Social media | New Chapter Cove

Hey all, welcome back! So I’m sure you’ve noticed that I’ve been absent lately. I keep thinking that it’s only been a week since my last post, but as my last post was on St. Patrick’s Day, this week will hit a month since I’ve been here. Sorry to let you down, however, here I am!

There’s a few reasons I haven’t been around, nothing major. However, I do put some of the blame on Daylight Savings Time as it does a number on me every Spring. As someone who lives her life at night, the extra sunshiny hours have been messing with my head a bit and sometimes a step back is needed. (We vampires like to keep it dark you know.)

I haven’t been idle though and have recently hit the one year mark of working on my novel. The only update I can really give is that I’ve cut a few more thousand words from it and I’m pretty proud of that. Still so much to do on it though and I’ve been getting rather frustrated with the process. My determination to finish this book is still driving me and come hell or high water, I will finish this thing!

In the meantime, I’ve been thinking a lot about numbers. Not just the word count I’m dealing with, but numbers in a different way. It hit me after my last post. Almost no one read it. Frankly, I was a bit surprised. I thought it was good, gave a bit of my back story and for once, wasn’t about my writing. Looking at it now, I realize that it may have been the title’s fault. Just stating that ‘St. Patrick’s Day is Here’ gave no indication to what the post was about. So ok, lesson learned and no hard feelings. This was all on me.

When I worked in social media, I had to keep track of lots of numbers. Follower count and best times of day to post to what platform, etc…I dreamt in digits. I also had to figure out what posts worked and what didn’t and then troubleshoot the lower tallies as well as try to decipher algorithms.

While that was ten years ago and pre-TikTok, algorithms still elude me. Trying to get something seen has mystified me since the dark days of social media. Not just blog posts either. This goes for my blog posts, my videos, my photos, my print on demand, Etsy and eBay listings, the list goes on and on.

I was most recently baffled when a video of mine on my #booktok account jumped my counts from hundreds to thousands. Before and after this video was posted, I had numbers that ranged from 109 to 906 views with an average of about 349. Still very low but at least seen. Then I posted this one video about a book I had been reading that had misprinted and uncut pages and had to be sent back in the middle of my reading it. My viewer count at the time of this post? 3065.

Are hashtags the key? The material? The fact that the book was recently released and was taking Booktok by storm? I have no clue. What I do know is that I haven’t been able to duplicate it since and it’s driving me crazy. I’ve had other videos jump past 1000 views which I was always happy with, considering that I currently only have 1068 followers on my NewChapterCove account. However, I’ve also had views as low as 23. Seriously. 23.

Being honest, I don’t have super high views here. That’s ok as this is still a growing site. Sometimes, both posting in a specific niche and not having consistency in my posting as a whole has led to such low views. Again, this is all on me and I take responsibility for it. This isn’t the first time I’ve had such a site, albeit, this is the first one I’ve really posted about my personal life. But in this case, I understand the number counts, which is why I am grateful to every single person who reads, subscribes and shares my site. I know that I don’t make it easy to keep following and I accept that.

But when I’m posting more consistently to a platform in very similar ways to others, using similar subject material and I’m still getting just a handful of views while others get thousands? This is where I lose it. I’ve tried different times of day. Different hashtags. Different filters. Different tags. I took suggestions from the platform itself to post photos instead of videos and then vice versa. And still, the view counts are low.

I think what makes this all the more frustrating for me is that I once made my living knowing just what to do and how to handle the low numbers. I’m not out of touch with social, despite how different the landscape is now compared to when it began. But like many, I learned as it grew and became much more than the old message board and MySpace days. (Dating myself here, but you get my point.) Social grew because of its users and we grew along with it.

As stymied as I am by all of this, I will never stop using social media platforms. There are days when I would gladly throw in the towel and escape it completely. But it is my link to the outside world. While keeping in touch with friends and family this way has been good for me, I also like social because for someone like myself who is trying to promote both products and a blog, these outlets are basically free. I will never be someone who buys follower counts or hires an ‘influencer’. As long as I can keep posting without paying anything, I’ll keep going.

Having said all of this though, it still comes down to how to get the messages out there. Take my last post here. Again, I left a simple title up and unlike all of my other post titles, it gave no indication of what the post was about. Just that Paddy’s Day had arrived. Now had I added a few words? Had I done what I normally do and use a phrase (or paraphrase) something from the post itself? My numbers would have been better and my story would have been read by more of you. Again I say, this one is on me and I know better than what I did…I’m also changing the title today to see if that changes anything.

Basically I need to figure out how to get the algorithms in my favor so that my posts and products will show up more without shelling out money for them. Because it isn’t just social…if you go to say Etsy, Zazzle or Redbubble (as examples) and try to find my products? Chances are that unless you have a direct link, you won’t find me. It’s discouraging too because I have hundreds of designs on thousands of products and sales are few and far between.

Let’s look at my facebook feed. I once, ONCE clicked on a book recommendation ad from Amazon that popped up. Now my entire feed, no matter the time of day or night, is filled with similar ads, with the ads outnumbering the actual people I’m connected with. Granted, I’m interested in the genre and have accumulated quite a list of future books to download, but how did that first title get to my feed in the first place when I’ve never talked about such books on FB? Inquiring minds want to know.

I know I should be better at this. It was what I did for a living. It was what I was good at. I used to keep daily tallies on a white board and post-its at my desk. Watching the numbers grow gave me a sense of accomplishment and drive. Now I feel like it’s a game of roulette and what is barely viewed one day will go viral the next and that the system is set up to have us fail more than succeed. Oh and for the record, I will never rely on AI to try and get me higher view counts. Yes, I’m one of those that despises it.

So here I am. Continually trying to figure things out while I sit, edit, read and contemplate the inner workings of this internet thing. Some days I like the challenge. I love it. Trying to prove myself wrong and finding that post that gets out there? It makes me feel like I’m still doing it right. And then, some days, I step away and pull a Scarlett O’Hara, “tomorrow is another day.” (It works for me ok?)

And that is where I will leave you for today. I hope you are all well and thank you once again for hanging in there with me. I welcome the new followers that have joined over these last weeks and to those who continue to come back? I appreciate you so much.

Until next time…cheers!

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To follow me on social, including my #booktok and to shop my linktree shop (now with a book rec’s section that I will continue to build): Click HERE

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To find my other shops: Click HERE

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If you’ve made it this far, I thank you and will see you soon…promise!

Hey all. Surprise, it’s Monday! I know normally I post on Fridays but I wanted to shake things up a little and had some thoughts rummaging around this head of mine so figured, why not do another post. Hell, it’s my blog and I can post if I want to! (Apologies to the great Lesley Gore.)

I have been doing social posts for many years and yet when it comes to promoting, I suck at it…and this is coming from a former social media specialist. Let me clarify something, I am good at promoting others but have never felt comfortable promoting myself. I can do it with my vintage/estate jewelry business, there I’ve gotten much better. But with my creative business? I would fire me as a marketing manager if I could. And as for here? Well, last week’s post having almost no views after finally starting to creep up in the analytics department was a slap of reality that I need to do more.

Part of that is timing. I know that I had a set schedule when I worked for a tech company and did their social. I had a grid of designated times that would work over those that didn’t and even that was broken up into the platforms for each: i.e. 1015am FB page, 1:30pm Instagram, etc. I started to see the numbers climbing when I found what was the sweet spot for each platform, (pre TikTok days) and as far as this blog goes, I am far, far out of practice. So this past week, I learned that maybe not posting at 4:30am wasn’t such a good idea and I really should have scheduled it for later on. I forget that no one besides me is up at that hour.

Something I don’t think I posted about here, although maybe in a post far, far away, (apologies to Star Wars fans), I may have mentioned it…but I have a reverse clock. Meaning, I sleep all day, wake up when it’s dark and stay up all night. There are days, although I try not for this to happen, that I am up until noon. Yes, this is all doctor approved. Yes, this is all ok. And no, it is not because of my current medical situation. This is how I have always been. Even in elementary school, it would be extremely hard to wake me up, (I’d be up all night ‘hiding’ under the covers reading) and then would get to class, check in and head to the nurses office to go to sleep for a while and join the class later. I still got high marks and did very well, it’s just that I was born with a reversed internal clock and it wasn’t until these last few years that I FINALLY had doctors tell me it was ok, that everyone is wired differently and that I’m not hurting myself or anyone else. I don’t know, maybe it was being born on Friday the 13th, who knows?

Everyone works differently and as much as I LOVED my old job and still miss it every day, even 9 years later, I wasn’t exactly doing the healthy thing. It was the only place I worked that I got up early because I was so excited to go to the office every day. However, I was always armed with two jumbo Dunkin’ coffees to start out with, would head there again at lunch, (they were next door, a lethal combo), would have soda, tea, anything caffeinated at lunch and to get me through my next break where I’d go back for more coffee. At home, I’d have to take something to help me get to sleep early and so I wouldn’t be up all night per my usual hours and this meant missing a lot of baseball that year. You don’t know me, that’s a huge issue.

In a job I had years ago, I was working well over 100 hour weeks. I lived on Vivarin (you may need to google that one), cigarettes and double shot cappuccinos to get me through the day and night. To this day I still don’t know how I didn’t have a stroke or a heart attack for what I put myself through to keep going.

Now that I’m home, I can finally deal with the schedule I was always meant to have and for me, it works out fine. Until I hit ‘publish’ on a blog post at 4:30am and then not so much.

So here I am trying to make up for it. Plus, the more I read about the whole blog-o-sphere, the more I understand that to build a following, I actually have to post more consistently, so here I am. I do hope you will bear with me as I learn as I go and try to make this something I am proud of.

My last such site wasn’t so much a personal blog as one I did for my town. In that case, I wasn’t really writing about myself, but rather I was writing about the happenings going on around here. I was writing about the history of the city. I was publicizing local eateries and promoting dj’s and live bands, so again, I was able to promote it better because I never felt like I was promoting myself vs the acts or venues themselves. So here I am trying to get my footing again with things like, hey, did you know you can now have more than one link in your IG profile? Or that ironically, photo posts do better than videos in TikTok for some reason? I mean, isn’t that what IG was in the beginning? Just photos? It gets confusing but this was my life for a long time. I lived and breathed social media and I loved it. But now, I have a hard time getting up the enthusiasm for it the way I once did. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still on it all the time, I am one of those people who has to share about a million funny animal videos a day. I have just learned to take a step back on some of it and unfortunately for my creative business, have forgotten about it altogether. Because of that, my sales are nonexistent. I own that though. It is my fault. And as much work as I put into the designs I do for it and all the ideas I have for it, I can’t get ahead without promoting. So here I am, trying to promote myself a little bit.

HEY WORLD, I HAVE A BLOG!

Ok had to get that out. Lol

Having said all of that, I have been really enjoying my time here. I feel like by writing about, well, my writing, has kept me on track. Has made me realize that by making my journey public, I have to get things done. I have heard from a couple of folks who are going through something similar. Whether as writers or as career changers, it makes me happy to know that I’m striking a chord out there somewhere. I may be horrible, (HORRIBLE) at getting back to emails, (sorry) if I can make someone smile when they need it, or give them that ‘oh I am so glad I’m not the only one’ moment they need, well then, I’m doing something right.

I took a few days off from working on my own novel or its sequel to read a couple of books I had been looking forward to, but sometimes we need that. To regroup. To get inspired by others and because I did this, I came up with new story ideas and a new direction. I am always thankful to other authors who can give me pure escapist tropes that keep me from knowing what’s going on in the world and my own drama, because frankly, I’m tired of it. I’m not reading the classics or any of my (many) non-fiction-history-bios-deep-thinking-books right now. I did that for oh so many years. Rather, this is my time to just relax with books that make me laugh and make me happy. Because there is absolutely nothing wrong with that.

I will eventually work a little Teddy Roosevelt, CT history, Yankees memoirs, Dave Grohl and Geddy Lee back into the mix. For now, I’m just enjoying my time with the ‘will they or won’t they’ types that have funny stories getting to how they eventually ‘will’ and loving every page of it. I hope you have found a way to decompress and forget about life for a while, because it feels so good when you finally find that thing that clicks. It really does. 🙂

And that is where I will leave you tonight. Once again I thank you for bearing with the rambles of a cooped up night owl! I appreciate every single one of you who takes time out of your own crazy schedule to read my posts. It honestly means the world to me that with all of the thousands upon thousands of blogs out there, that there’s even one of you who likes it and keeps coming back! You guys rock!!

Have a great night and be on the lookout, because you never know when the next post is coming.

Until next time…

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Be sure to check out my linktree for my social for this site as well as my new linktree shop that I will continue to add to as time goes on: Linktr.ee/promosocially

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Latest book read: Emily Henry’s Funny Story

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You can find all of my shop links for both my vintage/estate jewelry biz and my creative biz by going to either one of these linktrees: linktr.ee/stuffwefind or linktr.ee/stuffwemade

There’s a lot to see on both and I invite you to come and check them out. 🙂

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If you are at all interested in my previous site, you can click the ‘Stamford History’ tab in the menu up above. I keep the site up as an archive as well as for any who would like to read my local history related posts.

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As always, the links in the sidebar are clickable and will figure out this whole ad thing as time goes on. Thanks for reading this far!