Using Flyers To Sell Your Writing Services

Whenever you’re promoting a business, with a flyer campaign or otherwise, it always pays to articulate carefully what you can offer your potential customers. Writing is no different, but this is one niche where your flyer needs to be particularly carefully tailored.

Any promotional flyer should communicate that the purpose of your business is to do something for your customers that they cannot or do not want to do for themselves, and consequently will pay you to do instead. Whether it’s a cleaning service or specialist financial advice, you are offering the client something that makes their life easier in some way. Perhaps you’re providing expertise, perhaps you’re simply saving them time. Either way, a well-written flyer will clearly answer the reader’s implicit question: what can you do for me?

The purpose of your flyer

Writing for a living can encompass a broad range of jobs. You might focus on writing internet content, for example, in order to drive traffic to your website or others. You might write marketing copy, or magazine articles, or fiction… the list is almost endless, and in practice your day-to-day work may encompass a number of these. No matter how versatile your skills, though, your flyer is unlikely to succeed if its remit is this broad. Flyers are an excellent way to reach a specific readership – whether the subscribers of a particular publication or households in a given zip code. The trick is to tailor your message to that demographic to ensure the time and money you invest in your flyer campaign results in maximum pay-off.

Pick your speciality

This means that you should create a flyer that targets a specific niche. Perhaps you want to advertise your services for creating websites for individuals, groups or businesses. A flyer with a very general ‘Pen for hire’ advertisement isn’t going to resonate with your readers. You will have to send out thousands of flyers to gain a handful of clients. But if your flyer is designed with a specific audience in mind, you have a far better chance of attracting new customers.

With this in mind, your flyer should demonstrate that you are capable of delivering a service that your reader needs. Look at the problem from the customer’s point of view: what is the problem that they have that you can solve? Is it a lack of time, or expertise? Your flyer needs to show them that you can deliver something worth paying for.

Testimonials and writing samples will be useful, but don’t go overboard: people don’t want to plough through reams of dense text. Your flyer should point people in the right direction, not tell them absolutely everything they need to know. Contact details and a link to your own website achieve that better than a crammed page of words.

Flyer presentation

Any business flyer should be well-presented, but in this case the effort you put into it is absolutely critical. It’s one thing if a dry cleaning or gardening service hasn’t mastered punctuation and grammar, since it’s hardly going to affect the quality of the job they do – and even then, minor mistakes can be quite off-putting. Readers start to wonder whether you will show a similar level of carelessness in other areas of your work. When you are offering a writing service and the writing on the advert itself is flawed, you might as well have burned the flyer as paid to have it distributed. This has to be your very best writing: beautifully honed, convincing, and immaculate.

One problem of presentation is that flyers will often incorporate images for greater visual effect – something that can be distracting if done badly, but that can add a great deal to their impact. In the case of writing professionals, this is harder – appropriate images are not immediately obvious. It’s best not to use a picture on your flyer just for the sake of it – it needs to be something relevant, not just pretty. Instead, you may like to use different typefaces, layouts, pull-out quotes, text boxes, bullets and so on to break the text up and make it more attractive and readable.

Where to send your flyer

You will need to target your flyer’s audience carefully, but with a little research you can make a strong impact and a high ROI. You might distribute them to local businesses, or in specific publications. Similarly there are courses at which displaying your flyers could be very beneficial, as well as libraries and other locations.

This article was supplied by Printed.com, suppliers of unbeatable quality digital flyer printing, and a shortlisted company for this year’s industry leading Print Week Environmental Company of the Year 2011 award.

Image: jennafa

Tagged as: promotion, self-promotion, writer promotion

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