Small steps to increase your readership

Since reading The Tipping Point, I have begun to look at the way I reach out to my target market differently. The premise of the book is that a series of small action or small changes can cause something to take off [or suddenly stop]. One of the 'pillars' of the theory is called stickiness. It is essentially how responsive a person will be to a particular idea. Will they follow through.

What do I mean by "follow through?" I mean, will they go the next step to buy the book? Will they check out the next blog? Will they act on your recommendation or will they simply say "Wow, I should do that."

Consider this. I wrote a series on increasing your readership at my Examiner.com articles page. If you google my name and Examiner you should be able to find it. Many of you have read my articles before there, so it will be fairly easy for you to find. A few clicks at most.

But I also wrote a quick article on doing book reviews of other books to increase your own book sales. This is the link to it.

How many of you clicked over [or just decided you'd click over as soon as you finished reading this post?] I didn't really do anything differently. The content was equally helpful. In fact, the stories I didn't link to were SEVEN DIFFERENT ARTICLES each providing help from books I read. The book review article included some information from a single source, but it also contained a bit more analysis of the information from me. You were likely to read one quick article than seven articles that would require you to google.

That small step increased your likelihood to read my article.

I tested this theory further at my garage sale Saturday. I was selling a large amount of clothes my kids had outgrown for 25 cents a bag. For the first hour we sold them and did fairly well. People were excited to hear about the deal and most filled a bag.

Then we next separated the kids sizes by the box. Each box had its own size. Most people bought a bag or two that way too...but we were getting more people filling two bags.

Then we laid bags in each box. When a person came up we said "The clothes are 25 cents a bag. As many as you can stuff in there." You know what happened? People started buying 2-3 bags full.

There were only VERY small changes in each scenario.

Think about this and consider how this may affect your marketing. Tomorrow I will analyze this a bit further and tell you how you can use this to grow your own writing.

Tiffany Colter is a writer, speaker and writing career coach who works with beginner to published writers. She can be reached through her website at www.WritingCareerCoach.com
Tiffany is a speaker and teacher. Find out about available topics for your group's next event.
Tiffany is a National Examiner. Read her articles here.
Learn more about Tiffany's Marketing techniques on her main blog.
Common-sense money management is free at The Balanced Life website. [www.TheBalancedLife.com]
Read Tiffany's award winning manuscript "A Face in the Shadow" on her fiction blog. [http://tiffanycolter.blogspot.com]
She writes a blog for the Christian writer Tuesdays at Writer's Rest.[http://writersrest.blogspot.com]