If you know how to pronounce “meme”, you should get the jokey title. And if you don’t, don’t worry – you’re not alone! I kept calling them “me-me” up until the last week, and why not? Please, somebody, explain, why is it that a new word gets invented in this day and age, which is hard enough as it is, and for some reason it has to be pronounced exactly counterintuitively? I’ve made my peace with “choir” and “sixth”, and “knife”, because they were invented by your ancestors back when there was no electricity or canalisation. (My ancestors invented Russian, and yeah, it’s not for beginners either).
But why now? Why do you have to remember that a word spelled “meme” is actually pronounced “meem”? Is it to separate those “in the know” from late adaptors? Anyway, enough ranting, let’s get to what I actually was very excited to tell you – despite my pronunciation shortcomings, I now meme with the best of them.
Oh, and if you have not come across the term before – meme is basically something that goes viral, like a funny picture with an even funnier caption. Basically, every LOL CAT ever made. Here is my favorite one of all time:
I was posting quotes from Shizzle, Inc to my Buffer account, which feeds my Twitter, when it occurred to me that I could easily turn some of those quotes into memes. I was so excited with visions of the Internet exploding with all the sharing of Isa’s dubious wisdom, that I made a few of them right away:
I was so excited, that I even made a few with Mr. Hue:
So, have they gone viral? Well, not exactly (yet), but I’ve had a lot more “engagements” with these memes instead of the same quotes, which I’ve twitted before with links to Shizzle, Inc Amazon sale page. My average engagement rate with quotes was 1-2%, but the memes got 3-8% engagement.
The only issue was, memes did not get retwitted as much, so the number of impressions was lower. Still, where my quotes got 2-3K impressions and 20-30 “engagements” each, memes got anywhere from 1k to 2K impressions, but 30-80 engagements each. Not only that, my average sales per day (without any other promos) went from an average of 0.5 books per day to 1.5 books per day during last week. Not huge numbers, but enough to have me excited about making more of these…maybe introducing other characters as well?
Of course, I have to share lessons learned, the major one being the size and orientation of the photo. The very first meme I made looked like this:
I thought it was pretty good at the time, but the problem was that when it got uploaded to Twitter, it ended up looking like this in the feed:
That was a lesson in “don’t do anything without research”. I had a look at the suggested photo proportions and found that 1:2 was recommended, or 512×1024 pixels. I reformatted my meme. Close, but no cigar:
Finally, after a few trials, I figured out a perfect size: 512 pixels high by 908 pixels wide. The 1:2 ratio may have been true once, or maybe it’s a simplified version of 512:908, but I do believe my ratio is better:
I am using Photoshop to create my memes, but you can also use free online software – just google “free meme maker”. I can’t recommend any, unfortunately, because I have not tried them. If you do try a meme or two of your own, please let us all know how it has worked for you.
Have fun!
the other day. I do that quite often, actually – nothing like reading a good review of your book to get you out of the bed and to the keyboard. One of the reviewers mentioned that my book was somewhat similar in style to 
. I personally think that it’s more like 
or maybe 
. In any case, it was great to see my book compared to a bestseller.
with affiliate ones. It’s been months since that post, but a dozen people a week still find it from a google search for the author. It’s about time that interview started making me some money…and while I’m at it, why not sell 
? It looks like SO much fun…
Ana Spoke, author 