Why You Should Avoid Crotch-Grope Marketing

If you haven’t already realized that as an anchored authored, you’re actually running a small business on the side, then you need to adopt the mind-set as soon as possible. Having a business attitude and outlook makes a huge difference to the way you deal with the publishing world – even down to how you handle rejections. Rejections simply become objective feedback you can use to tweak the direction of your writing to make it more appealing to your customers (editors and readers), and build your readership.

Marketing is a business activity that you have to embrace as a survival skill. I’ve spoken before about the necessity for marketing, but slid over the types of marketing activities you should adopt.

Let’s focus on those for a few minutes.

There is an ever-expanding supply of free marketing advice on the Internet. Plug “Marketing” into Google, and you get 63.3 million unique hits. Narrow it down to “book marketing” and you get 53.1 million hits. Advice is cheap. Free, actually.

A huge amount of the marketing advice you find on-line is related to website marketing, e-book marketing, building traffic to sites, blogs, etc. Some of it is useful, and can be adapted to marketing fiction books. Some of the schemes and scams suggested border on unethical, if not totally illegal, and marketing gurus tend to think of these methods as “black hat” marketing, as opposed to the “white hat” marketing that abides by the Can-Spam Act, and other Internet protoccols and social etiquette.

But even within the White Hat category, there’s a type of marketing that I call “crotch-grope” marketing, and I know you’ve experienced it yourself. Hang out on-line for very long, and you’ll get groped.

Marketers who make their living from affiliate programs and click-through advertising displayed on their sites have one major aim; they want to build traffic to their site. They know success is a numbers game. The more traffic they can funnel to their site, the higher the click-throughs they’ll get on links and ads. They will do anything to get that traffic, and they don’t care what happens to the 95% of the traffic that doesn’t clink on a link. They’ll pepper their site with “content” which they’ve usually bought at a cut rate and re-worked to make it unique – which is a high priority for Search Engine Optimization (SEO), as Google downgrades a site with duplicate content.

There’s also the marketer with a “product” to sell. You’ll recognize these, too. The product is usually an e-book, sometimes courses, lessons, interviews, or a package of information products that can be downloaded for a price. The “landing page” you click through to is usually dozens of screens long, heavy on text, with bright yellow highlighting and screaming red font headlines extolling the benefits of the product (”Always stress the benefits!!”). There’ll be dozens of gushing testimonials, and you always have to scroll right down to the bottom of the page to find out how much the product costs, and there is very nearly always a “bonus” that comes with it.

Sound familiar?

I’ve been sucked into these more than once, and shelled out good cash for a product that promised the moon, and failed to deliver. A couple of times I’ve asked for my money back, and I’m glad to say I did get it back. Guarantees are part of the white-hat marketing credo.

But reading these landing pages always makes me feel like I’m being suckered. That they’re lining me up to grope for the sale, and once they have that sale, they couldn’t care if I lived or died.

Same with affiliate marketing sites, which are full of light-weight recycled information. It’s the equivalent of a carnival barker, whose sole job is to get people into the tent to see the three-legged man or the bearded lady for ten cents a peek.

This is what I call crotch-grope marketing. It’s impersonal, high-traffic-oriented and condescending. The marketers creating these sites and products are only looking for income. Sales. If they get their hand between your thighs, they consider that a hit and don’t care what you think about it, or how you feel.

A great deal of the marketing advice you’ll find on-line is designed for these types of sites and businesses. Even if you have the best intentions in the world, if you use these techniques, your readers will be subjected to the same experience you get when you trip over yet another affiliate business site. They’ll feel manipulated and used.

As an anchored author, your primary aim is to grow your readership with each book you publish – no matter how you publish it. Never think of it as ‘sales figures’. Your focus must be on your readers. Don’t forget, for every sale you make, there’s often a second or even a third reader reading that copy, and they’re your readers as much as the guy plunking down the money for your book. So look beyond the sales to the readers themselves, and aim your marketing efforts at encouraging them to a) read this book and b) read the next one.

In other words, you’re building relationships.

Crotch-grope marketing doesn’t build relationships. It doesn’t let the readers get to know you, your books, feel comfortable about spending money on your stories, and happy to tell others what a great writer you are. There’s no relationship there, and no intention of building one.

Evaluate every new marketing technique you come across for its ability to help you communicate with readers and find new ones. If the technique feels even slightly shabby, don’t use it. There are plenty of other ways of getting word out there about your books and your site(s) that don’t leave a bad taste in your reader’s mouth.

Seth Godin, for example, understands this intuitively. Subscribe to his blog, if you haven’t already, and read his books. Much of what he says can be adapted to marketing fiction.

Ideas are everywhere, though. One of the best marketing ploys I’ve ever seen came from Jeff Dunham, the ventriloquist, and his manic puppet Peanut. For a whole ten minutes, Peanut drove Dunham crazy reciting his website in a sing-song voice. I can hear it even now: “Jeff-f-fah…Done-ham…dot com!” It was hysterically funny, especially when Peanut looked at Jeff and said “You’re getting angry, aren’t you?”, then looked at the audience and said “the scary thing is, he really is getting pissed!”

It’s a brilliant way of making sure people remember Dunham’s website, and how to spell his name properly, so they don’t get a .404 error message. My own name can be spelled a dozen different, creative (or downright bizarre) ways, so this is definitely a useful technique for me. I still can’t figure out how to use it, yet, but it’s there for when I need it.

You can find copies of the Peanut clip on YouTube. Have a laugh.

Also watch what other authors do. You were a reader before you became an author, and you’re still reading (I hope!). Passively scan the ways you find out about other authors’ books. If you feel like you happily tripped over the information, analyse how it reached you and see if you can adapt the method for your own marketing portfolio. If you feel like you’ve been groped, though….

Happy marketing.

First appeared on Anchored Authors on June 24, 2008

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Tracy Cooper-Posey © 2009. Cannot be copied or distributed without permission.