Monitoring the Marketing

My Heaven's Wait project was finally out the door. The website was up. I was posting Unexpected Journey blog articles twice a week. I was updating my personal, Heaven's Wait, and R.J.'s Story Facebook pages. I was tweeting on my personal and Heaven's Wait pages. I was occasionally posting updates on LinkedIn. I was checking in on my Smashwords page to see if there was activity. And I was sending emails to those who had subscribed to HW news alerts.

The process was quite time consuming. I had been told that all of the above were necessary steps in order to promote my work, but I had no idea how much the marketing tentacles would eat away at my day. Each stop required some thought and note-taking. I needed to develop a way to track the articles and messages I was writing on the various networks and establish a rhythm for myself.

Back to my Microsoft suite! I constructed an Excel spreadsheet to record the marketing activity. For each day I was active online, I entered a row on the spreadsheet that described my activity and checked off the social networks that were notified of the activity. I included on the sheet some notes regarding the flow of the networking. For example, if I posted a notice on my Heaven's Wait Facebook page, it automatically posted on Heaven's Wait's Twitter page as well. But the same notice did not flow from the HW Facebook page to my personal Facebook page unless I hit the "share" button on the HW page. For sanity's sake, I needed to see on a chart which consistent steps to take each day. Otherwise, I would spend needless time rethinking the process. The spreadsheet became a great tool, as well as an expanding history of my activity.

Thank goodness I know how to use such programs. I can't imagine how I would keep track of it all otherwise. Now, I can go about my marketing chores in a more relaxed manner, having done most of the thinking the first time around.