Guest Post: Marketing Your Writing (Part II)

This post is part of the Guest Post Giveaway at the blog Unready and Willing. If you think articles about writing or personal development (or personal development for writers) sounds like a good fit for your blog, please take a look at the Guest Post Giveaway page and see if any of the articles spark your interest.

Continuing where Part I left off:

1.    Build Your Brand - Your personal brand is the combination of you and your product. You must establish your mission and identity as a writer, and this should be reflected by the writing that you produce.
2.    Make Connections - Marketing is all about making connections. It's not just about making connections with the right people, but also making connections with the wrong people who know the right people.
3.    Build Relationships- You must make strangers into acquaintances and acquaintances into friends. You must build trust and affinity with your personal brand.

Make Connections

Only a few people that you know, if any, are members of your target audience. Most people that you know, however, are certain to know people who are members of your target audience. That's why it's important to make connections.

Not all connections are to be treated equally, of course. Making a single connection with one person could be worth making connections with 20 others. You could, for example, make a connection with the editor of a popular magazine with thousands of readers. You may know a college professor who's willing to pass your name on to students that might benefit from reading your work. You may run into a talented web designer who's so impressed with your writing that he or she offers to revamp your website for free. You might establish a connection with someone who runs a book of the month club with 50 readers, and each of those readers may have five friends each who are interested in what you're writing. A wealthy philanthropist might come across your website, be impressed by your work, and give you a $10,000 donation. All of these connections could be a phone call, an email or a mouse click away.

Making connections like those listed above are not a matter of luck, but a matter of persistence. It's quite possible you could make 100 connections before running into someone that could really help you out. What the skilled marketer must do then is see beyond any single person and do their best to get in touch with all the people they know and all the people that those people know. If you continue to do this, It's only a matter of time before you make that "miracle" connection.

So how should you make these connections? Believe it or not, you already have a lot of connection building tools in your arsenal. In order to be a master marketer, you must become familiar with them all. You may, for example, be the most terrible cold caller in the world, but if you're persistent, and improve your skills in that area, it may become your best connection maker.

Here's a list of some connection making tools:

• You
• Your writing
• Your website
• RSS feeds and directories
• Internet bulletin boards and forums
• Emails
• Newsletters
• Affiliate programs
• Link building programs (link exchanges, blogrolls)
• Online contests
• Your own e-zine
• Other peoples e-zines
• Webinars
• Live seminars
• Advertisements (from Craigslist to Google Ads to print media)
• Writers conferences
• Interviews (both being interviewed and interviewing others)
• Speaking or reading stories at events
• Business cards
• E-books
• Podcasts
• Vlogging
• Snail mail
• Asking for referrals
• The phone
• Print media
• Social networking sites (Facebook, Myspace, Linked In)
• Slogans
• Memes
• Word-of-Mouth
• Alternative web navigation tools (delicious.com, Stumbleupon)
• Other websites and blogs
• Elevator pitch
• Personal PR

As you can see, the amount of options you have to build connections with your audience are almost endless. As it'd be a Herculean task to master all of these at once. It'd be best to focus on one at a time until you get the hang of each. Try as many as you can, especially the ones that scare you, as those can be indications of where you can grow.

For starters, choose some of these weapons and make a full frontal assault on your target audience. Don't depend on any single tool for your marketing success. It's important to take advantage of several tools at once. You must not, for example, rely on your website as the only way to make connections. Use your other connection making tools to leverage each other. Send letters to publishers and tack your website address in the letter. Make cold-calls or write emails to people who might be interested in your site and send them a link. The key to good marketing is repetition. The more people hear about you and your writing the more they'll be curious about it. If you approach your audience using all the tools in your arsenal, chances are the right people will see your name enough times to want to know what you're all about.

Kenji Crosland is a creative writing major who, scared of becoming a starving artist, became a corporate headhunter in Tokyo. Since then he's regained his sanity, quit his job, and now blogs about creating an ideal career at unreadyandwilling.com. He is also developing a web application that just might change the internet. Follow him on Twitter: @KenjiCrosland.