Wednesday, January 16, 2008
10 Strategies in 30 Days (Part 2)
| Last time I talked about how - if you are looking to kickstart your writing career in 2008 - your best approach might well be to reinvent yourself. For those of you who missed it, you can find the starting strategies here. For the rest of you read on. You have picked a passion - something that you can remain committed to for at least a year. You can translate that passion into a service. And you are able to express that service in terms of solving problems for your potential clients. [Thank you who sent in their "elevator-speech" lines - I will post them at a later date.] Now you need to GET NOTICED. After all, starting a business or trying to energize a moribund one without going to the next step - well you might as well go back the security of the dark side. The good news is that it is so much easier to do this than the bad old days when cold calling and print advertising seemed the only recourse. Getting noticed has three categories of action. For the exercises this week, we will start with the easiest, and the one with perhaps the most potential for bringing in work. This may be old hat to many of you, but you MUST have an electronic presence of one form or another. Do you need to have a fancy expensive web site? Not at all. But you do have to have an electronic link to your work samples, resume and testimonials. And that electronic link has to be in the signature line of every email you sent out. So, for those of you starting out in the business, don't have a web site or a budget or a conception for a web site - then this very day - or at least over the next three days - I want you to set up your own blog site. It is simple and it is free. There are lots of places you can go to do this. I suggest either www.blogger.com orwww.wordpress.com. Just follow the instructions to set up the blog. Then publish/post your resume, a couple of work samples, letters of reference if you have them, and anything else you think a client might want to see. Assuming you already have these items to post (if you don't you best get busy then) then the whole process should take about an hour - at most. Then its done and you don't have to ever look at it again, unless of course you want to start an interactive blog going. That's a whole other thing. And not a bad idea that I will discuss at another time. Once you have your blog up - you will have a URL - which is the object of the exercise. It is this URL you will put in your email signature line. Then if someone wants to see your work, your resume, or what others think of you - that information is a simple click away. Will doing this guarantee you work? No. Just as a business card won't. But the absence of either can kill a potential job possibility. For those of you for whom this is old stuff - and you already have a website or a blog - then I want you to raise the ante a little. In a world where viral marketing is king I would like you to take one of your own pieces from your site and see if you can find a like minded blog/site who you can cross post to - with links back to your site or at least with your email address. If anyone has done that recently I would love to hear about it. You have seven days for this very simple task. Until next time... |
