The BEST Search Optimization For Getting Visible on Kickstarter (KYN Challenge Day #1)

Hello and welcome to Monica and My 5-Day Kickstarter Challenge. In this challenge, you're going to learn how to set up the basic portion of your campaign page. So the title, the subtitle, categories, location, project image, all the way down to your funding goal and campaign duration. We're going to cover all of this so that when When you're done with these 5 days, you are going to be ready to go into the next sections and confidently into your campaign. So for this challenge, I am making an assumption that you created your account. If you created your account, then you can go up to the top here where you'll have your account, and there should be a section that says created projects and add new. Once you've done that, you— this will be the page that you get to, and none of these things will be checked. And then you'll be able to go into the basic section, the rewards section, uh, which is your— what people are pledging for, your story where you'll be writing your copy, add any people or collaborators, payment, promotion, and a whole lot more. But we're going to be focusing on this section for this challenge. So your title and subtitle. This is like SEO for your campaign. Really, this is mislabeled because this should be title and subtitle and then logline or quick description. I'm not quite sure why they named it like this, but it's not great. And the goal of this, you can see this is title:subtitle, is to use all 60 of these characters and fill them with as many keywords as possible without without it sounding like gibberish. So for this campaign, the keywords that we focused on were Cthulhu, Lovecraft, comic, and anthologies. Why did we do that? Because people search for comics, they search for anthologies, and our campaign is about Lovecraft monsters. So we picked the most popular Lovecraft monster, Cthulhu, and then made sure that Lovecraft was in it because a lot of people search for that in the title. And we put Lovecraft a lot in the subtitle. And so how do we know how to do that? Well, this goes all the way back to the book design, but we used 3 things. The first was we looked through Kickstarter. Kickstarter is great because every campaign that has been successful or unsuccessful since Kickstarter started is here for you to do research on. And all you have to do is go to Discover. You can click everything. You can see all categories. You can search for specific categories in specific locations. I usually like sorting by most funded— actually, that's not true. I usually like sorting by most backed because that shows things that people pay— uh, the most people are interested in. Funding could be a very expensive campaign that had far less people than something like Exploding Kittens did. And you can see that if you go to most funded Exploding Kittens isn't even in the top 10 most funded campaigns of all time. Brandon Sanderson's campaign is though. Uh, so I'm gonna go back to most backed, and I can— what I usually do is, uh, I like searching for, uh, live projects. Um, but for this time we're going to search for all projects, and we're going to put on Earth, uh, and then we're going to search for— let's just do comics. I like comics, so I'm going to do comics. So, uh, now we're going through and we're looking at books that are popular that look like our book. And we can point out nothing there, nothing there. Avis Demon might be one. Um, Steve Lickman. None of these really say Lovecraft or Cthulhu, but I'm sort of getting a vibe for what is A, super popular, Now I can also sort by the amount pledged. So let's say you have a $10,000 goal, you might want to be searching for this in this, in this section, which is just $10,000+ projects. So a lot of these are very popular webcomics or comic webcomic creators that become successful, that have success here. So we're not necessarily looking for names for for this section, we're looking for like what they put in their description too, because this part codes to here, and this part codes to here. And so I search through this thing. I'm not going to do it right now. I'm just trying to find good keywords. Then I'll come over to Google Trends, which you can find if you have a Google account. You have access to Google Trends, and it will show you it'll just come up with like— they'll ask you for one keyword and then you will populate it and it will add a search term. And so we'll just put Cthulhu and mythos, and then I'll add Lovecraft here. You'll be able to see the trend over time of these search terms. So you can see that there's a huge jump in Lovecraft right around here, but right now Lovecraft and Cthulhu pretty, uh, pretty well, uh, tied. And, and when we started doing this book in 2018, uh, Cthulhu was way outstripping Lovecraft. Then you could see mythos down here, and you could add some of your other, um, you know, other, other keywords that are in the Lovecraft, and you'll just see sort of what, what is the most popular one. And so Cthulhu versus Mythos and Dagon, much more popular. So you can do this when you're designing a book as well. You can also— the second tool I use, the third tool I use is Google Keyword Plan, which you can get to in your Google Ads account. Again, all this is free, and you can see you can put on a bunch of keywords Then you can see which one gets the most average monthly searches. You can see while Lovecraft— go back here— while Lovecraft shows higher here, when you actually go to the Keyword Planner, you'll see Lovecraft gets far less impressions than Cthulhu. Cthulhu gets between 100,000 and 1 million search results every month. Lovecraft gets a tenth of that. By all of these things, you kind of get to see sort of what people are searching for, and that will bring you back to both your title and your subtitle. The title is usually the title of your book, but then you'll put some— I use mythological fantasy or portal fantasy. Sci-fi, whatever your category is, is a good way to just differentiate this from everything else in that specific category. And also make sure that it is coded with the same thing. So if it's portal fantasy instead of just fantasy, it gives people who want portal fantasy a little bit more of an edge to that book. And then, and and make sure to use as many characters as you can, as close to 60 as possible. The same thing here, you have 135 characters. I added Lovecraft, comic, anthology, Lovecraft again, gods, monsters. All of these are good keywords for us, and you want to make this very keyword heavy and very targeted. This says complete because it's a trilogy. It's a complete series. People can can get everything, the whole thought in one. I put that trilogy because it was a trilogy. 107 stories to show just, we had just an infinite amount of stories. It feels like kind of the vibe is that these are love letters. These are like, these are, there's a very referent, very sort of referential attitude that we had towards Lovecraft's material. And so Those are how we do those things. And now there's one more thing that I want to give you just as a quick tip for how to get a good, um, a, a good short link. So you can see up here, Cthulhu Battle Royale. Usually what happens is you get a little dash here, here, here, here, and here. But if right before you generate your link, after you are, um, I after your book is approved, uh, so generate your link here. If right before you do that, you go into your basics and you create something like, like this, now when it creates the link, it will populate, um, it will populate that short link, and then you can go back and change it right after it populates. That's a little trick for me to you. Okay, so your, your, your goal for today is to set up your account if you haven't, start a project if you haven't, and then fill out your title and subtitle, and then share it in the group and let us take a look at it. We'll see you tomorrow.