Intelligent Marketing: Ways To Promote Your Business When Your Passion is Writing

Summary: If you're a writer, promote your articles and business using some of the suggestions below.

There are at least a "zillion" of 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.

1. Publish an ezine using your original content. There are a few free services that let you create an ezine in exchange for including advertisements in the publication. The service I use most often is www.topica.com because it's simple to use, and it gives you a choice between promoting ads and promoting their company (my choice). Yahoogroups.com offers more of a community with their service, including a file area, an area for members to list their websites, and much more. In my opinion, the yahoogroups ad is unprofessional looking but yahoogroups offers a paid version with no ad for $50 which is a very good deal. Smartgroups.com is somewhere in between.

2. Each quarter, take the 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.

3. Place articles on your website. Visit www.coachmaria.com/articles.html for suggestions on how you might accomplish this.

4. Submit articles to Article Banks on the Web. Find links to article banks at www.coachmaria.com/articlebanks.html

5. Create an elist on http://groups.yahoo.com/ , www.topica.com, or www.smartgroups.com, especially for other ezine authors who look for original articles by other writers. Look at one list description example: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/coachmaria/join

6. Promote your article through the signature line of your email. Make it easy for people to request your article by placing it in an auto-responder. Some auto-responders sites are: www.ez-responder.com, www.webmailstation.com, www.fastfacts.net, http://www.sendfree.com

7. Send articles to your local newspaper (make sure you include your own copyright information and bio*)

8. Mail, through the Post Office, new articles to your former clients, current clients and potential clients. Include a hand written note and your business card.

9. Pass them out at networking meetings. People seem to take this type of newsletter more quickly than a brochure (just my personal observation).

10. Subscribe to some elists that are set up for authors to publicize their work. Make sure that you change your subscription to digest mode! I subscribe to a few on yahoogroups. Their names are: aabusiness, articles_archives, article_announce, bizarticles, free-content, publishinyours, readmyarticles. Conduct your own search at http://groups.yahoo.com/, www.topica.com, or www.smartgroups.com using the words promote articles, advertise articles, or submit articles. There are new lists popping up all the time.

* Sometimes ezine and magazines have a word limit on bio's. Best to ask what the limit is prior to submitting.

Do you have a suggestion to add to this list? If so, send it to Maria Marsala and I'll publish it along with your name, title and URL in one of my newsletters.

© 2000-2001 Maria Marsala, Special Projects Coach & Consultant www.coachmaria.com



Written By: Maria Marsala