It’s difficult to know what promotion is working when you’re an author, or an editor. Sometimes you feel as if you’re posting too much about one thing. With the tone, you can be too ‘salesy’, or too informal, or post about topics your fans are not expecting, or are uncomfortable with.
You can spend too much money, and get little in return, leading to loss, and utter disappointment! You can spend nothing and realise you don’t have the help to spread the word about your products or services.
Getting led astray is a problem, in my case, seeing what others are doing, apparently successfully, and attempting to emulate it using their formula, and then realising that the strategy was either better suited to them rather than you or that they may have just been boasting.
There is an element of follow the sheep that makes it up the hill, and this works for some people, but strangely, not everyone. It turns out that not everyone wants the same thing in business, exactly, even if people can get distracted into thinking that they do want something close to what others want.
These days, there is a technological element to nearly everything we do. Your audience is in one place for a few years, and then, after the market is saturated, your audience or the potential for finding it and growing, moves to another app, platform, website, etc. It’s hard to stay on top of the incessant movement of trends. You can learn some new skills and be satisfied that you’ve figured out how to do something, and then they can become obsolete, or you decide some strategy isn’t working anymore.
In other words, trying to find or grow an audience can feel like a pick-up and go affair and knowing how to spend your time and focus your attention can be difficult to judge. Personal experience and analysis can help you gauge how much time you spent and how much fulfilment or return you got from a strategy.
But to know where the next avenue for audience growth is, or which skills need to be learned next, to make the best use of your time may require more than hindsight.