Five for Friday: Fizzled Marketing Channels of 2018

Happy Friday to all the Story Empire readers! The year is quickly coming to a close with Christmas and New Year’s Day just a matter of a few weeks away. 2018 has been challenging, astounding and fun for the other authors at Story Empire as well as me. With that in mind, I thought I’d share five marketing channels that fizzled for me (an many others) during the year:

1. 

   Creator Collabs disappeared in the night spring of 2018.

   Creator Collab – this was a social media cross promotion service with both free and paid plans. It basically worked on gaining share points from sharing other people’s social media posts which were used when other people shared your own. It worked well with some impressive reach for social media posts and good traffic to my website and book links. Sadly, it went away in the night without warning as it had in its former iteration during 2017. Losing the social media boost was a blow to my efforts this year and I have not found a replacement for it yet – at least not for free. I suspect it took the dive this time over GDPR.

2. Readers Gazette – this was a site I used for several years which allowed authors to post their books, share their website/blogs and obtain more social media sharing with scheduled specials for books. It worked very well and I saw some pretty decent traffic from the site for a while. Much like, Creator Collab, it disappeared overnight last spring – just in time for GDPR.  Go figure.
3. Author Reach – this was an email service just like MailChimp and Mailerlite but geared toward authors. It was still a small service with a better price per thousand subscribers and a better reputation than larger services. After switching to Author Reach, my newsletter grew and experienced more opens and clicks so the better reputation worked. Unfortunately, Author Reach announced that they discontinued their services because they lacked the resources to comply with GDPR so this one was a definite casualty of the changes – too small to deal with the regulations.
4. StumbleUpon – this social media site had become a solid generator of
   

   StumbleUpon shuttered its site in 2018.

   traffic throughout last year and into this one. Sharing links and posts to the site often provided some extra visibility and even this site attracted some attention on it. Unfortunately, the site closed this year and recommended its members shift to Mix. All of us at Story Empire made that shift but the results have been, uh, mixed. The site does not seem to have attracted as many members from StumbleUpon so it has not been a solid replacement source of visibility thus far.

5. Blogging effectiveness – since all these sources of traffic have gone away, my own site has suffered some. Also, with truncated time to spend on writing, I have not dedicated writing to steady posts on Archer’s Aim so it’s been better to let it slide into a site for readers to visit while serving as a place for announcements. Honestly, I think my traffic suffered once GDPR went into affect though my SPAM filter has been inundated (as has Story Empire’s). It seem GDPR has had the opposite effect than intended, creating more SPAM on sites, shutting down legitimate services and narrowing the ability for legitimate communication.

Were you using any of these services? Did you see other marketing channels affected by GDPR or other changes this year? What marketing worked for you?

Thanks for reading today. Please leave your responses in the comments section and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.