Category: Business

Why You Need the 80/20 Rule if You Want to Grow Your Platform

by Maria
the 80 20 rule 

We are creatures of habit, and we can so easily be caught up in our routines and systems. This is especially true for bloggers, who control their own schedules and have to face a whole slew of new challenges as they grow: how to build traffic, how to monetize, how to avoid burnout, how to resist the urge to give up. And as I wrote about a few weeks ago, one of the biggest mistakes bloggers can make is to spend too much time simply churning out content. If you’re just operating in survival mode five days a week, it becomes impossible to tackle the big-picture growth initiatives.

Which is why the most successful bloggers I’ve seen—the ones that built blogs with millions of pages views in just a couple of years—are the ones that understand the 80/20 rule. The 80/20 rule is this: you should spend 20% of your time creating content and 80% of your time finding ways to share it. Here’s why it works:

Read More

Read, Eat, Drink: How ClickHole Became the Best Thing on the Internet & a Rhubarb Gin Cocktail Recipe

by Maria

Read:

How to get published

60+ Fantastic Email Newsletters to Read and Share (Courtney Seiter for Buffer): I love email newsletters because they’re such an effortless and fun way to learn new things. And this list is especially awesome, since it spans so many topics: general news, tech, marketing, design, photography, sports, food and beverage, general interesting-ness, and self-improvement (i.e. a lot of the topics I represent as an agent)! I really do not want to confess how many of these I signed up for. Let’s just say it was more than 2 and less than 20.

How ClickHole Became the Best Thing on the Internet (Dan Kois for Slate): “But the Atlantic reports that [The Onion] plans more independent site launches in the ClickHole mode, and according to Quantcast, the online traffic-measuring tool, ClickHole’s traffic has mostly held steady between 10 million and 15 million page views per month. Like many websites, ClickHole’s had game-changing mammoth viral hits; in November about 7 million people read what I believe to be ClickHole’s masterpiece, “’90s Kids Rejoice! The Spider Eggs They Used to Fill Beanie Babies Are Finally Hatching,” in part because at least a few social-Web visitors worried the threat was real. And as ClickHole has grown,  the site’s moved away from being a simple BuzzFeed parody; instead it’s become richer, weirder, a darker reflection of our own dark times.” Did any one else burst out laughing at the thought of spider eggs hatching in Beanie Babies? Way, way too good.

The Quick-and-Simple Guide to Getting Started with Video Content (Matt Aunger for Buffer): Video is a fabulous tool for connecting more deeply with your readers, because it creates an intimate, face-to-face, three-dimensional experience. (Why do you think Food Network stars, John Green, and other TV, YouTube, and movie stars manage to sell so many books?) Here’s the delightfully short guide to layering video into your existing platform without driving yourself nuts.

How to Repurpose Your Book or Blog Content for Profit and Promotion (Nina Amir on JaneFriedman.com): “As an author who has just produced or may be in the process of producing amazing amounts of content, you have a great advantage: You can turn all that content into money-making products. These ‘information products’ can provide you additional income and a business that revolves around your book. This strategy also works for long-time bloggers who are often sitting on as much information as a book would contain.”

Eat & Drink:

Over to Jarrett, for this gloriously delicious drink:

Rhubarb and gin cocktail recipe

Read More

How to Measure Engagement and Why It Matters for Your Platform

by Maria

How to measure engagement

A few weeks ago I was asked about how to measure engagement, and I gave a quick answer in a comment thread. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I spend a lot of time talking about how crucial engagement is, and not enough time talking about how to measure it.

When I was an editor at a New York publisher, I would have anywhere from 7-15 meetings a week. Mostly that was because I had to be at meetings for two different teams, but it still meant anywhere from 1-2 full work days a week spent sitting around a conference room with a group of people.

Some of the meetings were awesome and energizing and full of smart people brainstorming about our books. But some of them were painful. If anyone has ever been in a production meeting where you’re reviewing deadlines title-by-title, you’re probably as accomplished of a doodler as I am. I can now draw quite a menagerie of miniature animals. This is in no way a life skill.

But the point is that it was the content of the meeting that determined whether I was an active or inactive participant. If we were talking about one of my books, or about marketing strategies, or about titles, I was usually giving my full attention and input to the meeting. If we were talking about production dates that had nothing to do with me, it was giraffe-drawing time.

If you had put a two-way mirror in that conference room and placed a randomly selected group of people on the other side, they could have easily told you which people in the meeting were engaged, simply by looking at who was interacting with the meeting content—by offering opinions, asking questions, or expressing emotion.

The meeting of the minds that is your blog/vlog/website is no different. Some people are just popping their head into the room and leaving, some people are present but not engaged, and some people are all in. The people who are all in will be interacting with your content in one way or another. So measuring engagement is really about measuring action.

How, exactly, to measure engagement on different platforms:

Read More

Should You Self-Publish or Traditionally Publish? The One Thing That Matters.

by Maria

 

self publishing vs traditional publishing

When you work in a coaching role like literary agents do, you tend to get a lot of the same questions. This is one of the big ones.

So, in the interest of efficiency, let’s hash it out right here. Should you self-publish or traditionally publish?

Read More