by Chris Harris
Eleven days into trying to build a proper marketing platform for my writing, I have discovered why everyone says it takes twelve to eighteen months. Four days, 250 screenshots and several AI-induced rabbit holes later, the blog is finally beginning to look like the hub I always intended it to be.
I spent the four days last week, after the book was finally published, revisiting, organising and setting up my long-ignored social media and publishing channels; ha ha, sounds very grand, at the moment they are not!
For a long time, the two blogs have really existed as part of a much bigger plan that I knew I would eventually have to deal with properly, but which I never quite had the time to sit down and tackle. When I started embarking on the huge array of marketing tasks, accounts, platforms and general administrative nonsense that comes with trying to promote a book properly, I was very conscious that if I tried to do everything at once I would simply end up crunching the whole lot together and achieving very little, so logically the blogs were the first things to receive my attention.
I have two of them. The first, The Right of Fans, is relatively established and is where I write about non-league football and various other things that interest me. The second is based around the book and my short stories, and has had so little traffic since I set it up, that I genuinely couldn’t remember the name of it off the top of my head. In truth, it has mostly been somewhere for me to store articles until such a time as I had the time and inclination to knuckle down and turn it into something more useful.
There is already a surprising amount sitting there. I have around forty blog articles on the site, and that does not include the thirty-two instalments of my non-league football satire, which is based around the football club in the fictional village where my short stories are also set. The idea, gradually, is to create a sort of ecosystem around all of the writing, with the same village, the same world and overlapping strands of fiction, football, satire and general observation all feeding into each other rather than sitting in completely separate boxes.
Unfortunately, or fortunately depending on how you look at it, the timing has been slightly ridiculous because I have just had the busiest month I have ever had with the business, and everything has been fairly chaotic. Finding the time to work on the blogs has come largely at the expense of sleep. On three days this week I started work at half past two in the morning, finished at half past six in the evening after what amounted to an eighteen-hour shift, ate something, watched about an hour of television and then went straight to bed.
Somehow, within all that, I found four separate sessions where I could sit down and actually start rebuilding the blog. The method I have been using is, in its own strange way, quite brilliant. I take a screenshot of whatever is in front of me, send it to ChatGPT and ask what to do next. For someone who is technically useless, this is probably the only reason I have managed to get as far as I have, because you can effectively build something that looks vaguely like a website by taking things one screen at a time.
It does take a long time. Chat also has a tendency to take you down the occasional rabbit hole before apologising profusely for having wasted your time, but that is part and parcel of using AI for this sort of thing. I have probably sent it somewhere in the region of 250 screenshots. You send one in, it tells you what to do in the vast baffling array of admin choices and features, you do it, then you take another screenshot of what you have just done and send that back, because Chat seems to require constant visual affirmation in order to know where it is and what state everything is in.
I also ignored its advice at one point. I had only ever used the standard free version of WordPress, and I eventually decided to upgrade and buy the premium package, which costs around £100 a year or thereabouts. Before doing it, I asked Chat whether upgrading would make the site more visible. It said no, it wouldn’t. I upgraded anyway, and almost immediately the site started getting more traffic. So, as everyone now knows, AI can be incredibly useful, but it is never infallible. I questioned AI about its mistake, and it explained why it was wrong; it’s good like that, a shame it does not work that out before divvying out the incorrect advice!
And rebuild we did. We made the whole thing more presentable, sorted out the menus and the drop-downs, and at least got it to the point where it is now navigable. What it is not is slick. It does not look like a polished professional website, and there is still a long way to go, but it is functional, looks perfectly acceptable and that already feels like progress. For someone who struggles to work a new television, essentially getting a making a blog functional is no mean fert.
At the beginning of the week I had this slightly ridiculous hope that I might somehow transform both blogs into amazing-looking website-style platforms in a matter of days. Having now started the process, and having made what I think is very good progress so far, I have realised that this is probably going to take a couple of months rather than a couple of afternoons.
That does not really matter, because the important thing is that these blogs are going to become the hub of everything I am doing. Logically, they have to be. The whole point of the marketing is to promote my writing and, ultimately, the book, so the blogs need to become the central place where all the articles, stories, fiction, football pieces and other bits of writing live together in some coherent form.
Once the blogs are working properly, the same material will also be going onto Substack and Medium, and then those will need sorting out in exactly the same way, because at the moment they are also more functional than polished. There is a considerable amount still to do, but at least now it feels as though the structure is beginning to exist, and for the first time I can see how all the different bits of writing, promotion and publishing might eventually fit together into one system rather than a collection of disconnected platforms.
Often, with so much of what you do on social media and all the associated platforms, you get absolutely no response whatsoever. You can spend hours setting things up, posting content for weeks, fiddling with layouts and trying to make everything look vaguely professional, and then sit there wondering whether anybody has actually seen any of it. As I have said in earlier blogs, this really is a long game, and most of the time you have to keep doing the work without any immediate evidence that it is achieving anything. WordPress, however, has been slightly different, because the transformation there was almost immediate.
As soon as I started rebuilding the site properly, I began getting around ten people a day landing on the home page. Because of how the blog is currently set up, all the articles are available by scrolling down the page, so people can read several things without clicking into each individual post so what we do not know is how many individual blogs, if any, the visitors are reading. We know this is happening because some of the pieces are getting likes, even though those likes are not always registering as separate views in the statistics.
For a complete amateur, with probably another twelve to eighteen months of content, improvements and general tinkering ahead, that feels wildly successful. ChatGPT estimated that with the number of people arriving on the home page, the site may already have had something like 150 actual article views in total, which, for what is essentially a brand-new blog in its present form, is very encouraging. It looks okay, it works, it is functional, and although there is still an enormous amount to do, it has already become something much more important than just a place where I dump articles. It is starting to become the foundation for the whole marketing exercise.
When I researched how long it would take to establish a decent marketing and promotional portfolio, and it said 12-18 months, I didn’t baulk at the commitment but thought, really, how come? I now know. A long journey, but importantly I feel I have delivered in the first eleven days, a sense of order and direction, working channels and a working blog. I need one more drop-down. Next week, I tackle the podcasts!
