Forum Marketing for Writers
Here’s a few important things I’ve learned (through sometimes painful trial and error):
You have services, people need your services. That’s a simple fact of life. The tricky thing is finding out who needs you. You might be tempted to just post a one off announcement and hope that you get work that way. Problem is, if you post it in an approriate spam/announcement forum it may not get seen much.
There’s a few ways to work around this. The first way is to tone down your announcement and work it into an introduction. Don’t get flowerly, don’t get extensive - if you oversell it’s akin to being a door to door salesman. Plus many people like the postcount +1 aspect of welcoming threads.
The best thing for me is to actually just stick around, read, and learn. You are going to need to focus on a few specific industries (for me it’s adult and technology). Chances are, there’s things you don’t know about the industries you write for. Why not take the opportunity to learn from potential clients?
While higher post counts don’t necessarily indicate an intelligent poster, I’d rather work with someone that has an established post count rather than someone whose post count is 1. If that 1 happens to be a spammy thread it’s even worse.
Make sure you have samples on hand - preferably on a website. There’s no reason for you to NOT have an online portfolio. If you don’t want to drop the cash for your own site/domain, just use a freehost.
You don’t have to list everything you have ever done, but you do want to provide a good range of samples. I like to try to get at least one sample of each type of writing service that I provide.
The other advantage to having an online portfolio is that you can just link it up in your signature. This ties into my earlier point of actually participating on industry boards. You don’t want to be a board whore or start needless drama. At the same time, how will people know to contact you with their writing needs if you don’t say anything at all?
You sig will sell for you without you having to say a word. Many users have sigs turned off. Are they unreachable without a hard sell approach? Of course not.
Many forums have the option for you to display your location. You can (if it is permitted by the boards rules) use this field to put your url or a descriptive title (writer for hire, sex text here, etc) to promote your services.
The other pitfall to avoid is terrible broken sentences and mispellings. I’ll admit it upfront - I’m a terrible speller. I live and die by extensive proofreading and my handy spellchecker. You don’t always have those, so you’ll want to make sure you don’t fuck up too bad on your posts. No one is perfect but if you want to offer your writing services - you have to make sure to minimize your mistakes.
Catering to a specific niche is a great way to focus yourself. You will learn a ton through your client and dealings on the forums. Eventually you will be able to capitialize on this knowledge as an expert in the field.
So what spurred this posting on? Well I’ve been wanting to write up a few articles about niche marketing, etc etc. I don’t really have time to do the magazine query thing so I figured I’d at least start to develop the ideas here.
The other reason is that I’ve seen a few postings by writers lately that just show no common sense. One was just generally spammed all over the place (and it was spam spam, not introduction spam). The other was an announcement spam in the right place - but then the writer wondered why they weren’t getting any response to their posting. You can’t just post in the smaller forums on a board - get yourself seen on the active parts.
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