A couple of years ago I got really strict about creating a promotional calendar throughout the year.
Before a year begins, I plot out my big promotions, my big mailing list building scenarios, and everything else.
Whenever I talk to people about their plan, I always try to get them to make a promotional calendar.
First, block out your major promotions for the year. If you’re planning BIG promotions, like Kickstarters or huge course launches, then you’ll want to plan NO MORE than four in a year, generally, one a season.
It doesn’t have to be one a season, but for beginners at planning something like this, it’s helpful to keep everything in three-month chunks.
Before you start blocking promotions, you’re going to want to make sure what you’re planning doesn’t have any dead zones.
For instance, launching books in November or December is not very good, especially after Thanksgiving, because ad spend goes up drastically during that time.
Is there a big event happening, like an election, or holiday, like Memorial Day, when ad buys will also go up dramatically and the world will be focused on something else?
If so, knock those off your calendar, or at least that kind of promotion off your calendar. You can, for instance, launch a course in November/December, but a book is not advisable, and a Kickstarter after Halloween is just out unless you can deliver before the holidays.
Then, you block, giving at least a month between DELIVERY of the last product, and launching the new product.
As you get further into your career and build more clout, you can potentially launch multiple products without delivering on the last one yet, but if you are a newbie, always deliver before you launch.
I like launching in January, June, and September, and then I usually launch in March, too, but end before tax day, and don’t usually launch in the fourth quarter at all, so you don’t HAVE to follow the once a quarter suggestion, but I do recommend launching different types of products if you are going to do them close together.
For instance, I am launching a comic anthology in March and then a trade of a comic in September. I launched a book series in January, and I’ll launch another one in June, so I’m spacing out the same kind of books, to try and capture different fans with each promotion, and not overloading them.
Now, once you’ve blocked out the main promotions, you want to block out the main audience building events. Each big promotion should correspond with AT LEAST one audience building event.
This is because you’ll funnel out a lot of people during the promotion period, and you’ll need to build back up again, and focus your audience on GIVING them something after you asked for something for so long.
I generally schedule at least two audience building events between campaigns.
I like to schedule the first audience building event a couple of weeks after my campaign ends, and at least a month before the launch of the next campaign.
I like to schedule my second one RIGHT before the next launch and make it more focused on the product I’m about to launch.
Everything else in my promotional calendar falls around those big launches. If I have other anthologies or books to promote or other things I need to promote, they have to slot in and around those big launches, and they will likely only get 1-2 days of promotion max.
The caveat to this is that if you have two businesses, you can have two different promotional calendars. I still don’t recommend promoting two things at once, but assuming you have two different audiences and not a lot of overlap on either, then you will have two different promotional calendars.
For instance, The Complete Creative and Wannabe Press are two different companies, so I plan launches for courses close to my book launches because I absolutely have to do so otherwise I would never launch any courses.
However, if you have only one company, then you will only have one promotional calendar.
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