane, but it's completely possible, and I'll give, like, a com- very short personal example, which is over the last 10 days my podcast for Beyond the Book has seen 100%-plus uptake or increase in daily downloads, which I'm very happy with.
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I have not done anything different. I have not shared it anywhere else that I normally don't. I have not released more episodes than I normally do. I have done nothing different.
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That is literally just from, okay, wow, it is continuing to grow, and now my effort now when I release a podcast gets me two times more reach than I was before, and I'm not putting in any more effort.
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Theoretically, you give it a year, two years, three years, four years, I might be getting 10 or 20 times what I am today.
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So part of a reader growth engine is the compounding effect in what you're doing, and so often we spread ourselves thin and take away our compounding impact.
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Because if you're trying to do a podcast, TikTok, Facebook ads, Amazon ads, all of that sounds great until you realize that where is your compounding benefit in all these different areas?
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Like, it- you can get them to work together, which we'll talk about, but when you're first getting started, it's a lot to deal with, and oftentimes it's not the best strategy.
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Now, with a reader growth engine, we have to back up before we talk about even more deeply, which is how do we know when we're ready for it? And this is the biggest thing. It's the thing that I
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made probably one of the biggest mistakes of my publishing career on, and it's the thing that I don't want to happen to you.
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I'm writing about it tomorrow for the third day of the boot camp for Author Marketing Superpowers Boot Camp. But the TLDR is this: it's not enough to be able to just sell your book and get readers. That...
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It's not enough. Distribution is everything, but you need a great story, which a great story is not anything literary, and it's not even a review count.
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That's not how I define it, because if it was those things, it would be very hard to understand when we reach it.
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It really is just having a retention or a read-through rate that's high enough for it to be profitable, where readers are going on and buying future books in a series.
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And what I did with my World Gone Mad series is had decent reviews. I was able to get a lot of sales on it through Facebook ads, and I just figured this is gonna be amazing. This is gonna be a huge series.
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So I went ahead and I wrote book two and wrote book three, and my read-through rate was about 30 to 35% from KU page-read rates, and I think sales was, like, 25%. That's quite low. That's a very low read-through rate.
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It's to the point that it's very hard to make any money. And if I had a higher read-through rate, I would have been making double to triple the money on my series, right?
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'Cause I would have double to triple the readers reading through. I didn't have that.
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And there was an author I was talking with maybe two weeks ago, and she was talking to me about her marketing problem and how she wanted to figure out how to scale, and I was totally with her.
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I'm like, "Let's figure it out. But before this, can you show me your KDP dashboard?" And she's like, "Sure." I'm like, "Yeah, I want you to log in and show me everything. Show me all your sales.
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I want to see the history of it."
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So I'm just looking at it and studying it, trying to figure out what's happened here, because again, like, the data aspect of it is where I like to nerd out, 'cause I'm a numbers guy at the end of the day, which is weird, 'cause I also love creativity, but I love numbers, and I'm looking at her charts, and I'm going, "The numbers are not adding up here.
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There's something wrong."And we basically did some back-of-the-nath, uh, calculations, 'cause again, KDP's tough 'cause they don't actually give you a set number on what your read-through rate is.
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They don't tell you where you drop off. That's why I've been working on things like ReaderMeter. But regardless, I'm in that dashboard sitting in there.
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And also, like, free downloads to, or 99 cents downloads are gonna have a different read-through rate than you would see from a full-price book. So it's all...
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It's a lot of alchemy that goes into these calculations, right? It's hard to just pinpoint a specific number 'cause we all have different marketing strategies and business strategies and all these things.
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But it was very clear to me that she was not getting a read-through rate high enough that would be able to make much profit, no matter how well we got readers into the first book. So I was like, "This is your problem.
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You can't market this series effectively right now." So we now have to go back to the drawing board and figure out is it a different audience that you need to reach? Is it the book itself where readers are dropping off?
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And that's where I encourage you to start first, is understand is this product actually working? And I'll use an example 'cause Maggie's here, and I talk to Maggie a ton. She's one of my best friends.
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And Maggie is doing her Trope Tale book and then Kickstarter for the c- Trope Tale mix.
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And something we've talked a lot about, especially as she takes this leap into, like, full-time being in the industry and creative entrepreneurship is, what are you gonna do after the Kickstarter, that initial launch?
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And I...
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Today, ironically, I'm gonna maybe share with her what that could look like, but until recently I haven't even wanted her to think about that, and I still don't really want her thinking about that because it doesn't really matter
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how you can get more sales of a product if you don't know if the product's gonna be good enough yet, if you don't know if people actually like it.
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So testing it out and actually seeing, wow, people like it and wanna buy more of it. In her case, her retention would be consumers coming back and buying more drink mixes, right? That would be the signal.
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That's the signal we want. Then we know that's an amazing product and so exciting. So it's not even the initial Kickstarter launch and the money coming in that matters. It's seeing
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that they actually like it and wanna buy more from you. So with that said, like, that's where we have to spend a lot of our time.
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And if you are listening to this going, "I don't think I have story-market fit yet," that's okay. You might not be ready for a reader growth engine yet. But the good news is that you will be soon.
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And when you are ready, you have all this here to benefit you, and you'll have all this to think about. So that's my, my cautionary tale. I don't know. But do I really need a growth engine?
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Because I'll tell you, it, it sometimes just feels nice to be like, "Oh, I'll just grab a few sales here. I'll just grab a few sales doing that." And then also we see books,
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and I'm gonna share with you the financials of a specific book series in a moment that I find unbelievably fascinating. But we sometimes see these books take off and we go, "Obviously I want that.
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However that book went viral, however that took off is what I want." And that's possible. You can have your book go viral. But viral is not a concept that's mythical. It doesn't have to do with even a sales number.
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It doesn't have to do even with a chart position or a bestseller status. Viral is a number, and it's called the K factor. And what the K factor is... And th- this is taken from the world of viruses, literally.
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So every virus has a K factor. COVID has a K factor. And you actually see this in the spread of every single virus, right? It's fascinating.
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You can map it out and if you're in- into epidemiology, my ex was years ago, which is funny, but it taught me quite a few things and I guess I'm reusing it here, so thank you to my ex.
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That's the one good thing she did for me. Just kidding. But... Just kidding. That was way too harsh. Anyways, [laughs] when you have a K factor above one, what that means is for every reader who comes into your story,
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they're sharing it with more than one reader. One or more readers, right? Having a K factor above one. That effectively means your story can spread forever, right? 'Cause you can usually map.
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One reader comes in, they share it with another reader. That reader then shares it with another reader. That reader then shares it with another reader. That reader then shares it with another reader. Y- Y-
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Oh my God, we're done. This is, like, discussion closed. Like, how do we achieve that? Here's the thing: you can achieve that, but it's always gonna be for a fleeting moment.
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Even the most viral of all viruses, including COVID, eventually reach a point where they spread through a specific population and that K factor goes down below zero. Or, sorry, below one.
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It goes somewhere between zero and one, where, of course, for every person who gets a virus or who reads a book, there is still some word of mouth taking place, but it's likely below one, which that means if you m- map that out over a period of time, which isn't a long period of time, all of a sudden one reader that comes in is going to turn into none that come in.
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There's gonna be no one new to spread it to over a period of time if your K factor's below one. And again, there's specific cultural moments. There's specific things that can happen that can cause your K factor to go up.
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There's what we'll call super spreader readers, super ambassadors, which I talked about in our last chat, that you're able to maybe mobilize to increase your K factor.
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There- there's fun things you can do here, but there's no series ever that has sustained a K factor above one. And when I say that, that's so literally to the point that the, the Bible has not done that.
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Like, nothing's done that ever.
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There's a point in which continued growth requires investment in marketing, which if you don't think these institutions of story, I'll put it that way, don't market themselves, they clearly do.
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And an institution of story, that's by an indie author, which is my pivot here, which is quite a large institution of story, a multi-billion dollar empire, regardless of your thoughts and her interesting takes in the world, Pottermore Publishing, we probably all know the creator of it.
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Pottermore Publishing publishes the indie audiobooks and e-books of J.K. Rowling. She always retained the rights to those. She never sold the e-book and audiobook rights to a publisher, which is wild.
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Not everyone knows that. I think it's really cool. But I was sitting there going-How can I figure out how much money this thing makes?
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It turns out the UK, you have to be pretty transparent with how much money companies make who, that are even private.
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And all, always every year, like their finances end up getting reported on, and you can go look at them, and you can see the profit and the revenue that Pottermore Publishing makes.
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So effectively you can see the finances, not broken out by expense item, but you can at least see the top level finances of one of the largest indie authors in the world, which is... It's weird to think of J.K.
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Rowling as an indie author, but sh- she's a hybrid author, but certainly like she has independently published IP, right? So we can learn a lot from this. And when we think about virality, I mean, who tops Harry Potter?
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Very few pieces of media ever. At that viral peak, I imagine [laughs] that K-factor was above one, but that viral peak was, at this point, 20-ish years ago, right? It lasted for a while, but 20-ish years ago.
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It always dips back down, and I'll show you that it dipped back down for her. So when we look at the Pottermore Publishing finances,
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there's this fun little article, it was published in The Bookseller, which is basically a trade publication outlet that reports the publishing industry.
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And I just want you to look at two numbers here, 'cause there really are only two numbers that are important. One is the revenue. That's wild. That's nearly 50 million pounds. That's just...
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That's mainly from the audiobook and EBM book. Uh, the [laughs] audiobook and e-book of the, the Harry Potter series and the other Harry Potter connected IP under Pottermore Publishing. That is absurd. That is absurd.
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I, again, I'm never ceased to be amazed by that number. But think about it, an e-book, an audiobook doesn't cost anything relatively to print. This revenue, I imagine, is net after retailer fees.
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I don't know that for a fact, but I imagine so, because, you know, that... It's not like you, Amazon pays you a dollar then takes 30 cents. They pay you 70 cents for every dollar you make in the platform.
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So again, that doesn't feel like that can be recognized as revenue. This is basically feels like from a, when we think about gross profit and net profit, the gross profit of Pottermore Publishing, I bet is like
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extremely close to 100%. That might be a little bit of exaggeration, but it's gotta be over 90. What are the expenses involved in fulfilling these e-books and audiobooks? N- not that much, right?
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But the net profits, what's interesting, what are they actually taking home? And the pre-tax profits were a 21% margin. 21%, meaning right around 11.4 million pounds.
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Look, I don't feel bad for Pottermore Publishing and the author behind it. Plenty of money there. But that's not that high. That's surprising to me. Why only 21%? If they're selling e-books to audiobooks,
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and we know that the e-books and audiobooks lead to basically near, near profit, these things were already written. I don't... Y- you can't have that huge of a product development team here.
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What operations team needs to be had, or even support team for that matter, when it's just e-books, audiobooks? I'm not saying there isn't those expenses in there, they're certainly in there,
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but the only thing that really I can come to here is that there's a multi eight figure budget each year being spent on ads and marketing to advertise the e-books and audiobooks of Harry Potter. That's immense.
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That's immense. And they're spending this every single year without fail. You can go back five years, six years, 10 years and see these numbers. It's grown over time.
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It used to be at the 30 million pound a year mark just about five or six years ago. So it's actually grown, which is tremendous. That's insane growth. Think about that. But they're obviously marketing their books.
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So all this to say that you need a way to be sustainable over like a decade, 20-year timeline to market yourself that might not require money.
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It doesn't have to necessarily, but has to require some investment of resource, time, money, et cetera, to keep your books out there. Because if your K-factor's below one, which it will be at some point,
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your sales will eventually go to nothing unless you have new leads coming in. So that feels like an extremely daunting task, and the whole point of a reader growth engine is to say, "Hey, wait,
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we can get these new leads. We can get new readers into our business without having to work super hard. Like, we don't have to be stressing about this month after month."
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Not saying it's easy, but once it's built, maybe it just needs some fine-tuning as it goes around the laps on the racetrack of getting your readers. Maybe it needs some repairs here and there. It can break down,
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but ideally it keeps running and can actually keep going faster and faster. So now we have to look at what the three reader growth engines are, and I'm gonna share with you some very recent examples in the media
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of big publishers, big stories happening where there's major investments going on into building out their own reader growth engines because, shocker, so many publishers don't have their own reader growth engines, which is alarming, and it actually is part of the reason why trad publishing
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kind of sucks at marketing. But they wanna change that because they kinda have to, 'cause there's so much competition if you're an in... You can just go indie, right?
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So it's becoming an interesting time where we're seeing market pressure leading towards a lot of players having to innovate in how they market books. So let's talk about these three reader growth engines.
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First is paid advertising, and I could give you like a full masterclass in paid ads.
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Instead, I have a feeling this is something that I'll be covering as we break down some of your own reader growth engines, which I think I'm gonna start with you, Maggie, 'cause I think we'll hit paid ads in our conversation.
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You can pay for ads, newsletters, meta ads, Reddit ads, Pinterest ads, paid sponsorships.The biggest opportunities I see in paid ads ultimately come down to winning ads.
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The power of a winning ad, I've talked about this before, but it's so immense, and seeing just the dashboard of people spending millions a year in ads, y- you think it's, like, remarkably complex, but it's really not.
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They just end up having a few killer winning ads that they're able to spend hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars on. And these are authors, right?
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One ad can make them that much money in terms of ad spend, millions of dollars in profit. So it's really about finding that, 'cause the rest of their ads might lose them money, all of the rest of their ads.
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So talk about going back to the small incremental improvements leading to exponential returns. Pareto's principle of the Pareto principle, right? The power law in action in our advertising.
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When it comes to these platforms, too, focusing in on one for that reason is really important, 'cause there's certain creative, certain copy that will perform better, certain iterations on specific ad platforms.
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And you can copy and paste, and they might work on other ad platforms, too, but it's really important to hone in one place first. Same thing with creator sponsorship.
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There's specific integrations that brands run that'll work across 20 or 30 channels, right? And they can spend tens of millions of dollars on that.
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Likewise, another thing that brands do with creators, which I personally love this model, and it's something that authors can think about doing, is having a creator make UGC for them for free, essentially, but you agree to pay them a percentage of the ad spend that you put behind that media if it converts.
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So there's this, there's this TikToker. I won't mention him name, his name, 'cause he probably wouldn't want me saying it.
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But he has a lot of followers, but he doesn't charge brands anything to advertise, and instead he says, "You will give me 20% of the ad spend that you use on my video.
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And if you don't spend money behind paid ads on my video, that's fine. That's chill. But I know you're gonna really like it, and you're gonna want to."
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And he's made tens of millions of dollars from single videos doing that. So all this to say that one video, brands and authors are able to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars, sometimes millions of dollars on.
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So in paid ads, it's thinking about winners. Now, content creation's a completely different game. Yes, in content creation you will have winners, winners that make you lots and lots of money.
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But here's the issue with content creation compared to paid ads. With paid ads you can say, "Hey, Mark Zuckerberg. Hey, Reddit CEO." I actually don't know their name, but I should have looked it up.
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"Hey, Pinterest guy or girl." It's a guy. I know it's a guy. I forgot his name. It's so sad all the tech things are just a bunch of people who look like me, but it's not a good thing. It's not a good thing.
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But regardless, they pay them to get continued reach. They say, "Hey, I'm going to pay you, and you're going to take that asset and keep getting it reach." Okay, great. Awesome.
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That's the rule that we have at the platforms.
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Except there's a sort of loophole in that, which is that if you o- either own your own piece of media, newsletter, podcast, or because a- an RSS feed's a direct relationship with an audience, right?
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They get that notification directly. RSS feed's what's called a protocol network. Protocol networks are not owned by anyone. No one own- owns an RSS feed. No company does, and that's a good thing for you.
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Just like email is a protocol network. If it's a corporate network, AKA a TikTok, AKA Facebook's pretty bad at this, but TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube tend to be pretty good at giving you organic reach in the algorithm.
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But th- their deal is this, and it's fascinating because there's two sides to this incentive. They heavily prioritize new content. For short-form content,
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TikTok and Instagram are almost entirely focused on new, fresh content. YouTube, for SEO purposes, actually does have decent backlist discovery where content can get you continued reach over time, but it works.
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Sometimes it's hard, but it can work really well. But even YouTube has an incentive to prioritize new content. You might be going, "Why do all these platforms want this?"
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Yes, it has to do with ads entirely, but it's not wanting you to pay for ads necessarily.
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Brands, because they're used to paying for ads in television, and that's a multi-hundred billion dollar industry that's collapsing, but that mo- money's moving towards online and digital.
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They're used to paying for media when it's new and fresh. They want to pay a premium to get on the new episode of Game of Thrones, not the rerun, right?
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So these ad platforms can charge more CPM for new and fresh content. Therefore, they literally give it a boost in the algorithm. It's not a conspiracy. I know this from talking to the people who run the platforms.
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So what you need to know with that is if you're building your own media brand, you need to create something that can consistently bring in new viewers with new and fresh content.
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So as opposed to paid advertising where you create a winner, you might create 100 terrible pieces of content that no one wants, but no one's gonna see it because you're not putting money behind it, and all the money's gonna go behind the winner because you'll see the winner, the conversion's gonna be there, and you'll put all the money into it.
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With building your media brand, it's a completely different mindset. It's how do we consistently build an audience over time that's going to compound?
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Because each new show I create, I put the same effort into, but my audience grows with each show.
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So retention is key, which is why we think about, less about content creation, which is how I framed it on the reader growth engine card, but I wanted to really, since we're diving deep into it, really share with you the nuance here.
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What you're really doing is building your own media brand that people want to come back to.
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That's how you win on social media versus paid ads, and that's what a lot of authors get wrong because what they end up doing, and you might be one of these authors, which is okay, but now you can change your strategy.
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You'll make 10 videos in a row advertising your book. Okay, that's cool.
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How is that interesting to the consumer who followed you, wants more TikTok videos from you, but now is on the fourth video of you advertising your book? They already bought the book. Why are they still there?
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So then the algorithm's gonna see that, oh, hey, viewers aren't retained on this channel very well or retained on this profile very well. We're gonna now deprioritize it. And don't think this doesn't happen.
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It happens all the time. So you can actually be shooting yourself because you're doing your marketing wrong, not because you're not creating great videos, because you're thinking about it wrong.
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So if you want to build your own media brand, you need to be thinking about-These are all the media brands that exist.
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These are all the media companies, which media companies are different from publishing companies necessarily. They're overlapped, but they're different.
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Thinking about things like Vox, thinking about things like Refinery, thinking about things like Time Out Market, thinking about things like, which Time Out Market is actually Time Out, but Time Out Market's a whole other really interesting business that I could get into.
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But regardless, thinking about YouTube channels, right? And thinking about podcasting shows that you watch, thinking about things like Good Mythical Morning, right? And Link, if you don't know them, they're awesome.
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Thinking about, like, the good old days with Smosh, which that show got acquired and then corporate kind of axed the main characters, and you still got Anthony Padilla out there with his own YouTube channel, but Smosh still exists, right?
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Thinking about these formats, right, that last. That's what you want to create, a format that can interest your audience. So that was a incredibly wrong lamp. But
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the takeaways are building, like, a book review site where you're advertising potentially other people's books, and it could even be a TikTok or YouTube channel, whatever.
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And you might be going, "Why would I ever do this?" Simon & Schuster is literally looking to do this.
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They're literally now moving into building out their own book review sites, building out their own podcasting network where they feature authors, not just from themselves, but other publishers because they want to create this center of conversation that people come back into, so they can insert, when it's time, their own books into it, their own published books.
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Genius, and they're investing into this in a big way. The next one is, like, reader community, right? I love reader communities. These things are... These are media assets unto themselves.
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Thinking about different Facebook groups you can build that, again, retain people in a different way, and you're not necessarily creating the content of the community.
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You're just seeding it and then creating the systems and processes for people to interact. Then there's, like, interview podcasts. And why do I mention interview podcasts? There's a very specific reason I do.
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Because interview podcasts give people a new opportunity to come in on each new episode. Serialized fiction podcasts I've talked a lot about before, but are typically a bad business. I'll explain why.
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Serialized fiction podcasts, you're publishing for free, right? You monetize early access, but a small amount of revenue is going to come from that.
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So what ends up happening is these shows have to be started from episode one, right, because they're serialized in a way, and then you end up progressing through all these different episodes.
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They take off over time, so you might take off when you're on episode 50. But a lot of the money in podcasting and in media in general comes from ads, right?
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So what ends up happening is they're getting all these views in episodes one through 50, but no brands integrate with it because the brands didn't want to sponsor it when it had 10 viewers.
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Now that it has 100,000 new viewers a week, they would love to sponsor it, but it's already posted on the RSS feed and can't be edited. These are big things that
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are hindering serialized podcasts from being a good media business.
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They can be great for storytelling, great for experimentation, but that really you want to think about less discovery-oriented and how do you paywall that, right?
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Because paywall is where you're going to win in that, whether it's early access, whether it's literally keeping future seasons behind a paywall entirely, because there's a lot of serialized podcasts that can't break even that are really big.
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So that's just another really interesting note on that. Then there's vertical television, which is a new format, but it's Time Traveler POV is an example on TikTok.
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But it's usually people either using, it could be reel videos that they're getting stock image from or, like, AI-generated images using something like Midjourney, then throwing it into Kling and animating it, and then taking that and making their own literal one-off TV shows that are not serialized, remember, because you want new people coming in too.
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People are doing this with animations as well. Fascinating stuff, again, about how you can grow. Then you could go get super creative with it. There's cooking shows for readers.
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Imagine, like, all the different things you can do to reach readers.
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So think about, again, building a media brand and what that looks like and how that can funnel into your books and everything you're doing forever and always. That is something key. Okay. So the last thing here,
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and we're gonna pause. We're gonna pause after this, and then we're gonna dive into going through some of your reader growth engines, and we'll start with Maggie.
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But then after that, we can go through, through any, is I want to make basically just two last points. Last one is affiliates. So I've talked about ambassadors before.
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Affiliates are a growth engine because they are using someone else's audience. That's the principle, and it's someone selling to their audience. The trick of it, it's hard to get kickstarted.
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It's hard to get kickstarted because until you have an audience, it's hard to connect with other people who have an audience. But there's ways around it. There's retail, which is interesting.
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This is what traditional publishers typically run off of. Traditional publishing is basically an affiliate model, right?
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If we actually think about traditional publishing, it's effectively an affiliate model at mass scale, right?
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They have distribution and relationships to all these different affiliates, AKA bookstore owners, whether it be reps at Barnes & Noble and regional reps, or whether it be obviously indie bookstores.
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And they then get shelf space. That indie bookstore has an audience and traffic already coming to it, and that indie bookstore owner then is empowered to sell it and get a cut. That is an affiliate.
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So affiliates are a really broad thing, and like I said, they're hard to break into, but extremely scalable, and we see authors like Matt Dinniman who've partnered with publishers to break into that format, and he's clearly utilizing that growth engine a ton.
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If you're wondering, "Why is Matt Dinniman growing so fast, like he's having this moment right now?" It's because he's literally gone all in on this growth engine, and it's worked for him.
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And again, these are things you can do as well. But what I don't like about affiliates is that they're not permissionless. No one's telling you to, like, whether you should be able to run a paid ad or not.
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You don't have to ask for permission. You don't have to ask permission to build your own media brand. You have to ask for permission to collaborate with people.
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It's part of what makes it beautiful, but it's part of what makes it challenging to get started. But I wanted to broaden your idea of what you think about as collaborations because
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it's just using someone else's audience and having the market to it, and anyone who has an audience anywhere in the world could fall into that.
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But scaling it, again, is difficult because those levers can be a lot to pull on.
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But again, once you have 10 people sharing with their audience, it's on 10 bookshelves, you get to continue benefiting from that forever, and that's pretty cool. Maybe not forever.
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You might not be on their shelves forever, but for as long as you're on their shelf.
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Now, the goal in all of this, as you can see, is to have people keep hearing about your storiesEven when you stop talking about them, right? Your show's done, you turn the camera off,
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you stop writing that newsletter, you stop writing that book review blog, you're still getting reads. You stop creating ads, that winning ad still has money going behind it.
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You stop recruiting new affiliates, your existing ones still have it on their shelves, whether that's digital shelves with quotes, which long-term I'm very bullish on that model, or like in person like shelves.
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So with all this said, there's one last thing I wanna share with you, which is that these models working together, these growth engines, can do wonders. Wonders.
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Paid advertising can work really well with building your own media brand because you're, can funnel people into the media brand that way, and the media brand can build trust to have them purchase more of your products, AKA stories, but there could be other products tied to that.
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The media brand can build trust and c- relationships, and even feature people in it who could become future affiliates. The affiliates obviously can lead more people to the media brand and paid advertising.
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It's a virtuous cycle. All this works in tandem and together. But all of it's really hard to get kickstarted because like I said,
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the benefits of getting to the top of the power law on any one of these engines is so high that it's better to focus on one. And I, I truly mean that. There, there's people who will try and do it all.
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There's people who can be successful doing it all. I have friends who've grown companies remarkably quickly, both within and outside of this industry, within months to multiple millions, within a year to eight figures.
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This has happened. People do this all the time, and it's because they got radical and focused. They're not actually working as hard as you think, and that's my takeaway for you. My takeaways are
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focus in, build a reader growth engine. These are all they are. You can't, there's, the, you can't get much more. This is, these are your options. But it's finding your reader growth engine and what works best for you.
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What works best for someone else might not work best for you. Meta ads, maybe not. Maybe it's a reader community. Podcasts, maybe, but maybe you actually wanna do Pinterest ads. May- Right?
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Whatever it is, there's tons of opportunity. Now with that said, I figured how we could end like the second half of this workshop is actually make it a workshop and less of me talking at you and more working with y'all.
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So I want y'all to prepare because I'm, I guess I'm putting Maggie into the hot seat first, and we're gonna dive in.
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I have a whiteboard ready in Canva, and we'll dive in and start talking about how to build Maggie's reader growth engine. After that, we'll certainly have time for at least one more, maybe more.
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I don't know how long Maggie's gonna take. I wanna, wanna make sure I give her ample time because we'll learn through that process, but I'm gonna have at least time for one more of you, maybe even multiple.
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I don't even have a hard stop in 40 minutes, so I can go over. So be prepared and be thinking as you're watching the exercise me and Maggie go through, which she's not been prepared for this, by the way.
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She just came on the call, and I was like, "Oh, Maggie, you, you'll be great for this." But as you watch the exercise that we go through, know that I would love to do the same thing with you.
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So just be prepared and you don't have to do it. No pressure, but I'd love for you to do it. So with that said, I'm going to switch it over to Maggie.
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And before we even dive into any reader growth engine talk, because a lot of folks are gonna be listening to this in the future, the recording, and might not know you, why don't you give a little introduction to who you are and what you're creating?
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Hello. [laughs] So I am currently working on creating a cocktail recipe brand for bookworms called Trope Tales. And last year I ran a Kickstarter campaign for it,
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and it did five figures, and I've been- Hey. That's impressive... having some good success with that.
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And I am actually working on developing a instant cocktail powder mix line for the brand. So that's what I'm currently working on. But, and I will be running a Kickstarter for that at the end of summer/early fall.
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And I know it sells well, the book, so I know the powders will do well hopefully. And I guess where I'm like not struggling, it's like how do I go from like point H, point B? 'Cause I already did the Kickstarter.
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I know there's a demand for it, and it did really well. And I still get like random sales on my website. Like I got one this morning from a random person, and I'm not even running ads or doing anything.
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So I'm like, I know there's like demand for it. I'm just trying to figure out how to scale it. Love it. But basically, yeah, cocktails for bookworms. Yeah.
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I mean, you're seeing the random sales are because of word of mouth and that K factor, right? And like you could literally model it out. If you were to look up like the model of graphs, the spread of viruses,
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that word of mouth that you're experiencing and that little trickle you'll get and, "Yeah, it doesn't fully die, but it's still there." Mm-hmm. It's probably what you're experiencing now, which is great.
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It's an awesome sign. The fact that you had a great Kickstarter means that there's demand for the product. Mm-hmm. People clearly like it. You're seeing word of mouth, amazing signs. But I know that you've
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had the question like, what's next? So thinking through this reader growth engine talk,
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I know that for the drink mixes, you might not be ready right now to turn on the reader growth [laughs] engine for that yet, 'cause you are in the medium stages.
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Like you're deep in the middle now of that product development.
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But once it's ready, which won't be too far from now, you'll be ready to turn on a reader growth engine, and a lot of folks listening might be in the same shoes as you, where in a couple months they're gonna be ready for this type of thing.
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So when you hear it, what do you start to think of in terms of where would you begin building your reader growth engine? What would you start to think about? Ads. Ads. Okay. Probably. Why?
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'Cause that feels a lot easier than creating a bunch of content [laughs] and not TikTok. You know, that, that's actually a great point.
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If it, what feels easier-Is a great place to start because you have, like we talked about, it takes so much investment. It doesn't necessarily mean money, but certainly time or- Mm-hmm...
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energy, emotional energy- Yeah... into a specific area. So if ads feel like an easier place to start for you, you can always change your reader growth engine. Yeah. Meaning, this didn't work, I wanna go somewhere else.
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So where would you begin with ads? What does that even look like? Yeah. I mean, I've run a couple in the past, and I've gotten sales from them. I turned it off 'cause I was running them during Dry January.
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So I was like, "This doesn't make any sense. Why am I running ads right now?" And I was- For your specific product, that, that does make sense to maybe dial it back during that period, yeah. Yeah.
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So I was like, okay, I'm gonna run them again in the summer, 'cause it feels like more of a time where people would be buying and consuming cocktails.
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But yeah, I mean, I just created some graphics that I thought were good, and I ran them, and I saw that some did better than others. But I didn't really run enough to really get good data on it.
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But I've done some TikToks, and some of them have done well, so my next step would probably be to run ads with the videos that did well. Yeah. No, you could definitely run ads with the videos that do well.
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To them or, like, from them? Uh, no. Like, you would use the same video content and then upload it to Meta probably. Yeah. Yeah. You would just use the same content. Yeah.
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'Cause it's ultimately about the psychology of it. It's, okay, something clicked here. Are the people on TikTok remarkably different than the people on Meta? Possible, but- Yeah...
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I would be willing to bet that probably isn't true, so it's a good place to start when testing ads. Now, okay, we could talk a lot about...
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'Cause what I love about this product is, like, I can see a lot of different ways to market it. Like, I can see how you could build any one of these reader growth engines.
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But if we focus on ads, first of all, if you want, you're welcome to share your ads dashboard and I can take a look at it. We can all see it. Okay. You don't have to, but I would be curious to- I can pull it up...
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see what you actually spent and where that went and what ads did best, but- I'll pull it up. Yeah. No, that would be great. And then the big thing is, like, when you're running ads- Let me see...
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you're limited by, your growth is limited by your cash, 'cause you're spending money and then not... You might not be making it back immediately.
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So my first thing to think through with you would be, how can you profit immediately on your ads so that you aren't going in the hole, but actually making a profit so that
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you're not even spending real money out of pocket? You're not. You're making that money back. There's an immediate ROI.
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So that would be, I think, the thing to try and nail with that for you that would make this a, a growth engine that can really grow. Yeah. Marketing isn't easy, but 90% of it is just trying. Like, that's the big thing.
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It's not that there's a perfect strategy. There is not. It's just seeing, okay, so this was the last 30 days. That probably won't have anything, 'cause I don't think you're running ads right now, right?
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Yeah, but this is from the ad set that I ran. But you were running ads in the last 30 days? I ran it... When did I run this? Is there a way to see what day I ran it? You can change the dates.
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So you can go up there and then you can change it to this year, um- I think I ran it at the end of February. This one specifically. At the end of February? Okay. What can I do? How do I do this year? Where is this year?
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You can, up, up there you'll s- be able to change the dates. Like, you can scroll back a month and just... Yeah. Okay. Enter whenever you'd like. Oh, you only are doing January 1st now? My God.
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I don't know how to do this. It's all good. This is a good little tutorial for everyone. So this is the Meta Ads dashboard, if no one's used it before. You can go from here and advertise to
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Facebook, Instagram, and then, like, some other properties, like Messenger and WhatsApp. But typically, I guess you can let the AI kind of optimize for the ad placements you want, but most are gonna be in the feed.
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Occasionally there'll be a few story ones. That's where most of the impressions are gonna be, where most of the ad spend's gonna be, where most of the profit will be. Meta works where you have three things.
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You have the campaign, then you have ad- the campaign basically is what you set, like, a budget at. You can optimize the budget based on each ad set or have Meta do it for you. Then you have ad sets.
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Each ad set's basically you're targeting or how you're niching it down. So you could be doing retargeting ad sets, retargeting audience you've run ads to before who visit your website.
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You can have ad sets for specific countries. You can have ad sets for specific demographics or specific, like, interests.
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Typically, having Meta choose the targeting and interest tends to be good, but if you wanna feed it some indication of who your audience is, oh, they like romance books, as a starting point, that can be helpful, but I would almost always let Meta also get people outside of that audience, which is an option.
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You can select for that because Meta's AI is very good now. Then the last thing is obviously your creative, which creative can be in... You know, you can have the same creative be in multiple ad sets.
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You would just have to copy it into each one, and you can actually copy engagement over too if you use the same ad ID. This is getting, like, really inside baseball for a quick tutorial.
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But regardless, you have all the different copy that you can do, images, headline. Images can also end up being videos, and that's Meta Ads.
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You basically wanna take the limited targeting, you give it a budget, and most of your time's gonna be spent creating, like, hopefully incredible copy headlines and images that get people to go to whatever link you're sending them to, which is probably a place to either buy your book or sign up to your mailing list.
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I love when they get to sign up to your mailing list and then after get an upsell.
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That allows you to grow your audience at a fast rate, so you can sell them things later, but then also allows you to make back the money you're spending acquiring those emails off the upsell, which is infinite reader loop, which something I cover in The Power of Sp- Anyways, with all that said, I think we now can see your ads, which is great.
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Yeah. So it doesn't look like you... I guess cost per click looks great. 1,300 post saves, 198 link clicks. Does it, are you able to see, you're using Shopify, right?
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Yeah.Are you able to see anywhere on here, you might have to scroll to the left or add it. Were you running a traffic campaign or were you running a conversion- Yeah. Traffic... traffic campaign. Okay. Got it. Cool.
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Immediately I'm thinking like, so you... Where were you sending them? To my website. And that was just the product page to buy your Trope Tales book? Yes. And the price point was? I think it's 35. Okay, 35.
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And it costs what? You... What's the cost of goods sold there? Like $5? Cost of goods sold is like how much it costs to produce the product that's being paid for. It's about five or six. Six. Okay.
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So roughly then you're maybe taking home, let's call it, throw in some margin there, 27, although you're probably making more than that. So that's your gross. Although, again, it's probably a little bit higher.
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And you're getting 40 cents link clicks. Okay. That's... So then bringing cold traffic to a paid product, conversion rates obviously vary.
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But if we're looking at paid ads and we're diving deep into paid ads right now, and I wish like I could go on for...
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We could go on for 10 hours about paid ads, but I actually genuinely want to cover paid ads in a period of time that like is manageable for you, so you can walk away and be like, "Oh, I get this." So- Yeah.
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It's a big animal to bite... with paid ads you have like three, three parts to the funnel, right? You've got part one is like the actual like click, right? Click to it. The next step to the page, to the web page.
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Remember the web pages. Yeah. Which in this case you mentioned is Trope Tale book. So you're getting 40 cents on average. Now let's look at this first step.
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Is there any of them that were getting, if you scroll back over to the cost per link click, were there any of them that were getting... No, they're all about the same. So all about the same. Yeah. That's not bad. Okay?
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I, I have- I'm gonna have some feedback for you, but it's not, it's not terrible. So what this means is that no ads under, overperforming from a, a, a click perspective. Now there's the conversion perspective.
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So what we typically expect, there's different benchmarks for link clicks, but I honestly would like to see this be cheaper for you. Yeah.
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I'd like for you to get your clicks down to, at this scale, 20 cents, that when you scale up it's 25 to maybe 28 cents and maybe even cheaper than that. Yeah. Y- your clicks are a little bit expensive.
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So it shows me this. You don't have bad ads, but you don't have a winning ad. Yeah. And the problem- I also didn't run it for that long either... winning ads will show up pretty quickly. You'd be surprised.
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Like you don't have to spend $100 to find a winning ad. You could spend $10 and you'll see it's a winner. That's how fast Meta will show you. This indication to me, given they're all here, is that there probably is no...
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Now, we can look at the creative, and I wanna get there, but this is just how much the numbers can show you. Now- Yeah... the next step is this.
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And this is where you'll start to see why I don't like this cost per click and why we need to adjust it. But I wanna see what your actual conversion was.
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But typically, I'd expect cold traffic to convert to a paid product at around 1.5%, give or take 1% on either end. Obviously 0.5% is very hard to make money on. 2.5%'s great.
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You could be getting 2.5% at this lower price maybe, but you're gonna probably be under 3% of cold traffic converting, right? Like almost... If you're above 3%, that's amazing, like incredible, and I'm so happy for you.
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That's difficult to do. So let's just benchmark it at one out of every 50 clicks. If we do 50 times.4, we're at $20. So you're spending $20 to make $27, which means you make roughly $7 or $10 in profit.
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That's what I'd be roughly expecting seeing this. That's not an amazing return. Not bad. It's really good if you have more books to sell them. But in your Trope Tale series you don't. Now here's the trick.
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You have drink mixes to sell them, which technically could make this remarkably profitable. There's a good conversion to that. Mm-hmm. Remarkably profitable.
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Which is why your offer and what you're charging matters so much. Oftentimes the people who win in advertising are the people who can afford to spend the most.
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It's not who's the best at ads, it's who can afford to spend the most, which- Yeah... sounds depressing, but it's also a game about spending money. So- Yeah...
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that's why when you talked about doing the drink mix, I was like, "This is genius. Gonna work really well." And I was very happy to see you do that.
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But the other flip side of it is, damn, if we can make our ads work even better and have a higher average order value, AKA more money that we're making per customer, well, that would be incredible. So- Yeah...
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what I wanna ask you before we talk about that and this whole reader growth engine is what, from these 198 clicks, how many purchases did you get? None. None? None. None. Okay, that's okay. Yeah. You're good.
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So first of all, this is a really great indication of... It's a good thing where you spent... W- let me think. You spent about- 100... 80 bucks on these ads? Yeah, it was like, yeah, like around 100.
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It was a $10 a day ad spend. Yeah. For seven days. Oh, yeah, so 80 bucks. Yeah. Not 100. So- Less than 100...
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80 bucks, depending on who you are, could be the difference between you making your electricity bill or it might not make much difference in your finances.
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If it's the difference between you making your electricity bill or not, AKA $80 is money that you can't afford to lose, then you should not be, you should not be spending money on paid ads like that to get going.
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You should save up for it or be even more conservative than Maggie. Spend $5 a day. Spend, only spend $10, whatever you need to do.
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Obviously, statistical significance comes at 334 typically, although 1,000 clicks is probably better. But statistical significance starts around 334. That's what I remember from my stats class.
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I could be wrong, but it's somewhere in the 300 range, like where you can start to have that.
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You didn't quite hit the point of statistical significance, which what that means isYou do need to get enough data to know what your conversion rate is, right? Yeah. So it's tough to say. But given that you have none,
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and you don't have statistical significance yet, but you have more than like 20 clicks- Yeah... that, that is a little bit of a cause for concern for me. My first thing would be, one, did you take the people
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who backed your Kickstarter and input it in Facebook to try and create a lookalike audience from it? What is that? No. So a lookalike, a lookalike audience is when Facebook... Basically, you feed Facebook emails.
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You could say, "Hey, here's a list of 100 emails." More is better. 1,000 emails. 10,000 emails. I want you to go find people similar to these emails.
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And Facebook typically, this is almost dystopian, has 50% to 60% of like emails you'll give it in their system already.
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So they know who those people are, and then they map who those people are onto building out your own lookalike audience of that, right?
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I would, I- Building lookalike audience is interesting, 'cause you could build a lookalike audience to your mailing list. Maybe not all of them have bought, so it might be like lower intent group.
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They might draw an interesting lookalike audience compared to people who have bought, such as your Kickstarter backers or plus- Mm-hmm... Shopify conversions.
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You also might be able to do that for people who buy specific products at scale, right? Anyways, that's effectively what a lookalike audience is.
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One, that's an interesting thing to try because when you're trying to not spend a ton of money on Meta, to test it in the beginning, giving it as much direction as possible while still letting the AI do its thing can help it be more efficient.
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Because this sounds weird, but like 100 bucks is nothing to most brands advertising on Meta.
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So for them, oh, I spent a couple, I spent $100, $200 on Meta and then the ads went through the learning phase, and now they're out of the learning phase. Okay.
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But for you, like anything you can do to get out of the learning phase faster- Hmm... is probably a good thing. So- How do you import the audience? So if you go to the three, like three lines, all tools, I believe.
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Yeah, audience right there. There you go. So click audiences. And then in there- Oh... you can create a custom audience, and then when you import the- Or is it this one?
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You, basically you'll create the lookalike audience from your custom audience.
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So you can click create a lookalike audience, but then it's gonna ask you where are you creating that lookalike audience from, and ask to pick a custom audience.
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The custom audience is gonna be, "Here are my mailing list subscribers. Here are my Kickstarter buyers," et cetera. So you can say like where it came from, right? It came from customer list, offline activity, et cetera.
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Offline activity could be like buyers at a book signing. And then you can say what percentage you want it to be in terms of the population. Do you want it to be the 1% of the US population closest to that audience?
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Do you want it to be the 10% closest to that audience? It's pretty fast. It's incredible. This one. I think that one. Yeah. It's incredible. And again, like I said, once Facebook's trained up on you, you don't even...
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You're good. Then, now my next question for you is, did you pixel up your store? What does that mean? I- Oh, I maybe I'm speaking a little bit. I should be more clear.
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So Meta pixel, it's essentially a tracking pixel that you could input into Shopify.
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In fact, Shopify has a really good conversion with Facebook's CAPI, AKA conversions API, which basically allows Facebook to see everyone who buys your product on Shopify. Do you have that set up? I don't think so.
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Set it up. Okay. It takes maybe 20 minutes. Yeah. So if you go to apps, I would go to... Yeah. And then you can enter in pixel and then like from there. Or marketing, too, I think it might be in.
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It's funny when I'm put on the spot with all these dashboards. It's, "Oh my God. Where is everything?" That's okay. Yeah. Facebook and Instagram. I would check out that app, 'cause there's the free plan there. Okay.
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Yeah. Ta- take that, but I think it'll be in marketing actually, where you'll be able to install the pixel. It's a very simple process. There's a bunch of different like YouTube tutorials on it. I'm trying to
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remember h- exactly where it is in Shopify. Oh, yeah. There you go. Marketing apps. Down here. Few more marketing apps. Because here's the thing about what happened here that I'm really interested in.
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You chose to run a traffic ad, but what a traffic ad tells Facebook is, "Hey, Maggie. Thank you. We're gonna take your money and get as much people to click on your link as possible."
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What that doesn't tell Facebook is, "Hey, Maggie. We're gonna take your money and get as much people to buy your product as possible." Mm-hmm.
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Once you hook up the pixel to your Shopify store and give Meta visibility into what actions are taking place in your store, and if someone's buying your product or adding to cart, et cetera, 'cause it can see all these events.
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There's the Facebook Events Manager where once you set up the pixel, you map on what events happen on your website and what they mean for Meta.
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Then you can run what's called a conversion ad, and Facebook conversion ads are all about like driving conversions, and those will be optimized to find you buyers. Yeah.
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I would think about doing that because you're using Shopify. Traffic ads are really good if you're using Amazon, because Amazon doesn't give you amazing conversion data to feed back to Facebook. Or- Mm-hmm...
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which is, which sucks by the way. It's not ideal. It would be better to use conversion ads in that case, but it's just- Mm-hmm... you know.
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Or if you're trying to grow your mailing because you want just get traffic in, clicks, get those free email downloads. Makes sense. And then, then traffic ads make sense. Yeah.
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Because technically, you don't want cheap clicks, you want cheap buyers, and that's a different thing. So that's my first criticism. Before we even know- we haven't even looked at an ad yet.
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So I do wanna look- No pressure... at your actual ad creatives. But- Yeah... that's just where my mind goes to, and I apologize for not knowing off the top of my head exactly where the pixel stuff is in Shopify.
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I'll try and find it- Yeah. I would love to hear-... right now. Um- I would love to hear more about that. That sounds like something to check out. It's, oh, Facebook pixel's amazing.
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And every ads platform basically has like their own pixel. So yeah, basically, okay, you're gonna wanna go to the Meta Events Manager, create the pixel there- The Meta?...
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enter your Shopify store URL, and then it's going to go from there. So you'll set up on the Meta ad, not on Shop- Shopify Oh, okay. Okay. Yeah.
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I'm probably gonna have to look up a YouTube video for this too, 'cause this is... I don't wanna mess this up. This is-Oh, it's easy. Yeah. So you'll just go there and then, yeah Connect data Exactly.
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You'll actually do is you can... Let me send you this link here in the- Yeah. If there's like a step by step [laughs] 'cause I'm like- Yeah. This is Shopify's whole business is basically built off meta ads. Okay. Yeah.
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[laughs] That's how most people make their money on Shopify. Okay. So now that everyone here has a little crash course, do we wanna actually look at your ads? 'Cause I'd love to actually see them.
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Because I think what we're seeing here is this growth engine can work, right? We wanna be very clear that this growth engine can work, and it's not necessarily, oh, take all the courses and watch all the YouTube videos.
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It's literally like getting in there, seeing, oh my God, this didn't work. Why? Oh my God, maybe it's because I didn't connect my pixel. Maybe it's because
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I'm not feeding Facebook the right, any sort of indication of who my audience is when I already have buyers, therefore have an advantage and could give it a little head start.
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Maybe I'm not actually going through and optimizing for the right campaign goal. Like, I need to be optimizing for conversions or maybe it's traffic, whatever it is.
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In your case, that could be causing it all to fall apart because ads is this weird game of like little optimizations.
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Like, what I'm seeing here with Maggie's ads is not typically bad performance, it's just you ex- can expect to make all of your profit from winning ads. Yeah.
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When we actually look at your ads too, that's another key part of this funnel. I only ran it for a week. It's hard to tell. But you, but you have enough data to start to see some things. You do.
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So let's look at your images, if you can. Look at the actual creative. I'd love to see it. 'Cause they all look the same in terms of, roughly in terms of how their performance was. So I'm curious how similar they are.
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So let's see what they actually say. And Joselini- Oh, the actual... Okay. Wait, hold on. No, no. Yeah, exactly. Show me the, I wanna see exactly what a viewer sees on the platform. How do I, like, figure that out?
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How do I see that? Is there a way to- You will go to, if you, if you click, right now it, you have to click the new traffic ad for UpTales. Click that. Oh, edit? Yeah. And then you click edit. Yeah. Okay.
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And then you should be able to see it all there. And then it looks like you have the same copy and headline, but you just have four different image variations. Is that correct? That's what it looks like.
379
01:03:08.620 --> 01:03:18.860
I have- Yeah, that's what it looks like. I have different headlines for each one. Oh, you have different headlines. Okay. Okay. Okay. But the same copy. So now this is getting interesting. So
380
01:03:20.100 --> 01:03:27.340
I, I have a few friends who run Facebook ad agencies, and I don't proclaim to be a Facebook ad expert. I like to...
381
01:03:27.420 --> 01:03:34.760
I think I'm good at teaching the first principles of how to do all of this in terms of thinking about marketing and systems, but I don't also think I'm that bad at Facebook ads.
382
01:03:34.790 --> 01:03:45.680
And there might be different schools of thought around this, but for me, I like to think about it very systematically. And your goal, this is, now we're going to, like, this growth engine optimizing for this.
383
01:03:46.720 --> 01:04:03.000
Your goal when running meta ads is not to necessarily make money and get sales. That's your end goal. But your first goal is to find a winning ad, is to understand what a winning ad even is.
384
01:04:03.760 --> 01:04:09.160
What is the psychology behind it? What, why is that working? The tough part about when you have all these different headline variations is this.
385
01:04:09.280 --> 01:04:20.650
One, think about how much data, AKA impressions it takes to get statistical significance on any one of these combinations. That means more spend. A lot. Mm-hmm. Right? That also means more learning time for Facebook.
386
01:04:21.120 --> 01:04:29.580
You're giving it more stuff it has to sift through. Don't get me wrong, I say all the time, more is better, but more is better in a very specific sense with ads.
387
01:04:30.540 --> 01:04:42.160
More is better in that you should constantly be testing more. You sh- but you're, you need to get clear data first. Yeah. So here I'm not getting clear data at all. We don't even know what headline worked.
388
01:04:42.220 --> 01:04:50.620
What headline- Right... did? I have no idea. So I don't recommend in the beginning doing this. Once you have, this is the difference. Once you know your winners,
389
01:04:52.220 --> 01:05:00.960
yeah, you can throw 'em all in one mega campaign and all your winning images in one mega campaign and just let the AI do its thing. That's great at that point. But you don't, you're not, you're just starting.
390
01:05:01.040 --> 01:05:09.740
So I would- Right... literally take it down to one headline here. You don't have to do it right now. This is a lot to do, like, literally while we're live. But so you understand that's a, the kind of process.
391
01:05:10.340 --> 01:05:20.800
One headline. I wanna then test that one headline. Now let's go even deeper. You have these images, and images are great to test, but for every image, you have to test that headline and copy with that image.
392
01:05:20.860 --> 01:05:30.020
Likewise, if you have two headlines, you have to test two headlines with every copy image, which doubles the complexity. So everything you do doubles, doubles the complexity, every little change you add.
393
01:05:30.400 --> 01:05:47.590
In the beginning, I'm, I'm looking for simple, and what I'm looking for is the most high leverage place in our process that we can optimize to get a winning ad. And it's... A book all about this is called Cashvertising.
394
01:05:47.840 --> 01:05:58.520
It's an amazing book. Cashvertising. And what Cashvertising talks about, the principle behind it, are how big New York ad agencies make money from ads. It's freaking awesome. Everything about the book is awesome.
395
01:05:59.180 --> 01:06:05.160
I love it. And it's not about internet marketing ads at all, which is why I like it, because I always like taking things from different areas.
396
01:06:05.280 --> 01:06:13.660
But what you need to know from that book is that there's specific sections of an ad that if you could spend all of your time optimizing, you should.
397
01:06:14.440 --> 01:06:22.700
And effectively, they're talking a lot about newsletter headline, newsletter ads and things like that, like literal newspaper ads. So the headline's everything in that, right? Mm-hmm.
398
01:06:22.740 --> 01:06:36.100
In Facebook, personally, I found it's the image. 'Cause the image- Yep... is what draws the most attention. Yeah. So you're better suited to run one headline, one copy, but throw in 10 images.
399
01:06:37.500 --> 01:06:47.250
More on that front, 'cause you're testing images right now. One, once you get the winning image, take that winning image, and I promise you, every time I run a Facebook ad, I see one or two images
400
01:06:48.540 --> 01:06:59.660
go so much better than the other ones, like double to triple cheaper in terms of whatever I, my outcome goal is. Yeah. So once you put all those in there-Then you can go, "Now let me test the headlines."
401
01:06:59.960 --> 01:07:07.920
But that's not a process that takes days, it's a process that takes weeks. And ideally you've been able to make some money throughout the way, so it's not like you're just hemorrhaging cash the whole way through.
402
01:07:07.960 --> 01:07:18.580
You're actually ideally able to start making some money at some point 'cause you've optimized to get winning ads. Yeah. And knowing that you can keep making the winners better and keep finding more winners.
403
01:07:18.600 --> 01:07:28.360
And what you wanna do essentially is have a testing process, right? Where you're gonna have an ad set that becomes your image ad set, that we just pile new images into, and then we have the set copy.
404
01:07:29.000 --> 01:07:37.020
And maybe over time you create a new ad set or update that ad set to have new ads for winning copy you find later on in the process does better.
405
01:07:37.120 --> 01:07:48.380
'Cause you wanna use that winning copy on every new image and/or new video as well. Video's a asset that catches eyes. Then next step's gonna be headline testing, right? And the next step's gonna be copy testing.
406
01:07:48.400 --> 01:07:56.040
But at some point if you have a winning ad, just let that sucker run too. Mm-hmm. And sp- and let that thing spend money, but then continue trying to optimize that winning ad in and of itself.
407
01:07:56.070 --> 01:07:57.180
And that would be the process I'd take it through.
408
01:07:57.240 --> 01:08:09.120
Going from image to headline to copy, and then continuing with each winner to update your process, so that as you begin testing new images, you're incorporating concepts from the winning headlines and the winning copy.
409
01:08:09.380 --> 01:08:16.780
And likewise, when you're text is in te- testing the next winning copy, you have those winning images. Right? It all builds on itself. It all builds its knowledge.
410
01:08:16.810 --> 01:08:30.000
And ultimately who usually wins in ads is not who makes the most ads, but who tests better. And testing is a volume plus strategy game, and you can do it.
411
01:08:30.060 --> 01:08:41.260
So yeah, I guess everything I'm seeing from you is you've got a good product, you've got all this down, but then there's one last step here, which is that if we look at the ad and we read the copy,
412
01:08:42.220 --> 01:08:51.540
I wanna then go read the copy and then go to the actual Shopify page. Yeah. Because I am curious if there's a reason people are dropping off, 'cause there might be. And that would then be crucial.
413
01:08:51.550 --> 01:09:02.020
'Cause it doesn't matter if you have a winning ad if no one's buying. If you scroll up, you can actually see the copy you entered in. No, do... Okay, wait. There we go. So let's read it.
414
01:09:02.050 --> 01:09:11.360
"Mead Trope Tales, the world's first cocktail recipe book inspired by popular bookish themes and literary tropes. Featuring 50 specialty drinks, hand-drawn illustrations, and funny anecdotes.
415
01:09:11.400 --> 01:09:19.980
Get your signed copy with exclusive bonuses, a bookmark, sticker, and postcard. Perfect for any book lover looking to elevate their reading experience and bar cart." Okay. People were clicking on that.
416
01:09:20.020 --> 01:09:29.560
Oh, there's multiple. Oh, there's multiple. [laughs] Oops. So that... Oh, so this is getting really crazy. Oh, there's a lot of them. Oopsie. It's getting real- [laughs] Well, but most of them have the same theme though.
417
01:09:29.640 --> 01:09:41.240
But yes. Yeah. This is... You can see my whole point that it's gonna be- Oh, wait. Is this...? No, that's the AI thing. The primary text is right here. Oh, okay. That's not what I did. This is AI suggested. That's fine.
418
01:09:41.300 --> 01:09:50.240
Okay. Th- those variations actually are more readable actually. Yeah. Okay. But yeah, they have the same core point. Yeah. So I actually don't think those variations are major.
419
01:09:50.360 --> 01:10:00.810
Usually the meta AI variations are not major. It, which isn't a bad thing. Like, they're not trying to... They're trying to add little optimizations, not completely change everything. But okay, so I, I get what it says.
420
01:10:01.660 --> 01:10:12.520
To me, that aligns actually very well with your product. So can we go to your product page? Because I'm wondering, like, there's... You can see how much confounding variables are in this situation now.
421
01:10:13.500 --> 01:10:18.570
It's almost mind-numbing. And I'm sorry, 'cause y- now you at least can knock out some of these confounding variables.
422
01:10:18.600 --> 01:10:27.430
But ultimately, like your goal in anything is to try and understand like why or why not is your book doing well, and take out all the other things that like could be noise. Oh.
423
01:10:27.460 --> 01:10:37.320
So the noise here I have so far is too much headlines and images- Yes... not making a cohesive winning ad. But, eh, I'm not too concerned for that because that's more a winning ad situation. You did get 200 clicks.
424
01:10:37.360 --> 01:10:42.540
On the click situation though, it's like the traffic. That's the thing that I'm concerned about, the traffic and the lack of pixel.
425
01:10:42.580 --> 01:10:49.220
But on top of that, let's at least do our due diligence and look at the page, because- Yeah... maybe there's something going wrong on your product page. Maybe not.
426
01:10:49.600 --> 01:11:01.160
Um- I actually have to head off because it's my mom's birthday and we're going out to dinner. But- Oh. Oh, good. Oh, good... this is the website. [laughs] Okay. You, wait, you sent them to this page?
427
01:11:01.920 --> 01:11:18.680
I sent them to- 'Cause I don't... Oh, nope. That's why. Look how far down the buy button is. No one's scrolling that far. True. [laughs] Then if they go to this, 'cause this is where I initially had it.
428
01:11:19.440 --> 01:11:32.840
Yeah, that's better. Much better. Okay. Much better. That alone might 3X your conversion. To have it go to this. Oh, yeah. Man, I wanna stay for this. [laughs] I have to go. No, it's all right. It's all right.
429
01:11:33.060 --> 01:11:42.120
Y- your mom is way more important than this. Thank you, Maggie, for volunteering. Yes. That was a lot of fun. I'd love to do one more with someone else who ideally is not doing paid ads.
430
01:11:42.440 --> 01:11:54.140
Ideally you want to do another growth engine and are at some sort of phase in it. I, I'm a big fan of simplifying things, but it's very easy to complicate things, so we wanna make it as simple as possible.
431
01:11:54.180 --> 01:12:08.020
With all that said, between content, community, everything with building your own media brand, or collaborations and affiliates, does anyone have a growth engine they wanna workshop?
432
01:12:08.780 --> 01:12:21.970
Where would me- I'm thinking like membership community. Let's do it. Let's do it. I have not started it. This is like your ground floor conversation. So- No, that's... I love it. [laughs] This is perfect.
433
01:12:22.360 --> 01:12:29.080
And by the way, I know we're over. I'm completely famous for doing this at this point. I'm not famous for doing it, I'm famous among few, but this happens all the time.
434
01:12:29.120 --> 01:12:33.720
So if you have to go, no worries, it's just being recorded. But it's just too much of an exciting topic.
435
01:12:33.760 --> 01:12:39.860
There's too much here with reader growth engines to not dive into, and I think there's so much more to learn when we get to go hands-on. I'm not in a particular rush to get going, Jocelyn.
436
01:12:39.980 --> 01:12:43.740
I think probably I'll call it in f- definitely if we go longer than 40, I'll probably call it.
437
01:12:44.100 --> 01:12:54.080
But let's just dive into everything we have here, which sounds like you might be at more at the ideation stage here, which is perfect, 'cause I think a lot of us are also at the ideation stage in whatever our growth engine is.
438
01:12:54.160 --> 01:13:04.760
So walk me through. You said paid membership. Let's back up before then. Which everyone knows where I start, which is before we have a reader growth engine, we need to know who our readers are. So who are your readers?
439
01:13:04.780 --> 01:13:22.068
What do you create?I am creating urban fantasy for over 40 Gen X predominantly women. Love it. Love it. Okay. I'm with you. Second book publishes Thursday. [laughs] Amazing.
440
01:13:22.568 --> 01:13:40.498
Huge. [laughs] Amazing. 1st of October, yeah. That's incredible. So I'm in build- I'm in building audience visibility stage. Yeah, yeah. Okay, let's... I always, I have so many questions- Yeah...
441
01:13:40.508 --> 01:13:46.488
but I just wanna keep on topic. Let's dive into this audience building reader growth engine. Okay. How have you marketed yourself so far?
442
01:13:46.588 --> 01:13:59.508
And when you hear the word reader growth engine, what starts to come to mind for building yours? All the things. So right now, primarily how I'm doing this is through Facebook ads.
443
01:14:00.288 --> 01:14:12.988
I'm doing the testing through all of that, just for the book sales. I'm focusing primarily on getting the word out about the book. I have a newsletter. So newsletter ads, community building,
444
01:14:14.248 --> 01:14:31.848
getting like readers together. That's pretty much it, and yeah. Okay. Okay. No, makes total sense. So do you think you're ready for reader growth engine?
445
01:14:32.488 --> 01:14:37.068
I think I could be at the very beginning of it. Why?
446
01:14:40.168 --> 01:14:54.128
One, because I know I can handle doing the work because I've done lots of other work and other products and other businesses, so I'm not worried about that. I know I have an audience.
447
01:14:54.208 --> 01:14:59.598
I have a, as I'm finding the audience, I have a very loyal, engaged audience. Good.
448
01:14:59.648 --> 01:15:13.188
It's small, but mighty at the moment, and the word of mouth is happening in ways that are very strange and exciting, um- That's incredible. [laughs] Now, do you have...
449
01:15:14.328 --> 01:15:24.308
All these are really like really good signs and like amazing. There's a sort of, how I like to think about story market fit, 'cause that's the predecessor to being able to create a reader growth engine.
450
01:15:24.348 --> 01:15:29.188
That's how I like to... You wanna clear that bar first. Yeah. Which it's the hardest bar to clear, by the way. That's...
451
01:15:30.588 --> 01:15:43.948
On- once you have that, I automatically start thinking your success as an author is undeniably inevitable, which is so exciting. But you know it when you have it, and like I said, there's no hard numbers behind it.
452
01:15:43.988 --> 01:15:49.538
But for book two, do you have a pre-order up for it? Yes. If you don't mind sharing
453
01:15:50.748 --> 01:15:58.848
roughly, you could either share the total shares, sales number of book one and now the pre-orders of book two, or you could share roughly the percentage of people who bought book one, who bought book two.
454
01:15:58.888 --> 01:16:11.368
And if you don't know it, totally pull it up. I would love for you to see that. I don't know it yet. Let me see here. Let me pull it up. Let's check it out. Let's check it out. That's a great data point. That, that's...
455
01:16:11.477 --> 01:16:20.838
'Cause I think you have a lot of qualitative signals, and I love that. I, I love that. I, as well though, as a cautionary tale, this is not to say that...
456
01:16:20.848 --> 01:16:29.268
I'm one of the most optimistic people out there, I'm very hopeful for you, but I had a lot of optimistic signals moving into a series I did not have story market fit on.
457
01:16:29.348 --> 01:16:44.348
My readers that I found really liked it, but unfortunately the actual market of a defined group of readers that I was going to continually reach with it, the post-apocalypse survival folks, were not as into it, even though I had amazing signals from my readers and even good reviews of the book.
458
01:16:44.448 --> 01:16:51.648
So there was a sort of like qualitative, quantitative gap that was weird where I had like a small group of loud people, but
459
01:16:52.728 --> 01:17:00.808
when it came to the masses of my audience, the masses of my customers, it was hard to make the numbers work. Right. So that is not to say that you don't have it, just to be a cautionary tale on that.
460
01:17:01.188 --> 01:17:11.477
I think it's good to always mix quantitative with qualitative. And one of the things I know, especially in this genre, is it will build more as more books come out- Oh, yeah...
461
01:17:11.477 --> 01:17:25.508
because it's a very untrusting genre right now. [laughs] People wanna see three plus books. [laughs] It's completed. Yeah, 100%. Exactly, and I'm not thinking of anything big in the next week. Let's, how do I share?
462
01:17:25.588 --> 01:17:32.388
Oh, I'll stop sharing. You're welcome to share your screen. Oh. I'd love for you to share your screen. Oh, oh, oh, I, oh, I can... I don't have to share, but- Oh, you, whatever you want.
463
01:17:32.468 --> 01:17:48.968
Yeah, whatever's comfortable for you. So the, so I can just tell you, the pre-orders on book one from July to September were 34. The pre-orders now on book two from January to now have been 18.
464
01:17:50.648 --> 01:17:59.308
Okay, so the pre-orders of book one were 34. The pre-orders of book two are 18. Yeah. Okay, and what were the sales of book one?
465
01:18:00.048 --> 01:18:14.288
Because like pre-orders plus like current sales since it, 'cause that would be like, we're not gonna get your actual read-through rate. We're gonna get an idea. So my sales, okay, of print or anything? Any, anything.
466
01:18:14.888 --> 01:18:32.708
Um- So I've sold just about 75 print books. Nice. And I'm a couple thousand e-books. Nice. Okay. Okay, cool. That is- I'm at 1,928 e-books. Cool.
467
01:18:33.148 --> 01:18:46.828
That's awesome. And you're in KU, correct? Correct. The biggest indicator I think is gonna actually be the page reads. That'll probably be your least noisy data in this- Okay... which is interesting.
468
01:18:46.848 --> 01:18:48.698
But once book two comes out, which is next week,
469
01:18:50.288 --> 01:19:03.388
what I would be really curious to see is the metric, which you probably are familiar with, but folks listening this will be good review or maybe an intr- interesting new concept, is like a full read-through in KU, right?
470
01:19:03.448 --> 01:19:14.310
In, in Kindle, unloaded in your KDP dashboard, there's a section when you goActually to your enrollment details, Kindle, it'll give you your KENP or your Kindle Normalized Page count. Mm-hmm.
471
01:19:14.360 --> 01:19:27.940
And that's effectively how long they say your book is in Kindle Unlimited. So for easy maths sake, if your book's 250 KENP and 10,000 pages long, that means that you've had 40 people read it. So what you wanna see is
472
01:19:29.140 --> 01:19:37.740
comparing apples to apples here in terms of your next book might be shorter or longer, how many full read-throughs of book one compared to book two do you have? Is that an imperfect metric?
473
01:19:37.760 --> 01:19:47.620
It is, and I could talk for days about why, but it's the best indicator Amazon gives us. It's pretty terrible still- It's pretty-... but it's at least decent enough. Yeah. So I would be curious
474
01:19:48.680 --> 01:19:57.800
over time, over weeks, over months, what that looks like in comparison. For a rough benchmark, like I see lead series in Kindle Unlimited book one to book two have 80%
475
01:19:59.120 --> 01:20:11.400
of the full read-throughs of book one, 80% of that number will move on to book two. And then after that it'll normally be like 90 plus percent, even 95% plus.
476
01:20:12.040 --> 01:20:19.510
Especially 'cause in KU you don't have the friction of buying more. So it's a really good indication of just is the story enough to keep them around?
477
01:20:20.300 --> 01:20:35.430
Now, there's a lot of reasons why you might be saying 80% sounds high to 90% sounds high, is it's not actually that high because the KU full read-through is a flawed calculation. You have people who will read five pages,
478
01:20:36.380 --> 01:20:50.750
10 pages, 15 pages, and drop off and never come back, and but you don't know. So that's why I get pissed at it, 'cause it's like weirdly annoying. But all this to say that I think you have insanely good reviews. Mm-hmm.
479
01:20:50.870 --> 01:21:03.340
Looking at it, like 4.4 on Goodreads, 4.6. I- it's tough to know until we get a little bit more of a signal. Okay. But part of it is you need to take effort, you need to put in...
480
01:21:03.380 --> 01:21:10.870
You almost need to start building the engine and turning on all of it to get the signal, and there's almost like a degree of story market fit. So when you said you have, are at the beginnings of it,
481
01:21:12.500 --> 01:21:20.200
my analysis would ha- say the exact same thing. Which I think is actually a really cool place to be in. You're in the exact place to be seriously considering a reader growth engine,
482
01:21:21.400 --> 01:21:24.600
and knowing that building it is likely in your near future.
483
01:21:24.760 --> 01:21:39.180
Because even if this isn't exactly it and you don't end up having incredible story market fit, this isn't a rewrite the whole book or start a new series or pivot entirely, you're at a level in which I would say it might just be some tweaks here and there.
484
01:21:39.240 --> 01:21:46.440
Which there's an art to figuring out what those might look like or even if they're needed. Right. I, I think it's all good signals. We need more signal.
485
01:21:46.480 --> 01:21:55.030
With that said, I think it's a great thought exercise to go into building a reader growth engine. My advice to you would be not to go out and build it immediately. No. Let book two launch. Yes.
486
01:21:55.520 --> 01:22:08.220
[laughs] Get, get signal on that. Three launch. [laughs] Yes, exactly. Then once that happens, I would start to dial up the reader growth engine a little bit, right? And start to experiment with it and see
487
01:22:09.540 --> 01:22:18.830
are these numbers holding true? Are readers sticking through? Is this all working? Which is really fun. So with that, you mentioned paid membership or membership community stuff.
488
01:22:19.420 --> 01:22:28.729
I know Scott's also thinking about that, who's live here right now. Um- Fabulous... which is great, and you're welcome to chime in, Scott, too. We can do a joint thing right now as well. Please, dude. Um.
489
01:22:28.740 --> 01:22:35.800
You just said we're running over. You want me to start talking about community building? [laughs] Well, be my guest, whatever. Yeah, that's what we're here for. This is the, this is our workshop.
490
01:22:35.810 --> 01:22:47.440
That's what we're here for. Okay. Well, I will say this, this was something Michael recommended to me. I've been doing tons of reading on community building. Okay. This is a great book, and Michael...
491
01:22:47.600 --> 01:23:03.660
I'd, I'd heard of Michael of Mighty Networks before Michael confirmed that if you haven't gone through their free video course series, do that. Yeah. Have you done that? Uh, I've used Mighty Networks a lot.
492
01:23:03.780 --> 01:23:18.800
I've built other communities through them for, like, reader groups or whatnot. Yeah. So I'm very familiar with the platform. Are th- were those paid or free? One was paid and a couple were free. Okay. Yeah.
493
01:23:18.940 --> 01:23:27.109
So you've got that experience there. I have never built a community before. I'm all about I'm gonna go down a rabbit hole. I'm gonna read every book and article and watch every video about it.
494
01:23:27.160 --> 01:23:30.470
So I've been Hoovering that up. I would say
495
01:23:31.580 --> 01:23:43.570
if you haven't gone, even if you've used Mighty Networks, the video series is, it is literally everything they've learned distilled down into very short, easy to digest videos, best practices.
496
01:23:43.600 --> 01:23:49.580
And it's, as Michael has, keeps reminding me [laughs], it's a lot less work in terms of content creation.
497
01:23:49.880 --> 01:24:01.040
I always want to do more content, and what I've realized, uh, between Michael and the research is it's not really about that. And so I just, I'm gonna share that in case that's not something that's...
498
01:24:01.100 --> 01:24:08.660
Don't, it's not gonna take a lot of work to launch it. It's gonna take a lot of work to keep it going, but it's totally doable. Mm-hmm. It's totally doable. Yeah.
499
01:24:08.670 --> 01:24:19.990
A lot of people- Are those communities still going, Jocelyn? I, is, what was that? Are those communities still active? A couple of them have left the platform- Okay... for various reasons.
500
01:24:20.040 --> 01:24:31.440
A co- one of them moved over to Circle, and that, uh, and one is still on Mighty Networks. I'm just not involved with it anymore. Gotcha. It grew beyond the capacity I wanted to give it.
501
01:24:31.980 --> 01:24:41.700
So I, I was kind of, I, I stepped out because I wanted to be doing this thing. [laughs] Cool. Very cool. What were you gonna say, Michael? I didn't mean to interrupt you. No, I, I love it.
502
01:24:41.820 --> 01:24:55.610
I think the biggest thing when thinking about a growth engine is thinking about your CUNY design, and I like to think about a CUNY like a city. And
503
01:24:57.640 --> 01:25:11.428
the, the best cities have... I shouldn't say the best cities, that's not the right word. The fastest growing cities tend to have-An industry or something they're known for.
504
01:25:11.628 --> 01:25:18.478
In the States, Los Angeles, which I'm here now, I'm actually about to see Scott in literally a couple of hours in person, which is amazing. LA is known for entertainment.
505
01:25:18.948 --> 01:25:27.468
Also now it's diversified a lot since then, all right? But it's a very diverse economy here. But entertainment's certainly still what it's known for, and it's what a lot of people come here for.
506
01:25:27.548 --> 01:25:34.308
You got San Francisco being tech, New York finance. You have the cities, they have something.
507
01:25:34.348 --> 01:25:44.608
And even towns have their own version of an industry, whether that be a specific factory located there, a specific company, a specific distribution plant. All this to say,
508
01:25:46.348 --> 01:25:55.208
there needs to be a reason for readers to come to your city. Cities are really durable to build when you design it, but you want to design it for growth because sometimes
509
01:25:56.148 --> 01:26:12.848
when we think of a community as a growth engine and then community as a business model, they're slightly different. A membership, paid membership community probably is more akin to a society or a speakeasy or a gym or...
510
01:26:12.887 --> 01:26:24.158
There's better real world proxies for paid membership because you have this interest, you have this passion, and you want to be a part of this group for either status or some sort of transformation.
511
01:26:25.288 --> 01:26:38.428
But that group in and of itself tends to not, just like books, tends to not just naturally have millions of people coming to it organically, but ends up being the type of thing that you need to market and have a growth engine for.
512
01:26:38.508 --> 01:26:46.848
And the best growth engine for paid community is often free community, and free community can be a growth engine for your stories, for anything.
513
01:26:46.968 --> 01:26:54.208
So what makes a community designed for discovery or for customer acquisition? And I think there's three principles of it.
514
01:26:54.828 --> 01:27:02.508
So the first is that it can't be a community based around your brand because your brand limits the growth of the community.
515
01:27:02.628 --> 01:27:12.098
Going back to my Simon & Schuster example, they're not building a community, but they're building media products, and they even understood from their media products when it came to podcasts.
516
01:27:12.368 --> 01:27:17.928
If they just did it based on their authors, they'd limit the growth of the media product, and the media product is what gave discovery to their actual products.
517
01:27:17.948 --> 01:27:20.888
Therefore, they are willing to feature other people who they don't publish.
518
01:27:21.697 --> 01:27:29.588
Maybe get other people on the bestseller list because they know in the long run and in the medium term that's going to lead to more growth for them. It's the right play. It's the smart play. Now,
519
01:27:31.468 --> 01:27:42.808
the other thing, the second principle I think when designing a community for discovery is thinking about what space you want to own in someone's mind. I think, like literally do an exercise.
520
01:27:42.968 --> 01:27:57.888
We can do this in a moment because I can pull back up the Canva of a word map, right? And thinking about this is the community at the center. What words do you want people to associate with your community?
521
01:27:57.948 --> 01:28:10.008
What makes your community special? And the idea here is that it, it's actually tough to compete with an existing community. Extremely hard. It's way easier to compete with an existing media format.
522
01:28:10.028 --> 01:28:22.688
There's a reason for that. When you have a media format that does really well, a consumer might want more of that media format, AKA, "Oh my God, I love this show. Yeah, a similar show sounds great. I'll go to that show.
523
01:28:23.308 --> 01:28:32.408
Why not?" And there is still a power law to it, but it's not as durable. There's a lot more churn in it, meaning it's a lot easier for... Or word it another way.
524
01:28:33.468 --> 01:28:42.128
Authors drop off the top of bestseller chart a lot, and then new authors come in. It doesn't happen as often with communities. Communities are a lot more like cities.
525
01:28:42.168 --> 01:28:54.048
How often does New York fall off the list of the number one finance hub? It doesn't happen. It will maybe one day, but it doesn't happen. These things take hundreds of years, and it might never happen. Who knows?
526
01:28:54.148 --> 01:29:00.768
I don't know. I'm not, I'm a futurist, but there's certain things I don't even pretend to know. That feels like these networks are so powerful.
527
01:29:01.068 --> 01:29:09.928
When you're building a community, you're not creating content, you're creating a network. That's the shift, and what you need to understand is why are people going to come to your network
528
01:29:11.508 --> 01:29:20.088
and leave other networks, spend more time. It sub- it's not complimentary. Stories, why authors are very collaborative, because it's complimentary. Community is not complimentary. It's often substitutive.
529
01:29:21.388 --> 01:29:28.208
You directly decide to be part of X creative community, right, as authors, and it means you're not spending that time in another one.
530
01:29:28.727 --> 01:29:45.828
And speaking of the author community, th- we all know a few Facebook groups that have been unbelievably durable for years and may just be durable for years and years to come, and aren't even having any interaction at all from their original leaders.
531
01:29:45.948 --> 01:29:59.428
Mm. And I'm not saying it's a good or bad thing. It's just a fact. It's wild. So you want to go and build that for yourself. So the biggest thing is thinking about how you differentiate. So how do you differentiate?
532
01:29:59.508 --> 01:30:05.028
There's three ways to differentiate, which I'm giving you almost like bullet points and bullet points now. But here are the three ways.
533
01:30:06.048 --> 01:30:15.648
First is covering a new topic, having a space for conversation that has not happened before. So in your case, maybe that's combining urban fantasy with another passion.
534
01:30:15.688 --> 01:30:22.988
Like we're gonna do urban fantasy and cooking, urban fantasy and knitting, urban fantasy, I don't know, something. I'm throwing stuff out there. Urban fantasy and travel.
535
01:30:23.448 --> 01:30:34.608
It could also be a specific subgenre or demographic within urban fantasy. We are only like w- women in our 40s in with fantasy, urban fantasy. I don't think that's the best community, by the way.
536
01:30:34.748 --> 01:30:42.948
It, but it, that could be a great community. I don't think that's the best way to market it. But regardless, you, you get that point. Or it could be we only want name X subgenre of urban fantasy.
537
01:30:42.988 --> 01:30:51.348
We only talk about this, and oh my God, I've been waiting for a place to only talk about this. It's like the person who goes, and I'm using another analogy here to cities because it's true.
538
01:30:51.388 --> 01:31:04.468
The person who like lives in, let's say, the Back Bay of Boston and then decides, "Okay, I love the architecture here. I love the good food, but I hate the traffic and the high prices.
539
01:31:04.548 --> 01:31:14.508
I'm out to my little place, my, my new little city. I'm gonna move out. That gives me that, the little stuff I really like."I don't need all the bigness here. It's... And we see that happen all the time.
540
01:31:14.728 --> 01:31:24.718
And the third way you can differen- the second way, sorry, you can differentiate or, wait, I think I'm on the third way you can differentiate your community. Fir- first way is gonna be you're combining passions.
541
01:31:24.848 --> 01:31:39.148
Second way is niching it down, getting really specific about your topic. The third way is going to be the mindset, the movement, and some of the biggest author communities have done this unbelievably effectively.
542
01:31:39.188 --> 01:31:48.408
I'll give you the best example, which is 20 Books 50K. I mean, when it started, right, like it was a movement. It was a literal movement. It wasn't that 20 Books was the only business getting out their writers.
543
01:31:48.488 --> 01:31:53.968
It was not. It wasn't that 20 Books was the only community talking about the things it was talking about. It was not. So then why did 20 Books take off?
544
01:31:54.868 --> 01:32:02.728
Because it was very clear that this was a whole new movement of how to be a writer that still combined all these other topics and conversations.
545
01:32:03.108 --> 01:32:06.868
So to say we are urban fantasy, we are readers of urban fantasy who are here
546
01:32:07.968 --> 01:32:20.728
because we use this to get through challenging times in life, or we love urban fantasy because we think it's the thing to bring humor to the world, or we love urban fantasy because it turns us into badasses.
547
01:32:20.768 --> 01:32:26.128
Like, whatever that is, like creating a movement around urban fantasy is the third way to do that.
548
01:32:26.208 --> 01:32:36.588
So again, to review, you have the first two things you wanna think about with your community, which is what is the reason people are coming there that makes it special, not making it around your brand.
549
01:32:37.008 --> 01:32:48.318
Um, and then the third thing, the third big bullet point in this whole list is gonna be how do people engage in the community, right? What makes it special in terms of
550
01:32:49.228 --> 01:33:02.268
what rituals do they partake in your community that are gonna be different than other places? Because you can build a community of people who wanna come around wellness. Or I'll give you an even better example.
551
01:33:02.308 --> 01:33:09.788
You can build a community of people who wanna come around yoga, right? And you can have a whole movement around yoga, and it can be based in a different space.
552
01:33:10.108 --> 01:33:20.908
But then when you incorporate the ritual of puppies in the mix, all of a sudden that becomes supremely interesting, right? So thinking about, what is your version of puppies? What is your version of yoga puppies?
553
01:33:20.918 --> 01:33:28.288
And there's examples of it. Like some communities like under-index on certain needs. They might not let people share certain types of things.
554
01:33:28.308 --> 01:33:34.998
They might also like share things in a different format that you encourage people to do. Hey, like, this is gonna be like you sharing.
555
01:33:35.008 --> 01:33:43.068
Like in this community we're not just gonna talk about books, but you're gonna share like what you're eating and what you're doing while you're reading, and it's just constant pictures of I'm at this park or I'm reading, I'm drinking this tea.
556
01:33:43.228 --> 01:33:50.528
These are different types of rituals. Maybe it's we quote our favorite things in our books here. That's what we do. That's our ritual. Like you share the quotes. We're sharing it and we're sharing these things.
557
01:33:51.088 --> 01:33:55.648
Maybe it's fan fiction based, which you have to be careful of, but that's, a lot of people love that.
558
01:33:56.068 --> 01:34:02.868
So as long as you make sure that people are not pirating and being respectful of IP, there's lots of different ways to go about it. The fan art, oh my God.
559
01:34:02.908 --> 01:34:08.808
So anyways, I could go on for hours about community, but that's my like framework in terms of how I'd approach it. So I'll throw it back in your court.
560
01:34:09.468 --> 01:34:26.388
Considering all that community design for discovery and how you're able to position that community in a different way, what do you think that looks like for you? I'm almost thinking Gen X. Yeah.
561
01:34:27.128 --> 01:34:35.408
That's, that's what I'm thinking is leaning into that way because then you can... It's not my brand. There's,
562
01:34:36.928 --> 01:34:54.688
uh, about the mindset and the movement, the feral children of Gen X who are now the feral adults, that's ki- that's, I would be leaning into that kind of like movement in terms of leaning heavily into what it, what does it mean to be Gen X?
563
01:34:55.428 --> 01:35:10.028
'Cause there is a certain nostalgia now of us in that generation that are looking back and seeing who we are now and how we became who we are based on how we grew up and who we were and
564
01:35:11.188 --> 01:35:25.028
there, there is a real like calling to Gen X to find each other and there, there is, there is also a certain irony to a Gen X community. And it- That is so true. As a fellow Gen X-er, that is so true.
565
01:35:25.268 --> 01:35:28.867
I, I think there's real demand there. I have an author friend who
566
01:35:30.128 --> 01:35:39.168
also had a community of fellow Gen X-ers, and this is a paid community, not a community designed for discovery, although they had that too, and they were next level when it came to community.
567
01:35:39.988 --> 01:35:48.168
But needless to say, my point is they had about 10 or 12 women who were all recently divorced, Gen X, who
568
01:35:49.768 --> 01:35:59.518
really were struggling to make friends and had lost a lot of their world, their social life, so they came together through books online, ended up having these like hour wine chats. Mm-hmm.
569
01:35:59.528 --> 01:36:01.518
And that's what it was, like the ritual, right? Yeah.
570
01:36:01.518 --> 01:36:14.688
'Cause I think you now have, you just really outlined like the sort of niche, like the, you know, you niched it down in terms of, in this case, the who it's for, 'cause it could be the who, it could be the why or the what.
571
01:36:14.728 --> 01:36:23.688
So you, you niched it down on the who. That was a such a similar way to explain that. I explained it the long way. There's three ways to niche down a community: who, what, or why. But regardless, you did the who.
572
01:36:23.748 --> 01:36:30.508
Then the first thing you did too is really important as well, which is that you've now made it for everyone, right?
573
01:36:30.548 --> 01:36:40.648
In term- not for everyone, but you've made it not just for people who are- read your books, but people who like urban fantasy and are Gen X. You've accomplished steps one and two. Now it's the ritual. Yeah.
574
01:36:41.048 --> 01:36:46.228
Yeah, because I think the ritual could even be like the book club of the things we read.
575
01:36:46.928 --> 01:37:03.608
The original old school urban fantasy from the '80s and the '90s that is not paranormal romance, it is not paranormal women's fiction, 'cause that's more to what I write to, is like that old almost horror urban fantasy before it got
576
01:37:04.528 --> 01:37:13.028
sparkly. Yeah, yeah, so I've thought a lot about that as doing like... I mean, I've often, I've even thought of like the old urban fantasy podcast.
577
01:37:13.268 --> 01:37:26.754
The bringing the people around the old love of what-Urban fantasy originally, why we loved it when we loved it when we were 20. Why the things that Gen X has a very different urban fantasy.
578
01:37:28.504 --> 01:37:41.164
Yeah, our urban h- fantasy is very much more horror than ur- the urban fantasy we know today. Oh, Jocelyn. Yeah. No, it's great. Let me give you the challenge of this reader growth engine.
579
01:37:41.244 --> 01:37:52.604
Every reader growth engine has a challenge. Paid ads are really good for numbers geeks like me who like optimizing things, because you're gonna dive in, and the challenge is how many steps the optimization can go wrong.
580
01:37:52.644 --> 01:37:55.994
Community is not really a numbers game from an optimization- Mm-mm... standpoint at all.
581
01:37:56.624 --> 01:38:04.274
You can throw out a lot of the advice I shared earlier, 'cause it's just not applicable to this growth engine, but there's one thing that's hyper applicable, or not hyper applicable, hyper important,
582
01:38:05.244 --> 01:38:22.254
which is that communities, when we talk about, like, any form of a network, it's... I'm gonna sneeze. [coughs] I'm sorry. So [clears throat] communities need what's called a node, and a node [clears throat]
583
01:38:23.044 --> 01:38:37.004
is essentially the minimum amount of people interaction for the network to produce value, and people in networks often cluster around nodes. So you have to basically create a node- Mm-hmm...
584
01:38:37.034 --> 01:38:46.474
and then the node ideally actually self-perpetuates, which doesn't always happen, and it takes a while sometimes to get to the point where communities are self-sustaining. Like- Mm-hmm...
585
01:38:46.484 --> 01:38:47.844
that's a beautiful place to be in.
586
01:38:48.524 --> 01:38:56.944
So the actual tough part- It's hard to- Yeah, so the tough part is actually marketing a community in the beginning, 'cause communities are one of those things that, like, is really durable.
587
01:38:56.984 --> 01:39:05.604
Because eventually you can sit back, not even run it, have other people run it, and have it work everything for you. Like, communities are an incredible asset. Communities are one of the only things you can buy.
588
01:39:05.644 --> 01:39:13.644
Like, I would never buy a paid ad from someone. A paid ad is not an asset. [clears throat] Content in shows you, you can buy from people.
589
01:39:14.504 --> 01:39:23.144
I think they're remarkably difficult, because oftentimes if they're not participating in it, it loses all the value. Communities are hyper valuable. If I... To acquire a community, like, would be an amazing business.
590
01:39:23.184 --> 01:39:32.214
So what you need to think about then are what are the communities that you can siphon people from, in a respectful way. So, you know, what podcast can you speak on? Where can you interact in? Mm-hmm.
591
01:39:32.214 --> 01:39:39.864
Where can you share yourself? 'Cause that's where you're gonna be able to grow. So you have to have that concerted strategy, and I actually love this reader growth engine for you because
592
01:39:41.024 --> 01:39:52.084
paid ads is a growth engine that can scale very quickly. It's high risk, high reward, literally. Right. Content also can scale quickly, but also can go down quickly.
593
01:39:52.184 --> 01:40:03.304
Content's one of those that goes up and down, but can also be very durable. Typically, though, it takes longer to get started. Community takes six to 12 months to start to pay off on average.
594
01:40:03.424 --> 01:40:11.294
That doesn't mean you can't do it faster, but you'll feel those fruits for years. So that is my...
595
01:40:11.324 --> 01:40:21.224
the honest pros and cons to you with it, but I think you're in a good position to start it, because you're not looking to necessarily take off right now. You're looking to actually s- set the seeds in motion.
596
01:40:22.004 --> 01:40:32.944
And what I love about community is community's probably the only marketing method, outside of if you design a really well-designed show, where you don't need to have story-market fit to do it.
597
01:40:33.004 --> 01:40:38.234
It's funny, 'cause I give advice, and then it's, oh, there's so much nuances even to the advice I give, and I...
598
01:40:38.284 --> 01:40:44.684
The advice in story-market fit is the right one for most people in most situations, which is why I share it, but this is an, a valid exception to it.
599
01:40:45.304 --> 01:40:57.614
You can build a great community and not have story-market fit, but know you're gonna create for that audience, and know that eventually one of your stories will have story-market fit and retain that audience, because the community has such a long-term payoff that building earlier is actually a good thing.
600
01:40:58.264 --> 01:41:05.444
Versus paid ads, if you don't have story-market fit and you're running into paid ads, disaster zone. Content is in the middle again.
601
01:41:05.624 --> 01:41:11.884
It's, you can start it earlier, but because content's not as durable, when you take off, you'd really like to have...
602
01:41:11.924 --> 01:41:21.424
You'd really prefer to have story-market fit, whereas a community, you can take it off, have a huge community, and, and not have any product to sell them, as long as you're okay with that, because that community likely will stay.
603
01:41:21.464 --> 01:41:34.804
Unless, again, drastic things happen, but even I've seen drastic things happen and communities have stayed. So that's my long short answer on it. Now, Scott, you're talking about doing it on Mighty Networks.
604
01:41:34.884 --> 01:41:48.584
[clears throat] Building your community on Mighty Networks. What about a community that's built in a way that's, like, a, like, just a... I'm thinking, like, a Zoom. Does it have to, does it have to...
605
01:41:49.024 --> 01:41:57.304
Like, a we meet once a month as, like, the book club, the Urban Fantasy After Dark Book Club, as, like, a beginning stage
606
01:41:58.324 --> 01:42:10.204
to start se- to start feeling out if it starts getting a group, or do you immediately go to something... Does the node need to be, like, fixed, or can it be a barge?
607
01:42:10.444 --> 01:42:14.644
Does it have to be a city, or can it be, like, s- like- I think
608
01:42:15.704 --> 01:42:26.724
it, it's up to you, depending on where you are in terms of time, learning the system, firing it up, 'cause it's, uh, it's not gonna be an overnight thing to fire up a, a Mighty Network community.
609
01:42:26.904 --> 01:42:45.964
Money, all that k- I know they have a free plan, free community or so- They've got a free community that's really cheap, but the bottom line is, and I'm very curious to see if Michael has different views on this, but everything I've read so far has said that one-to-one peer interaction is the number one metric for a successful growing community.
610
01:42:46.044 --> 01:43:00.384
And as soon as you take it out of membership.io, Kajabi, School, Mighty Networks, as soon as you remove it from that platform, what you lose is that ability between Zoom calls for the people to interact. Right.
611
01:43:00.404 --> 01:43:07.434
Now, you could replicate that through Discord. Yep. I was just thinking Discord. Yeah. There's a way to do it that... So can you? For sure,
612
01:43:08.364 --> 01:43:14.394
but make sure you're building in a place for them in between those calls, 24/7 asynchronous connection- Right...
613
01:43:14.394 --> 01:43:25.186
connectivity inter engagement, because ev- including this book, which I swear Mighty Networks read this and used this for their tutorial video series-It's all about that engagement.
614
01:43:25.316 --> 01:43:36.476
Like quick win, get them engaged, get them, whether it's in some way, shape, or form reward them for joining the community right away. Yeah. Get them on board, get them engaged. That's gonna be critical.
615
01:43:36.576 --> 01:43:54.416
So yeah, you could roll it with a patchwork of Zoom and Discord for sure. Yeah. What do you think, Michael? I think that you when it is- async's important, yes, but also
616
01:43:55.936 --> 01:44:06.376
a timeline of a couple weeks versus a couple months versus a couple years is different, meaning if Zoom's easier for you to get started for a couple weeks, I think that's okay even for a month or two.
617
01:44:06.496 --> 01:44:16.045
But for several months, for a year having that only be it and not graduating then to async I think would be an issue. The rollout's important. Like you, you need both at a relatively early stage- Mm-hmm...
618
01:44:16.106 --> 01:44:26.316
but early stage is relative. So it can be over a period of time. And the other thing I'd say is that you wanna think very carefully when you're designing a community, 'cause this is focused on
619
01:44:27.356 --> 01:44:39.476
building a reader growth engine for you around a place that can drive growth for you. And it's really interesting because I've seen communities grow to large sizes on many different platforms.
620
01:44:39.556 --> 01:44:51.776
So communities are weird because the tool you need to grow it can vary, but I'll give you what you should look at. So I've seen big communities on School. I've seen big communities on Discord obviously.
621
01:44:51.796 --> 01:44:56.066
I've seen big communities on Facebook. I've seen big communities on Mighty Networks. If you're doing a paid community, completely different.
622
01:44:56.396 --> 01:45:07.116
There's specific platforms that are optimized for paid communities that I tend to think are good, good for that. When you're talking about a free community what you really wanna optimize for is this.
623
01:45:07.376 --> 01:45:22.536
Imagine back to our city example. Think of the internet as these massive highway systems. You could plop your city out in the middle of the ocean that takes three layovers and a 24-hour trip to get to. Hmm.
624
01:45:23.176 --> 01:45:32.996
For a paid community there's nothing wrong with that, 'cause people are okay. Like people might wanna go to The Bahamas at that point. But for a free community is that really the most efficient way to grow?
625
01:45:33.456 --> 01:45:42.786
The answer's almost certainly gonna be no. So what you need to analyze is, and, and using one of the superpowers here, what are the other reader cities that already exist? Where are they?
626
01:45:43.266 --> 01:45:46.696
And how can you build, for lack of better words, an edge city off of it?
627
01:45:47.016 --> 01:45:55.496
If you're not familiar with what an edge city is that would be the highway belt going around most our beautiful urban design in America around the belt roads and, and the cities there.
628
01:45:55.636 --> 01:46:08.616
I think Tyson Corner in Washington DC was the first one that, you know, geographers and demographers noted. So all of this to say that that would be the number one thing in terms of the tool that I'd look at.
629
01:46:08.916 --> 01:46:21.376
When you're optimizing for discovery for a- acquisition my instincts for you given that you're talking about probably creating for majority Gen X woman is gonna be Facebook.
630
01:46:22.076 --> 01:46:38.436
The downside of Facebook is it's not amazing at one-to-one connection, so what you're gonna have to do is build out some channels, 'cause Facebook has the channels feature now, and you're gonna want to incorporate tools like LetterLoop that people can opt into.
631
01:46:38.556 --> 01:46:41.846
I think the Zoom calls will be an important actually connector in that. Mm-hmm.
632
01:46:41.876 --> 01:46:49.256
You can design things with Tally that are completely free that people fill out forms, then automate things to vacuum with Zapier that connect them over email.
633
01:46:49.296 --> 01:46:53.096
Again, all opt-in, 'cause the most important thing about connecting people one-on-one is that they are okay with it.
634
01:46:53.616 --> 01:47:01.636
So there's nothing wrong with using Facebook as the discovery tool, and then getting deeper within it using a bunch of free automated tools to get people like deeper connected. So
635
01:47:02.596 --> 01:47:12.276
that, that's my instinct for you, but I would actually do the exercise of looking at the reader cities and seeing what's around just based off of what you've told me that's how I would approach it. Yeah. Which is weird.
636
01:47:12.326 --> 01:47:21.276
Again, I'm say- I'm suggesting a community on Facebook. I don't really like Facebook, but yeah. That's where my, that's where the majori- all the research I have done on marketing is like it's Facebook.
637
01:47:21.716 --> 01:47:31.096
There's one exception to it that Scott didn't bring up and that I didn't bring up yet that I wanna bring up to folks who are listening that might be useful, which is a community platform called Discourse.
638
01:47:31.296 --> 01:47:40.716
It's technically free, but it, if you run it on your own server, but it's $100 a month otherwise, which isn't cheap, but I'll tell you why it's not that expensive either.
639
01:47:41.156 --> 01:47:45.656
Essentially what I like about Discourse is it's really good as a SEO based forum.
640
01:47:45.756 --> 01:47:55.466
So the problem with Facebook, the problem with Discord, the problem with Mighty Networks, the problem with all of them, 100% of them, is that the content's in a silo. Mm-hmm.
641
01:47:55.496 --> 01:48:00.476
So if your community members are gonna be creating valuable content that people would wanna discover in and of itself
642
01:48:01.956 --> 01:48:14.236
creating a forum similar to Kboards, right, for folks who remember that, that can have immense value because then you can actually leverage Google's highway, right, to grow what you're doing.
643
01:48:14.756 --> 01:48:23.326
So depending on again the rituals and the conversations that are gonna take place the tool that you use to build your community is different. So again, Facebook's probably my suggestion.
644
01:48:23.466 --> 01:48:29.556
If, if you start with Zoom and are gonna figure out what those exact rituals are then you could wait because maybe Discourse is an option.
645
01:48:29.736 --> 01:48:58.376
I personally am a big fan of it, and when it comes to I haven't invested heavily in doing anything very real yet outside of like closer knit author community stuff, but when I get back into doing a more concerted effort for growing an author community my long-term bet is on Discourse personally because of the content authors are gonna create being valuable for other authors to find for free online, which makes sense with the community design and the content and the rituals that would take place.
646
01:48:58.426 --> 01:49:08.676
'Cause like you research any question about authorship eventually that's gonna show up and it's gonna lead to more growth. Right. So that makes a lot of sense for that, but I don't know if it makes sense for you.
647
01:49:08.716 --> 01:49:11.996
But I wanted to bring it up because there might be other people listening who are like, "Oh my God, that's great.
648
01:49:12.036 --> 01:49:19.556
Like I wanna create a prepper survival community," and oh my God everyone who's gonna search up content about like prepper and survivalist stuff is gonna land on my forum, that sounds epic.
649
01:49:19.596 --> 01:49:29.315
And that's pretty smart versus in your case if you're having a lot of posts that are like more personal and more touchy. Not that's even a bad thing to be searchable through Google, but who is searching for that?
650
01:49:29.356 --> 01:49:33.396
So anyways. Yeah. No. I should've mentioned earlier migration.
651
01:49:34.416 --> 01:49:46.336
So if you start with Zoom, Discord, and in two to three months or even six months you wanna switch to something else that's yet more people the further you get down that have to now go to a different platform. Yeah.
652
01:49:46.446 --> 01:49:56.256
And so I think if you can test it where you sign up there's lots of ways to market that. Michael and I have talked about that in terms of gauging interest.
653
01:49:56.896 --> 01:50:01.056
Put your money where your mouth is, not just I'm interested, but I will pay for you based on what you saw.
654
01:50:01.116 --> 01:50:12.566
You can do all of that before you build the community to make sure like Kickstarter that there is a demand in the market for that. All right. Thank you all so much for watching this Reader Growth Engines workshop.
655
01:50:13.036 --> 01:50:13.696
It ended here.
656
01:50:13.736 --> 01:50:26.656
We could have gone on for hours and hours and hours, but I hope this gives you a real taste of what it's like to build your own reader growth engine and gives you a framework and hopefully some steps to help you figure out what that looks like for you.
657
01:50:27.256 --> 01:50:38.796
If you have any questions about building your own reader growth engine I'd love to hear from you. You can email me at hello@authorsidekick.com. Likewise, the Reader's First Challenge is literally all about helping you
658
01:50:39.776 --> 01:50:44.036
get your book out into the world, get your first readers, and then start to think about building a reader growth engine.
659
01:50:44.136 --> 01:50:58.276
So if having some more hands-on experience and going through a true community experience where we all have the challenge over 10 days of marketing our books and selling to readers first, if that interests you then I'm sure you'll love the Reader's First Challenge.
660
01:50:58.556 --> 01:51:11.416
With all that said, thank you so much for watching. I had a ton of fun with this, and I hope you all have an amazing rest of your day. And as always, don't forget, never forget, together we are valance.