Case Study: Tim Ferriss
Book | Four Hour Workweek
Primary tribes | Four Hour Workweek blog | @tferriss
A lot of people point to Tim as the guy who broke the news that the blogosphere is a mission critical book marketing tool. Tim took a different approach to building his online author tribe. When Tim signed his book deal, he didn’t have much time to build his tribe. Nor had he spent much time in the blogosphere.
But, he’s an aggressive and extremely innovative marketer who “got” the power of the online world, through his other business ventures. So, Tim basically jumped on a bunch of planes and threw himself into some of the biggest tech/online conferences in the country with the goal of meeting and befriending a number of top bloggers and online influencers, then leveraging the power of their tribes to not only build his own tribe, but sell a lot of books.
During that process, he also was able to grab enough of their attention to effectively “test” which of the big ideas in the book would make for the best viral “memes” in the blogging community, so he’d be better positioned to run with his most buzzworthy content. This let him key in on and work the messages that would resonate with the tight tech blogger niche.
By the time the book launched, Tim had build a polished website and started blogging in earnest. But the thing that really launched the Four Hour Workweek into the stratosphere (mega-bestseller on every print list) was the way he pulled and developed his core “memes” and worked a small tribe of heavy hitting online influencers to kickstart them.
Interestingly, too. Tim’s book caught fire before twitter was a big enough vehicle to play a significant role in the launch. And, even though Tim is closing in on 60,000 followers, he follows back fewer than 200 and uses twitter not so much for conversation, but as a broadcast medium. And, while this diverges from the common conversational ethic, it works for him on two levels. One, he is a proponent of minimizing the quantity of digital noise that makes it to his eyes and ears. And, he’s established enough that, like many of other celebs and webcelebs, people will still follow him to keep up with his always provocative adventures in lifestyle design. Tim, it seems, revels in being the exception to the rule.
He’s currently working on a new book that sounds like it’s going to raise a lot of eyebrows. Keep an eye on how he brings it to market. You’ll learn a lot.