Friday Is Promo Day At Original Content. Or At Least It's Thinking About It Day.

If you've been following my Time Management Tuesday posts, you know that I've been trying to confine marketing/promotional work to Fridays so that it doesn't just take over the whole work week. Sometimes this will mean researching opportunities, which I'm devoting some time to today.

On-line marketing research could easily become a full-time activity, because one place refers you to another and then another. And, yes, a lot of info is repetitive. But that move from one place to another is how I found The Writing Desk, author Tony Riches' blog. What I found interesting here:

• Building Your Author Platform #6: Google+  because so few people I know use it
• Building Your Author Platform #2: Twitter primarily for the link to the hashtag for writers list. I think hashtags extend your reach on Twitter, if you know which ones to use.
• Building Your Author Platform #8: Linkedin because I've been wondering how valuable this would be for quite some time. I actually know someone who found a job with a major company through Linkedin. Since I can barely manage the social media sites I'm on now, I'm going to pass on this.

I also researched a number of blog directory type sites, looking for new places to approach regarding Saving the Planet & Stuff. I haven't done this since before Christmas. I abandoned all the sites I looked at due to lack of usefulness. After visiting hundreds of blogs and contacting maybe 70 to 90 or so (I'd have to hunt up my records--and I do have them), I have to say that I haven't found the marketing through blogs all that helpful. Yes, there are thousands of lit blogs out there. But there are probably very few that will accept any particular book for the following reasons:

• Large numbers of lit blogs only accept traditionally published books
• A growing number of lit blogs only accept self-published books
• Another group of lit blogs only accept self-published books that are being given away
• Huge numbers of lit blogs are genre specific. They accept only romance or paranormal or paranormal romance or fantasy or urban fantasy or science fiction or dystopian or YA dystopian or Christian
• Large numbers of lit blogs no longer accept requests for reviews because while there are thousands of of lit blogs, there are tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of authors contacting them with requests. Many of them are overwhelmed, because most lit bloggers don't make a living off their book work and have some other kind of day job.

That sounds discouraging, but it's more just a matter of fact. And the not very productive research I did today didn't wreck my Friday. I came up with an idea for Saving the Planet today that I wouldn't have thought of if I'd been doing creative work. I also remembered that it's time to start pulling together material for the Connecticut Children's Lit Calendar and sent out a call to the listserv I draw upon for that. Finally, I did a little work on an essay I started recently, which wasn't promotional but useful.

So, it was a good promo day as promo days go.