Tip #7: Use Copromote to Increase Your Advertising Reach.

Wow! It’s been over a year since I added any new tips. Well, less if you count the tip about the importance of advertising that I added to one of my September news updates. Still, that’s a lot less activity than I planned originally.

In that earlier post I discussed the critical need for self-published authors to advertise. Basically, when I wasn’t advertising, I wasn’t selling. (There are just so many books out there, especially self-published ones, that getting a book noticed is hard without considerable effort.)

The problem with advertising is that it usually costs money, and most self-published authors don’t have large sums to invest in advertising. Not only that, but some essential services, like professional editing and cover design, also cost money, so even though self-publishing in places like Amazon KDP is free, the surrounding expenses can really pile up fast.

Because of how expensive “free” self-publishing can be, a writer needs to find ways to maximize the effectiveness of his or her advertising dollar. Some other time I’ll tell you about my epic fails with ad buys that were fairly expensive and produced no results. Right now, though, I’m going to keep it positive and talk about one of the great blessings available to self-published writers: free (or nearly free) advertising.

One of the all-time gems I have stumbled across recently for free or low cost advertising is copromote (https://copromote.com/). I actually noticed it in a Facebook ad, and you can find it on Facebook very easily by searching for “copromote.”

What the creators of copromote have done is establish a community of advertisers who help each other. The system runs on “karma cash.” Basically, you get an initial karma cash deposit for joining and for the number of Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr followers you have. From that point you earn karma cash for sharing someone else’s promotion, the amount being determined by the number of followers you have. You spend karma cash when other people agree to share yours, the cost being determined by how many followers they have.

You can buy karma cash if you need it; I think the going rate is $100 for $200,000 in karma cash. (That could sound like a lot of money, but remember that that amount buys you 200,000 impressions–people seeing your ad. You’d have to spend into the thousands to get the same exposure from Facebook advertising.) You can also subscribe to a membership plan that gives you a certain amount of karma cash each month. That said, if you are cash strapped, you can promote modestly for free by sharing other people’s promotions like crazy.

The catch is that you can’t get very much promotion this way unless you have a pretty good-sized group of followers. Though I see people on copromote with followers in the low hundreds, I don’t think you’ll really get very far until you have at least 5,000. Some of you are gasping at this point. If you are just starting out as an author, it’s unlikely you have anywhere near that many. In another post I’ll discuss ways to build Facebook and Twitter followings. For right now I’ll just say, if you are starting small, you will get small results, but there is no harm in joining. One of the side effects of being a member, if you promote others a lot, is that suddenly you will have quite a stream of new content, and that can help to keep and build a following. You might not think a stream of ads would do this, but a lot of the people on copromote are bloggers advertising interesting blog posts, so by passing on those promotions, you are giving your fans access to more potentially interesting reading material. Also, people who like an author page, for example, generally want to read about book bargains and things of that kind, so at least the advertising won’t be a turnoff. It is also important to note that copromote only allows you to share three promotions each day, a policy that keeps your posts from being flooded by that sharing.

The other catch is that using copromote can be time-consuming, primarily because you will want to look over the promotion requests carefully. The reason is that a lot of people on copromote are, as one of the employees put it generously, “new promoters.” In other words, some of them have difficulty writing good ads, and you don’t want to share unappealing content with your fans. Here are some of the things you will want to watch out for:

ads written in the first person (which copromote cautions its members not to do): these will look like your own posts and cause confusion
ads that are just a link (would you click on a random link with no explanation?)
ads in which the link doesn’t work (yes, you may roll your eyes at this point!)
ads in which the link doesn’t go straight to what is being advertised. It isn’t good strategy to advertise a book on Amazon and then link to the Amazon home page, for example; most people are not going to go to the trouble of searching for the book. I have also seen ads link to the homepage of the author’s publisher; again, most people aren’t going to hunt for the book.
ads which are not consistent with interests of your fans and/or your own image. For example, since I write young adult fiction, I’m probably not going to start advertising erotica. (Note that ads are sometimes cryptic, and you won’t know the product is erotica without checking.)

As a consequence of all these potential problems, you should not only read the ad but follow the link and see what you find. You don’t need to read every word of a blog post, for example, but you should look at enough of it to determine if it has value for your followers.

I should mention one other potential drawback: the service is Twitter-centric, and instead of allowing different versions of the ad for different services, an advertiser can create only one, which means working within the Twitter character limits. That’s fine for Twitter, but the posts don’t look very attractive on Facebook. I worried about that a little at first, but my fans don’t seem to mind, and some of the posts even produce a fair amount of interaction, despite their truncated format.

Of course, getting new eyes on your ad is only part of the battle, but more eyes are better than fewer eyes. I have more than 6000 FB fans and Twitter followers combined, which is not a bad base, but this weekend I’m winding up a promotion on copromote that will have been seen by 500,000 people. Only a few of those will actually buy the book I’m advertising, but even that many sales is worth it, considering I’m spending a very small amount to advertise to them.

(The image above was created using http://photofunia.com/.)