Fusing your digital properties into a revenue monolith

Now that I’ve automated some marketing and patched up a few psychological flaws, I’m almost ready to push products to my network. But there’s one more scale I have to implement before I put my life savings into billboard space.

Before, when contemplating a scale to my physical book distribution system, I estimated that shipping ten books at once was ten times less work, per book, than shipping one by one. Today I’m going to use an inverse of that theory to scale my marketing efforts.

Right now, there are at least ten destinations within the website, each with separate audiences. The #SickGoTakedowns hashtag used to introduce the Snapback series to Go players might not be effective on a potential Ghostcrime reader, who may instead be pulled in with neon ghost/robot art. But if it's easier to navigate around the site, they'll explore and discover these other purchasing opportunities.

If you have a similar portfolio of disconnected comedy products, this next part will definitely be applicable.

The trick is to unite all of your unrelated products into one monstrous platform. Each book, blog, or game becomes a module of a much larger machine, and the marketing of one has the effect of marketing the whole. Now we must oil the machine, which sounds disgusting, but it’s necessary.

First, I’m going to analyze my blogs to make sure it’s easy to jump from post to post. ScaleQuail has a linear format, and prominent links page forward and backward, so it’s fine for now. The badger blog, however, needs some love. It’s a venerable story of human/animal relations, but by default it displays latest posts first. At this stage, I need to accommodate new readers who want to read the whole thing from the beginning.

This is as easy as improvements get, just a link to the posts sorted in reverse:

Next, I’ll look at the Mirth Turtle blog, which hosts a collection of older comedy essays, game reviews, and clickbait listicles. The range of topics is broad, so a custom recommendation engine is required here. It’s a simple build, choosing two posts related by Category or Tag, then a random third post for variety. With some new thumbnails to denote category, it’s done:

Getting readers deeper into the blogs is one thing, but to go from free short-form comedy to buying my entire creative output, they need to hop around. I was originally thinking a kind of an internal ad network, but everyone hates ads! That’s why you all use ad-blockers? (you should be using an ad-blocker)

I opted for a less obtrusive design — a bar along the top that lets you know you’re in a sub-area, with easy navigate home and also space to push the lifetime membership. Please buy a lifetime membership.

Now that my products are woven together into a multi-faceted revenue-generation monolith, it’s time to drive some serious traffic. In true ScaleQuail fashion, I’m going to accomplish this by orchestrating a marketing cyclone.

The difference between a cyclone of marketing and the regular kind is chaos. A traditional marketing campaign has focus. A marketing cyclone hits the populace with so many different ideas, they’ll wonder with each new ad they see whether it’s also secretly one of yours. A marketing cyclone is loud, unpredictable, and it’ll foster in the customer a paranoia that it’ll strike again at any moment.

A revenue monolith is perfectly suited to this kind of campaign, but if I’ve learned anything from the internet, it's that the Hootsuite hopper doesn’t fill itself. It’s hungry for content, like the public, and a well-planned marketing cyclone demands high-quality debris. ^{NEXT →}