Guysssssss… Marketing without social media.

The Chatters
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Okay, so. Imma need the nerds on this one.

I have a poetry blog, and I want to promote myself. I’d hate to post/do stuff no one sees :joy:

However, the pickle I’m currently in is that I despise social media. Like, I want it to burn in hell. It’s to the point where I’m sincerely considering deleting both my professional and my personal instagram accounts.

Like, I hate it. It’s a huge time and energy sink. And not only is it bad for MY mental health as a consumer, it also is really incompatible with how I like to interact with the world. Cuz seriously, you have 2-3 seconds to hook someone or they’re gone??? Like, RLY?

Thus I’m left with a pickle, esp bc some of the more traditional advice doesn’t really fit me. I will be doing the standard SEO and in-person event stuff, but I unfortunately can’t do more advanced SEO like stuffing lots of keywords in my posts, because it’s… well… poetry. It’s not gonna work :rofl:

So imma need your most unhinged suggestions pls. The weirder and audacious, the better. I was the world to be floored :grin:

(Btw if you’re clueless, SEO = search engine optimization. Basically like telling Google “HEY! SHOW ME TO PPL PLSSSS!!!”)

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Maybe I’m too into rap culture but could you create the poetry equivalent of a mixtape and pass it out? Almost like a zine but more sophisticated.

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Hmmmmm. I don’t think the rap mix tape would work, but I COULD try passing stuff out :thinking: like, you know, free samples at food shops :grin:

Sounds yummy :))

Ty for advice lol

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Oh, and as an honourable mention: my gf works in this this shit :rofl: like, she’s done digital marketing/sales for nearly 15 years (which is the age gap between us lmaoooo)

But I wanted to ask the writers first because you guys know more about the human side of things :joy:

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@Qualeshia12
@alcoholandcaffeine
@alenatenjo
@CoffeebyNight
@EmiliaFrost
@TheTigerWriter

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I haven’t the foggiest idea on how to help you. I’m very sorry.

I don’t use social media and I don’t know anything about how to not market without it.

Sorry that I couldn’t help you.

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It’s cool :] thanks for trying.

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I has been summoned

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Okay, so, do you have any, like, creative conventions or fairs that come near you?

I know some older people who don’t use much social media, but they’re able to market somewhat because they get booths at fairs and conventions and hand out their books or magazines or whatever there

Yes, this costs money :sweat_smile:

And they also likely have newsletters which isn’t social media. You just get people to sign up and give them free little things once a month or twice a month. I know someone who has curated some followers that way (yeah this person also does IG, but she renewed her account and stopped growing). Likely her sales are coming from her newsletter and hardcore fans.

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Yeah, I’ll do that, thanks :grin: as been mentioned… free samples?

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I’m better at connection with people in person anyway. I think half my followers were people who I got after I went to a concert and handed out poetry snippets with my insta handle on it? It was really cool.

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There’s… I think there’s a bunch of events in town lol. I can go to those.

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Totally get this lmao, I dropped social media this year. As far as I know, Enna’s suggestions are solid. Local craft fairs are where you’ll get the most interaction. You can make zines out of your poetry and sell them! You could also submit to publications, enter contests, the like.

You might glean some tips from older popular authors like Stephen King or Chuck Palhinuk or Margaret Atwood. You can probably look up how they started selling, the resources they used to build their community, ect.

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Social media is buns, yeah. I DETEST doing it for myself. If you did still want to take advantage of it, you can do it without even opening the apps. Batch create your content in Canva or whatever, then sign up to something like Postoplan (I have the lifetime deal, works gr8), schedule it, forget it until next month.

For SEO, I’ve always split it up into two categories - technical and not-technical, lol. The first one is your on-page metrics that Google pay attention to, like loading times, domain quality/age, stuff like that. The rest is what you’re talking about, with ‘keyword stuffing’ (although that’s not considered great to do). You can figure out your keywords in a bunch of ways, Neil Patel’s UberSuggest is free and great, and Google has their own tools that I don’t personally love all that much.

If your website is solely your poetry, and no opinion posts, no pages about you, nothing else, then yeah you’re a bit screwed with most SEO, except for page headers, description and backlinks. Backlinks are just links from other places, say a magazine mentions you and links to your website. The header is the < title > and < h1 > < h2 > so on of your web page. The description is specifically the information Google reads and displays in the search results, which you can and should manually edit for each page/post.

That said, you probably should be organising your blog somehow, and that can help you with your SEO. Think ‘Poems about X’ or whatever, but do some research because I haven’t audited your site or niche and can’t give any specific tips :’) You can then link those pages together, do some on-page SEO, and also organise your site so people who want to specifically read about a certain theme can do so easily.

As for non-SEO and non-SMM ideas, you could always turn your blog into a community of sorts. A forum, Discord, or other meeting-place-type-thing where people can get together and share their own poetry, or have VIP access to your poems before anyone else. If your poetry tackles certain themes, you could reach out to events or orgs that are about those themed (for instance, if you write about living with migraines, you could reach out to a migraine charity to see if they would like to share your work or interview you).

If you have money and/or time to burn, podcasts seem to be the ‘in thing’ right now, but you would need equipment to get started. Adobe’s Podcast tool is actually really great, if you don’t have an amazing mic.

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Tbh most of my promotion now comes through my website and going to local fairs. If you get some of your poems printed (even self-published) it could do really good. I’ve actually had quite a few people ask if we sell books of poetry :joy:

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@alenatenjo @copyedit @CoffeebyNight

Tysm for the tips! I’ll try them/look into it.

The craft fairs sound soooo fun tho :grin: that’s literally one of the things in my bucket list to do from now on. Can’t wait :))

About older authors who didn’t have social media at their disposal when starting out - that’s really smart, I haven’t thought of that. I’ll def do some research :))

And yeah… my blog is basically just poetry? And some mini-essays and opinion pieces but even those are more like prose poetry than just writing.simply bc ive used very specific words to create a specific emotion in the other person to get my point across… the real message isn’t the writing itself, it how it makes you feel.

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