What marketing has actually moved the needle without costing a fortune

Another question that I got over the weekend and I thought you could all benefit from hearing the answer.

Q: What advice have you been given about Kickstarter/Convention/Online sales that actually moved the needle and doesn’t cost a fortune?

A: Working and networking with other creators to build your audience is the cheapest and easiest thing to do. Form a little working group and put your first issue or first trade into a bundle with theirs. Give it away for free or for cheap and share it around with all of you. That should be good for a couple hundred to a thousand new email leads and social media follows. I talk about it, and all group promotions, in this article. 

Run giveaways with cool packs targeted to a specific audience who you think will like your books, or join with other people do get more marketing muscle behind it. Group giveaways where you can all build your social media and email list is how I got started with my marketing company years ago. You can find more information about running your own giveaways at this link. 

Get your pitch down to 30 seconds for each book, and create sales sequences for in-person and automation sequences to turn a new person into a fan. What people are looking for in each series is different, so you have to walk them through the process for each universe. You can find out how to develop the perfect pitch by clicking here.

Pare down your universes so you only have a couple of main things you are selling, and make sure that each of those things has a high likelihood of leading into a sale. People are often very focused on selling ALL things, but you should be doubling down on your more profitable products. If you don’t have one that is a runaway hit, then you need to do more creating work until you come up with at least one that is a smash hit.

Learn how to overcome objections better. This is one of the easiest things to learn. People learn their pitch, but they don’t actually tailor it to people to get the best result, and don’t have a way to overcome the most common objections to their work.

Learn your audience better. Almost nobody knows their audience well enough to be able to target properly, or has the right words to get the right people to notice and buy their work. you can learn more about my audience building course at this link.

Develop a cohesive brand where the RIGHT person will look at it an immediately love it, or at least be drawn to it. People should be able to look at your logo and know “that’s the person who does x”. For more information about building a brand, you can go here to find a simple way to think about your brand.

You can also start going on podcasts and other comic-related shows, which takes time to research and go out, but costs no money. However, it usually does mean training yourself to be a magnet for your perfect fans so that when they hear your work, they will get excited about it. You have to draw excitement for your work. If you want to find the resources I use to book podcasts, then you can go here.

Those are the things I usually find that people AREN’T doing, but can be doing, both in-person and online which are cheap, cheap, cheap to do.

You can network with other people in this group and do a bundle with them, for instance, and then just keep doing it. You can do group giveaways with people as often as possible, and if you lead it you might even be able to get free entry, or maybe even make money on it if you’re really good.

Learning your audience is as easy as reaching out to them and learning about them to find out where to find more people like them.

Rebranding might take a couple hundred dollars, but most companies have nothing brands that have no personality and could do with a change to get people excited for it. Changing your brand to speak to your audience better is an easy way to make more sales. Once your brand resonates with the right people, then more people will find you without you having to lift a finger.

Bookfunnel, Prolific Works, KingSumo, Rafflecopter, StoryOrigin, and Facebook messenger have meant everything to my growth, along with a powerful network.

And there is one thing.

Change of attitude.

If you hate doing marketing and networking, it will show with people 100% of the time and they will be turned off. So, you really have to change your mindset to say “I GET to reach out to people”, instead of feeling it is a burden or frustration. That is also free.