Blogging Tips

My blog was recently in a competition. Even though it came through the first round okay (there are several rounds), one of the knocks against it was that it was a tad bit too self-promotional. This didn’t upset me because in my opinion freelance writing, as an industry, has this thing against marketing/self-promotion. Which, I think is why so many lead a starving artist existence.

However, this did get me to thinking about the mind of a marketer. As in, how do you develop it? When it comes to marketing, I think you either naturally have the skill, or you don’t. But, if you don’t have it, it can definitely be developed. How do I know? Because I was in the latter category, and learned how to develop marketing cojones years ago. I had to in order to save my business.

A Personal Story: Market, or Go Home!

Back in 1997 when I ran my editorial staffing agency in New York City, it almost went under before it ever got going good. My sister and I were co-owners, and a few months after I quit my publishing job to join the business full-time, we lost our biggest client, which had been our previous employer (we both worked for the same legal publishing firm).

So, we had to come up with some new business – fast – or go out and get full-time jobs again, which neither of us wanted to do.

So, we capitalized on what clients had been asking us for – temp help. We originally started out as just an editorial outsource firm. Clients would give us projects, and we would use independent contractors to get them done. Sometimes, they would want the person to come onsite, but as we weren’t set up as a temp agency, we couldn’t offer this service. BUT, we got the proper licenses and started to.

To get this part of the business off the ground quickly (and I’m talking within two to three months), we had to start doing some serious, cheap marketing. Neither of us liked doing it. We would procrastinate on cold calling and basically sat around twiddling our thumbs until one day, while reconciling the books, we realized that if we didn’t have some serious new business coming in soon, we were going to be closing up shop.

So, we started a fax campaign. We would go through the classified section of the Sunday New York Times and fax every employer in there who had listed a fax number (this was before the prolific use of email). Almost immediately, we started to get calls. And this is what saved our business from closing less than a year after it opened. The agency ran successfully for 8 years before it closed.

Our fax campaigns were so successful that we went on to hire an office assistant to handle this duty. We did this every Sunday for a couple of years. This taught me a lesson that has stuck with me to this day. You must constantly market to bring in customers. Shotgun approaches don’t work. You need an ongoing, consistent message out there.

Are You Too Promotional?

While you may think you’re overdoing it – and indeed some of your prospects may too – it’s when you quit that you’ll notice the effects, sometimes almost immediately. Think about it, how many times have you tried to track down a business, only to find that their ad isn’t in its usual spot, or you haven’t received their latest newsletter, or their last e-blast?

It seems to be some type of weird Murphy’s law that just when you stop marketing, that’s when somebody who has ignored a year’s worth of your advertisements will be looking for it – on the 366th day.

So, send out that email campaign, with your ads in it; send out that newsletter, with your ads in it; update your blog, with your ads in it. For, staying “top of mind” with potential customers means constantly reminding them of what you have to offer. To state the obvious, your content has to be beneficial to the reader, not just a bunch of ads.

Blog Contest

John Hewitt of Poewar.com, in honor of March Madness, put together a very unique contest entitled March Writing Blog Madness! The purpose: “A field of 32 blogs about writing will gather to compete to see who is the best.” Read more about it here. And read how my blog fared in the first round here.

It’s a great way to discover new freelance writing blogs, and to get in-depth information on which ones you may want to consider becoming regular readers of.