Okay, I am finally going to try to write this out, about how I want to hire someone to promote my content and app for me. This job would be open to… well the right person… hard to know who the right person is… you don’t need to agree with everything I say here of course, in fact I would want someone who can openly disagree with me and not feel uncomfortable about that.
My budget is $600 per month. You wouldn’t be expected to work any more than 10 hours per week, so I’m definitely not looking for a quote-unquote “qualified” marketing director or social media expert. I’m looking for someone who has some extra time, needs the extra money and is ready to have some fun trying something really weird and new. You’ll be experimenting, trying different things, most of which I’m assuming will fail, as is the case when trying something new. Fail fast and fail often, so you’ll need to be someone who is ready to just dive in and try stuff and can accept that many people will think what you’re doing is ridiculous. I don’t want someone who is going to spend a bunch of time researching marketing strategies and working up a plan. I’m looking for someone who just dives right in, starts making posts and sees what happens.
So basically there’s three major things you’d be promoting: Custom Data Organizer which is my data management application that I’ve been building, my non-fiction writing which includes this blog and some of the other pieces on this website, particularly the police reform stuff, and then third would be my fiction books available on Amazon. Which you would focus on and how you promote them would mostly be up to you. I have a list of ideas but at the end of the day it would all be up to you. You would be able to work on whatever felt right to you in the moment. If promoting this blog gets too intense or something, you could move to the fiction or CustomD. Or if those got boring you could move back–it would be up to you and it would be important to me that you have fun doing it. In a way, all of this is about having fun, like yes there’s a point to it, but at the end of the day, if we’re not enjoying ourselves, things just don’t work and life doesn’t have much purpose.
So when it comes to promoting my blog and website articles, the idea is that you’d kind of be my social media presence, except you would not in any way be required to agree with me. You’d be your own person, using your own social media accounts, making your own choices on which sites to use and how to do things. You could either use your real name or make up a new persona and stay anonymous. The primary requirement is honesty. I’m not looking for anything deceptive or manipulative. You would be honest about our arrangement and why you’re linking to, copying or otherwise promoting my stuff. I also don’t want a lot of sarcasm or posts designed to insult people or promote cruelty. But otherwise you’d be free to do it any way you want. I’d want someone who can see it as an art project and take creative control and just go for it.
In a lot of ways I’m looking for someone who will get my content onto social media while protecting me from the trolls, the hate and the manipulative arguments that have kept me away from social media for so long. I would not want you to protect me from differing opinions. I very much want to hear opposing viewpoints, but I want the nastiness filtered out. So one way would be to go around posting links to my stuff, making your own comments either agreeing or disagreeing, then you could collect all of the comments, copy them into ChatGPT and ask it to summarize it all in a way that’s more respectful.
I mean, I would of course occasionally go and read directly the things you’re doing, but I would refrain from directly interacting. Then I may respond to things in my blog as I feel is called for along the way.
Another possibility is you could actually copy entire articles or clips from this site, like onto Medium or something. I’m not sure what kind of other blogging websites are out there. Just so long as there’s a link back to the original content on this site. You don’t need to make your own comments at all if you don’t want to. You could make this job simply about copying and pasting my stuff onto other sites.
So one bonus you may be able to make work is I believe some of these social media sites you can actually make some money off the content. If you started doing that, you would be able to keep all of that money yourself. You would also control the accounts and could continue using them for other purposes after we’ve parted ways.
In some ways I would be judging the situation by the amount of fun you are having. I’m not looking for someone to feel like they’re trudging away at a boring job. If you’re not enjoying the process, then we’ll know we’re not doing it right and we’ll experiment with new strategies. I’m looking for help building a social art project. That means you should be somewhat excited about my content. More importantly, in the long run anyway, I’d be judging the situation by how much impact I’m having on actual people’s lives. Yes, a big part of the job is driving traffic to this site, but mainly it’s about getting my content out there any honest and respectful way we can, but in such a way that it has as much positive impact on the lives of other people as possible.
When it comes to promoting my books, I remember back in the day Amazon had a feature where you could make your book available for free for like 3 days once every 3 months or something like that. I did that for a while and there were all these twitter accounts that you could ping and if your book was free they would re-tweet you or whatever. That was like 10 years ago so I’m sure things have evolved a bit but I imagine things like that still exist. You would just do a bit of research on what other authors are doing to promote their books, then as soon as you find an idea, don’t debate on it, just dive in and start doing it and see how it goes. I of course would be happy to set up the promotions. You’d just have to tell me when and what.
I also was at the mall the other day and found a local author convention, where each author had a table and were selling their books. Something like this would be an option. You could get stuff like that set up and I would show up for it and do my part.
Same thing with like online live-streams. If you wanted me to do do a live video chat, you’d just have to make sure my schedule works for it first, and I would show up for it and participate to the best of my ability. Live video streams and in-person things where we actually see each other’s faces are far more acceptable to me to be directly involved as people tend to behave in more reasonable ways than they do when shooting tweets from the hip.
As this evolves, you may start asking me to make certain changes to my content or re-arrangements to my website or whatnot as you get feedback and data on how things are working–though I’d need to agree with those changes of course for me to do them. I would need to get some analytics set up probably–if I don’t have access to that kind of thing already. It’s been so long since I’ve tried to do any kind of self-promotion. I could add links to your social media accounts. I could give you access to make comments on this site too. Maybe I could open it up for anyone to comment, I’d just need to figure out how to prevent the massive amounts of spam I get every time I attempt to turn commenting on.
It will all definitely be clunky and error-ridden, especially in the beginning, but that’ll be part of the fun.
Of course, there will be no long-term obligation from you. You could walk away at any time.
As for Custom Data Organizer, that may feel like a different ballgame. We may want to wait a month or two before diving into that, as it’ll take a little time for you to figure out how the app works and what it’s good for. (All that time you spend learning my app or reading my content will count toward the 10 hours a week maximum of course.) One likely place I know of to promote my app would be a site called ProductHunt.com, which is a social media site for startups and small time apps where people can search for investors and potential users or partners. One thing that would be an amazing help is if you were to make little demo videos about it. I mean, making videos would be a great option for any of the promoting that I’m thinking of. I have some experience editing and could teach you, or we could hire an editor on Fiverr or something too.
Which reminds me: I would definitely be open to paying for additional expenses, within reason of course, like if you need to pay for a premium version of a social media app or something.
If we start making any decent progress on CustomD, then you would be able to call yourself the Chief Marketing Officer of a tech company. If it gets moving as an actual company, then you would have an opportunity to progress along with it. I guess that’s true for any of this, like if I start bringing in money for any of this stuff, then your salary of course would go up in reflection of that. It’s just that profit is not at all my primary driver here and I definitely will not be monetizing this blog or my articles. But with CustomD, my hope is to eventually turn it into a real company with a bottom line by creating freemium and paid versions of it. But if you somehow found me an investor, I could see myself quitting my job and focusing my days on CustomD.
There’s really a multitude of different ways all this could pan out.
If you’re interested in this and you don’t already have contact info for me, I guess the best way to start is to contact me on facebook: https://www.facebook.com/kalin.ringkvist
