Marketing Techniques for Writers

From Cheryl's Writing Crate

With each passing day, I, as a writer, strive to improve my craft as well as to start earning a regular income from something I love to do immensely.

Many writers consider themselves introverts and would rather be holed up in a small space, alone, writing to their hearts content rather than think about "putting their stuff" or "themselves" out there for the public to scrutinize.

I happen to be just the opposite.  (And please forgive me if I sound a bit full of myself! When you're the mother of 8 kids, 5 of them teenagers, there's not too much one can be afraid of!) I guess you'd call me the stereotypical "social butterfly".  I don't mind sharing my written words with the world, in fact, I rather enjoy it.

So where am I going with all this you ask?  I'll get right to the point.  As an author of one book, a columnist and writing enthusiast of freelance articles, and more, I have a dream of being able to earn a living from my writing.  Though I consider myself quite lucky that I've achieved many paid and unpaid writing gigs at this point in my career, I truthfully believe I could do a heck of a lot better---if----if I became a bit more savvy with my marketing skills.

Yes, some writing assignments have easily fallen in my lap, but there are plenty of opportunities that still await and if I don't do something to acquire them then who will?

The past few weeks I've been researching all kinds of ways to rev up my writing opportunities and stumbled upon a great article written by Carol Tice entitled 5 Quick Ways Busy Freelancers Can Keep Marketing.

You can visit the link above to read the entire article, but I'll share with you the one tip from these five that I intend to begin working on:  Submitting more queries.  One of my writing inspirations for 2014 is to do at least one freelance article for a national woman's magazine.  To date, I've done nothing to make that happen but I am inspired by the tip below and intend to get cracking on some queries this weekend.  Here's the author's Tip # 4:

Short bursts

If you want to send letters of introduction or query letters and feel like you never have time for a multi-hour writing project, you can get it done by splitting up the task into 10- or 15-minute tasks.

Today, just write the introductory paragraph, or maybe do a quick pre-interview with a source so your query has a quote. Tomorrow, write your bio line that’ll go at the bottom. And so on, until your query is ready to send.

Time management is one of my biggest challenges, so this quick marketing tip will hopefully guide me in the "write" direction so I can attain some more assignments and keep doing something I absolutely love to do--write!

How do you fit in some quick and necessary marketing strategies with your busy schedule?