It’s the final day of our marketing bootcamp for freelance writers. You’ve come a long way towards laying the foundation for your writer platform, and you deserve a big CONGRATULATIONS for that! But you’re not finished. Marketing and platform building don’t end today. The rest is simply up to you. Today’s exercises will help you chart the course for your promotional work moving forward.
Background
It isn’t enough to build your visibility within your niche or specialty area. It’s equally important that you maintain it. While you can often cut down on the amount of marketing time required as your visibility grows and word of mouth spreads naturally, you should never stop altogether. That might mean continuing to blog. It could mean releasing a new book or e-book in the coming year. It could mean landing more interviews. It could mean participating in speaking engagements. It means whatever you choose for it to mean within the scope of your career and target market.
Exercises
- Review the platform-building plan you created early on during this bootcamp series. I have no doubt that you came up with some ideas you wanted to pursue which weren’t specifically covered here. Now is the time for you to run with them. Schedule in any marketing tactics or platform elements that we didn’t explore as a group. You don’t have to get on them immediately. Think about it as a long term plan.
- Re-evaluate that plan at the same time. Can you think of new strategies or tactics based on some of the things we’ve done here? Do some of your original ideas seem less appealing? Has your target market changed in any way? Your platform building plan (like any marketing plan or business plan) is a living document. It will grow and change as your career does. Let yourself be adaptable. Think about the New Year that’s quickly approaching, and think about what you can do throughout the year to keep your visibility strong.
- Don’t stop some of the simpler things we worked on. For example, if you launched a blog keep posting to it. Keep commenting on other blogs in the niche. Keep linking out to other people. Keep adapting your professional site (watch your rankings and update your Web copy if you’re not ranking well or if it’s not converting to sales).
You have the basic tools you need to pick up where we left off. Use them. And if you need more (or if you’d like to follow this series but you want to do it at your own pace), I’ll be releasing an enhanced version here and at AllFreelanceWriting.com. It will be released in e-book form for $9.97. It will take the information from our post series and expand on it, offer more detailed instructions for some aspects, and include some tools and worksheets to help you through the platform-building process. I’ll announce on the blog when it’s released — expect to see it in the next couple of weeks at most.
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That’s great news about the ebook! I am actually just now implementing all the steps you’ve outlined in these posts because October was too crazy with work for me to even spare a minute on my own stuff. Which is good I suppose, but I really need to start working for myself.
Anyhow, I was going to ask if you had any plans to put all of this together into one resource so I’m so happy to see that you are.
Thanks for all the help you provide. You have no idea how useful it is for me.
I came late to your Bootcamp and am going through it as we speak. Pardon my ignorance but why do you say in Day 5:
“Also, do not register your domain with the same company you host with ever, and do not host professional sites with GoDaddy — you should stick to hosts with more typical interfaces for that, and ones that maximize your control over your own site.”
What are the problems? I have an existing site and need to bump it up. I am using your Bootcamp (outstanding info!) to work through my business plan for 2010 and hopefully take my business to the next level.
This info. is fabulous – thank you for all your efforts!