Business advice

[Emerald88]

Does anybody run their own business on here?

Looking for advice as it's something I've been thinking about. I run a small distribution company for independent comics. Helping people who self-publish get their books into as many hands as possible basically.

I am interested in getting into the social marketing side of the whole thing. I have a rough understanding of social media, but unsure how to go about using it as a form of advertising. Not sure how to use things like mailing lists effectively etc. I was wondering if I should invest in something like https://www.icontact.com/services/campaign-consulting as they seem to help set up and educate you on this side of things. Which frankly, I need.

Have any of you run into this kind of problem before?

Thanks for reading!

 

[Bullgrit]

Check out Guerilla Marketing by Jay Levinson, or just search Amazon for "social media marketing." Marketing, whether online social media or other, is either very time consuming for the business owner, or very expensive to have someone else do it. You have to keep at it, often and constantly.

For my dad blog site and dad t-shirt business, I've dabbled in paying someone else to do it for me but found it too expensive for the size of my business. I've since tried to do it all myself, and it's sooooo hard. Fortunately for me, the dad blog and dad tee shirt business is only a side thing, secondary to my regular career. It's fun -- I love writing my dad blog and designing dad tshirts, but running a business has to be more than a hobby.

By the way, notice what I did in that above paragraph. That's the kind stuff you have to do for social media marketing. Post and answer questions in a helpful way, and get links to your site with keywords. (Notice how I linked three different ways of spelling "t-shirt".) That's all for Google. I over did it, (three times instead of one), intentionally to highlight the concept.

Be social, be helpful, be honest -- don't over do it like I just did

Bullgrit

 

[Radiating Gnome]

One of the challenges you will face in your efforts to market your services through social networks is that your audience isn't the general public -- unless I'm misunderstanding (highly possible).

You're a distributor, so you're doing business primarily B2B.

Social media marketing reaches people -- individuals. So, if you're going to promote something, you're going to want to promote comics to people and encourage them to ask their local shop to carry your products. So, you won't be promoting your business, but the comics that are in your stable.

That understanding probably makes your life a little easier, though -- it means that you want to call on your artists to use their social networks to help market everyone's stuff. If the plan is to use facebook, you create pages for each of your comic lines, and ask each of your artists to go ahead and like each other's comics -- you can start to build that marketing network very quickly -- and you should be able to count on good followthrough, since what you're doing is promoting their books, not your own business.

-rg

 

[Emerald88]

For my dad blog site and dad t-shirt business, I've dabbled in paying someone else to do it for me but found it too expensive for the size of my business. I've since tried to do it all myself, and it's sooooo hard. Fortunately for me, the dad blog and dad tee shirt business is only a side thing, secondary to my regular career. It's fun -- I love writing my dad blog and designing dad tshirts, but running a business has to be more than a hobby.

This paragraph taught me so much about this kind of thing. Thank you for this Bullgrit.

That understanding probably makes your life a little easier, though -- it means that you want to call on your artists to use their social networks to help market everyone's stuff. If the plan is to use facebook, you create pages for each of your comic lines, and ask each of your artists to go ahead and like each other's comics -- you can start to build that marketing network very quickly -- and you should be able to count on good follow through, since what you're doing is promoting their books, not your own business.

This is a very good point. A lot of people that do this kind of thing are great up until the point where they have to advertise themselves. It's not enough to write/illustrate the thing, you have to encourage people to actually look at it. Hopefully that's where I can help out a little.

You guys are mega-helpful. Thanks again.