Sacrilicious Marketing

Everybody is so caught up in the idea of blog to book deals, but really when you look at the Internet fame deals recently they have more in common than just blogging. They are mostly consumer centric, driven by the micro content phenomenon and appeal to the Gen X/Gen Y demographic. Now, let’s dissect that statement.

Top 10 Best Micro Content to Fame Deals

Recent Micro Content to Book/TV Deals

1.     Shitmydadsays (TV Deal)

2.     Fakeapstylebook (Book Deal)

3.     Fmylife (Book Deal)

4.     Texts From Last Night (TV Deal)

5.     F U Penguin (Book Deal)

6.     This is Why You’re Fat (Book Deal)

7.     Chuck Norris Facts (Book Deal)

8.     I Can Has Cheezburger (Book Deal)

9.     Stuff White People Like (Book Deal)

10.  Fail Blog (Book Deal)

Resource: Exploiting the Blog to Book Deal: A Guide

Resource: From Blog to Book, How 6 Authors Did It

1. Consumer Oriented

When you think of publishing fame do you think Seth Godin or JK Rowling? Seth has penned 12 best sellers but only sold 20 million copies, has an ad network/wiki called Squidoo and a social network called Triiibes. On the other hand, JK Rowling has penned a mere 7 bestsellers, sold over 400 million books and yet her fortune exceeds $798 million, ranking her the 12^th wealthiest woman on earth… The difference? Mr. Godin writes to marketing professionals, businesses and entrepreneurs while Ms. Rowling writes to a family friendly consumer audience of children and adults. What this should tell you unequivocally is that producing something you can market to the mass consumer market is more profitable than producing content you market to the business market.

Resource: Squidoo: Seth Godin’s Purple Albatross?

2. User Generated Content

The user generated model has really taken off within the micro content community with Fmylife and Textsfromlastnight. Each has successfully built a very robust and engaged community of commenter’s, voters and contributors. The product is simple. Hilarious situational humor coupled with a standardized format. The lesson? Find a universal situation or topic that all people can relate to and experience and open a micro forum where they can share their experience and interact with other similar experiences. The Fmyscript script can help you create just such a forum. It’s your responsibility to come up with the situation, the standardized format and populate the first few posts then spread the site among your inner circle. With any luck and good idea, it should go viral quickly.

3. Commentary on Third Party Content

Photo and video blogs are perfect for this kind of micro content. Check out FUpenguin, Failblog and Thisiswhyyouarefat. These are hyperfocused sites that take a central theme like cute animal pics, hilariously pathetic human fails and WTF food selections then just add their commentary or document the event in brief format. All this takes is a little ingenuity, a little research and a completely twisted mind and viola, a very funny site. I like these sites because while you do have to produce the content, the content production is pretty simple.

4. Appealing to Gen X/Gen Y/Millennial Demographics with Snarkiness

The more sarcastic and witty, the more Gen X/Gen Y and the Millennials will respond. Oversaturated with overt advertising, the new generations respond best to authentic thought and sarcasm. The most popular of micro content sites and social profiles like Shitmydadsays and Fakeapstylebook are snarky and sarcastic. They are broadcast only, single author profiles that produce micro format content on Twitter once or twice per day. The time investment is extremely small and the virility of the sites are dependent upon the Dunbar Number of the authors and the overall appeal of the content. Again, notice the hyper focus of the content. It never strays from

Read also: How Your Personal Dunbar Number Affects Your Ability to Social Network

5. Spreading the word over multiple networks and identifying influencers

Taking a page from Gary Vaynerchuk’s playbook, most of the more successful micro content bloggers have not only distributed their content over multiple social networks like Digg, Friendfeed, Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Viddler and Stumbleupon but they very wisely identified influencers on those network like Reg Saddler and made sure to befriend them so they could get their content into the right hands to send it viral. The process takes a bit of time but, 5 of the right people promulgating your content can mean millions of readers where 500 of the wrong people only mean a few thousand readers. Work smarter by identifying people with high trust value and Dunbar numbers. The process of networking up will yield you the ability to send any content viral in the future.

Conclusion

The moral of the story is if you want to build a viral site that you can generate advertising and infamy from to eventually garner wealth and a publishing or TV deal from, then you need to:

1.     Create hyper focused content

2.     Create structured content format

3.     Create snarky commentary or shared experienced based content

4.     Engage a fan base with user generated content and/or comments and voting

5.     Network up to build influence across multiple networks and send content viral and generate free publicity

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