Good morning crickets. Welcome to day number three-hundred-thirty-six of Operation Achieve Anything. I swear, it cracks me up how every single time I put any more effort into promoting my work, beyond casually sharing each new link through social media, the site traffic always seems to go down, only to jump back up to normal when I go back to my effortless ways. Yesterday, I figured I’d try to throw a couple of bucks at Twitter and Facebook to boost my post that celebrated my accomplishments from last month, thinking I’d see some sort of a bump only to end up seeing the curve turn in the wrong direction.

Sure, there was more activity on my Twitter and Facebook page, showing that my post reached a little over the number of followers I have, instead of the tiny percentage of a reach count that I see when I’m not paying to get unthrottled, but still saw no boost in traffic to this site. I was pretty lazy in slapping together each ad because it was just a one day/ten dollar experiment, but the way the sign-up process made it sound like they would target the right people that would translate to clicks that I wanted to test just promoting a post as is. Keep in mind, this was a post-boost that I was paying for an not an actual advertisement.

I just find it interesting how these social media post-boosts are so accurate in delivery on their promises on the platforms end but, from what little I’ve experienced, it barely ever translates to external activity. Way back when I was doing my Southland Tales reviews, I did buy a couple of ads through Facebook that would claim to give you X amount of likes for Y amount of money. I’m not talking about buying fake followers through some third-party scam, I’m talking ads purchased directly through Facebook.

Every time, I would get the exact amount of new page likes as promised, but saw zero increase in likes throughout the page, and also so zero boost in thewickerbreaker.com’s statistics. I can see how this type of marketing would work for someone who’s much more active with their audience. Seeing more action on the page might get more people to chime in, but for now, this experiment taught me that social media marketing is not for me until my Twitter and Facebook pages become much more interactive, if they ever get to that point.

I guess this sort of plays into the assignment from yesterday where I was supposed to draw a picture of what I look like when pride may be going to my head. Though initially, I was going to try to literally draw this image instead, I think my line of thinking is too complicated for my drawing abilities, so I’m opting instead to try to share this picture through my words. I’ve always felt that I have such low self-esteem that any point where I perceived that my pride has gone to my head, it also felt like I was experiencing a healthy level of confidence. The problem came from me hating myself so much that I preemptively start to feel judged for my efforts to stand out from the crowd.

Yes, I also can seem hard-headed and filled with pride when defending my choice to be an experimental writer, but I’ve also always been extremely open about the fact that I don’t think that I have it all figured out. I just have a very specific writing style that I want to try to explore when it comes to my fictional work. I don’t claim to have the next sliced bread. I’m not even trying to reinvent the wheel. I’m just desperate to figure out how to properly articulate and flesh out the ideas that I have in my head with the blueprints being all of the first drafts of my work. I often say that I feel like what I’ve always heard of stroke victims who can get extremely frustrated by having the memories of pre-stroke functionality that doesn’t sync up the current state of their head. I feel like I have more to say than I’m actually able to communicate.

In my case, I wouldn’t say that pride was that big of a monster, if anything, it’s the guilt from feeling that I don’t deserve anything that turned me into what could seem like a beast as I beat myself up for seeing more value in myself than what I’m worth. For example, this is why I feel a bit hurt when I notice the drop in web traffic whenever I start to feel confident enough to promote my work. It can feel like the world is working against me and it’s that paranoia that can make a healthy sense of pride end up looking bad.

I think that’s all I’ve got for yesterday’s task, now it’s time to move on to today’s where I’m now supposed to have fun. That’s all, no suggestions how, the book doesn’t even suggest the type of fun to attempt and even give permission to just go a little lighter while working. The timing couldn’t be better considering the fact that it’s Sunday which is the one day I try to go easy each week anyway. Of course, I’ll share whatever goes down when I check in with tomorrow’s update. Until then, it’s now that time for me to sign off by saying, good day and good luck to you and all of your projects.

Talk to you soon.

Sincerely,

The Wicker Breaker

P.S. Below are links to my novel, which I plan to promote as part of Operation Achieve Anything, as well as a link to where you can buy the book that is providing the structure to this project in case you would like to purchase it in order to play along.