Self Promotion: What’s The Point?

If you’re working as a freelance writer, then you should be promoting yourself. You might wonder whether you have the time and money to undertake promotional activity, and whether there’s any point. I can tell you, from my own experience, that there IS a point. Promoting yourself will help you to attract new clients for your writing, to consolidate relationships with existing clients and to form links with a writing and blogging community. It’s all about getting the word out about who you are and what you stand for.

There are a number of issues to consider when promoting yourself. For example, do you want to promote your name or brand yourself so that your business can continue in the future? Although in the past I have always said that writers’ names are their brand, recently I’ve been persuaded that there’s a lot of value in having a brand for your writing business that’s independent of your name. I won’t go into details here, but this post by James Chartrand makes the point.

Have you actually decided what aspect of your services you want to promote? As a writer, I could promote myself for:

• writing ebooks
• writing search engine optimized web content
• handling an article marketing campaign
• writing researched articles on a variety of topics
• writing travel pieces
• writing academic papers

This is just a sample, but you get the idea. In promoting myself, I need to decide whether to promote myself as an all round writer or to focus different types of promotion on different areas.

Once you know what services you are promoting and how you will brand yourself, it’s time to decide on the most effective method. You can promote yourself in a number of places and in a variety of ways. Rather than list them all here, I’ll be starting a new series on this blog next week, looking at some of the free ways that you can promote yourself. I’ll tell you which ones I’ve used effectively, and which ones have not worked for me – and why.

In general, self promotion has worked well for me. I have not spent any money on promoting myself, but my promotional efforts have helped clients to find me, as well as writers looking to offload some of their extra work. I’m pretty happy with the results so far. I’m sure you will be too.

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