Promoting Your Work to Get Work

By Terreece M. Clarke

By now, every writer knows to promote their blogs and web articles through various social networking sites. Almost as soon as you hit publish, you’re sending the url through Twitter and that’s great, but have you ever thought about using social networking and email blasts to promote your print work?

It’s pretty easy when the magazine or newspaper you’ve gotten a clip from has the clip online. Then it’s just a matter of zipping it out to all of your Facebook, Twitter and Digg friends. When the clip isn’t available online, you then have a great opportunity to upload the article – in an easy to read format, i.e. PDF, to your Web site and drive traffic there.

Email blasts are another great way to get the word out about what you’re doing, especially to editors. A monthly, well-written, mini-newsletter sent not only to your mom and your writer buddies, but also to editors you’ve worked with helps promote you in several ways – it reminds editors of who you are, it gets traffic either to your site or to the publication’s site and the newsletter itself is another example of your work.

One thing to remember about email blasts. Keep it professional, visually interesting and fairly brief. You don’t have to include the whole article in email, just a quick tease and a link. And in the spirit of keeping it professional, don’t get spammy with blasts, no one wants to hear from you everyday – well except maybe your mother. Other than that, stick to monthy quarterly reports of your most impressive work.

Are any of you already using these techniques? How is it working for you?

photo courtesy of stock.xchng.hu

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Comments

3 responses
  1. Michelle Kafka Avatar

    I use Twitter and I like to use MyBlogLog. I’m not heavy on the promotion/marketing thing though yet, still afraid I guess. Will keep the email blast thing in mind too. Will add this post to my favs too. Thanks.

  2. Terreece Avatar
  3. Mildred Avatar
    Mildred

    Some clips I have are from a magazine that publishes the whole thing into one PDF, and there are usually about 80 pages which makes it hard for me to direct people to my article unless I say, “Look for page 40.” Does anyone know how to make a file of a specific page from a PDF, or is that even possible? I’ve been wondering about doing this for some time and would appreciate any helpful feedback.

    Thanks

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