Ways To Promote Your Business When Your Passion is WritingWritten by Maria Marsala
There are at least a "zillion" ways you can market yourself and your business. Marketing intelligently means finding what you're passionate about and then using your passion to market. If you are passionate about writing, below are some ways to promote your business.Publish an ezine using your original content. You have 7 choices on how do develop your newsletter. www.coachmaria.com/articles/ezinechoices.html Each quarter, take best of your articles and place them in your in-print newsletter to use as part of your marketing materials. Send a copy to your friends, colleagues, family and potential clients. Place articles on your website. Include a line on each page that allows your article to be used by others, with permission. Then include a link to your email address. Submit articles to Article Banks on Web. Find links to article banks at www.coachmaria.com/articlebanks.html This way your articles have chance of getting picked up by other ezines, helping you to reach a broader audience. Create an elist especially for other ezine authors who look for original articles by other writers.
| | TO SPECIALIZE, OR NOT TO SPECIALIZE?Written by Mary Anne Hahn
Okay, so you've decided that you want to write for fun and profit, and not necessarily in that order. Perhaps you've already abandoned your day job to pursue your dream of full-time writing life, or maybe you just want to test waters part-time until you have guts (and money) to jump in with both feet. In any event, you've decided that you want to start your own writing business.Now what? You head for nearby library, rush to your favorite bookstore, or jump onto Web to see what other writers are doing. And you find that there are so many opportunities "out there" for writers, it makes your head spin. "Make a Gazillion Bucks as a Copywriter!" gushes one book title. "Big Profits From Short Pieces!" promises another. Book after book, web site after web site, take you down pathways paved with gold, fortunes made from writing everything from greeting card verses to computer manuals. Your excitement builds. Although some ideas appeal more to you than others, it is tempting to want to dabble in them all. Let's face it, we writers are a creative lot, and eschew thought of being tied down to a particular type of writing. Who wants to churn out press releases all day, or catalog copy, or annual reports? Variety, after all, is spice. Besides, why close yourself out of several money-making opportunities by concentrating on one? Couldn't you be a sort of one-stop writer, a one-size-fits-all kind of scribe, able to satisfy whatever kind of customer calls upon you for your services? Why limit your customer base or market to a certain kind of person, or company, or publication, when you could peddle your skills to whole world? I subscribed for years to this very line of thinking, and my writing resume shows it. I have published over a dozen non-fiction articles, put together a newsletter or two, created a few radio spots, won a short story contest, developed training manuals and revised job descriptions. I've written telephone scripts, business correspondence, procedure documents and users' guides. I am first person my friends think of when they need a resume, and yet those same friends also expect that I'll someday produce a string of romance novels. So I've had a versatile writing career, yes. A lucrative one? No.
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