Wednesday, May 9, 2012

Update on Easy, Sleazy Book Marketing

It's now been about a month since I joined groups on various Web and social media sites that promised to boost my online audience. My numbers have jumped as noted previously.

But since installing a tool called Hootsuite, which allows me to easily monitor my followers' tweets, I'm noticing a disturbing trend: A lot of my new followers are spammers, perverts, and other types of online cretins. I'm now going back and unfollowing many of them.

My strategy now is to follow only people who:
- offer useful tweets: interesting links and interesting short messages that don't require clicking.

- are agents, publishers, or writers that I'm interested in.
- are experts in fields related to my book: travel and humor. (I have yet to find a dating/relationship expert I want to follow.)
- are not promoting something, such as their book or latest scam in every tweet.

Yeah, I'm a knucklehead for trying to cut corners to build an audience.