I hate marketing my online business. Hate it, hate it, hate it. Nothing is more unnatural to my personality than “selling myself.” I want to sit here hunched over a computer and do nothing but write.
But one of the downsides of working for yourself (which means, let’s face it, running a business) is doing your own marketing. Oh man, listen to me – running your own business. It makes me almost gag to think I just wrote that!
As you can see, I’m not a marketing/businesses-minded type of person. So, one of my challenges when I decided to ditch working for other people once and for all was to come to terms with this. And I found that it was much easier than I thought.
Marketing your ghostwriting business is extremely simple. It gets more complex when you want to make big money or get big jobs. But I’m living proof that a completely marketing-adverse person with no business skills whatsoever can master it just enough to create a full-time online writing career out of it.
Pick One Or Two Things And Do Them Daily
Here’s how I did it: I picked two (count ’em – two!) marketing strategies and started doing them. I didn’t think about it; I just did them. After a month or so, they started paying off. By marketing strategies I mean stuff like article directory marketing, blog commenting, guest blogging, forum posting, social networking sites, etc.
If you’ve consumed any of the many internet marketing reports out there, or if you’ve spent time on any IM forums, you know that there’s a mind-boggling assortment of different strategies. If you’re on the forums, you also know that everybody’s got their pet method and they love to argue about which methods work and which don’t.
That’s all just static and noise. Tune it out. Pick your one or two out of those many methods and start doing them.
That’s the most important part – start doing them. Don’t worry over whether you’ve made the right choice or not, or what this person said on this forum. Just do it and wait for results. If you get no results, ditch the method and start something else. If it works for you, keep on keeping on.
Forget About Traffic
Don’t get fixated on stats, traffic, Google’s tender affection, “link juice” or any of that. It doesn’t matter to you because you don’t need a thousand hits per day to your site. What you need are a handful of visits who will hire you to write for them.
When I first got set up, I got Google Analytics. What fun! You can see how many total strangers who might hire you are coming to your site! You can see where they’re coming from, what countries they’re living in, how many seconds they looked at your site, and a whole bunch of other useless stuff that will waste your time.
Once you start marketing your ghostwriter site, it’s useful to check and see how your strategy is going. For example, if you’re submitting to 5 article directories and one is getting you zero traffic, you know to drop it. But the danger of monitoring your stats too closely is that you start obsessing over traffic and that really doesn’t matter to you as a ghostwriter. You’re not an internet marketer.
Your marketing efforts should focus on finding your target audience (clients who will buy from you) and putting yourself in front of them. That’s all, and you don’t need to worry about the numbers.
Don’t Think Of It As Marketing
It also helped me a lot to quit thinking of it as marketing. It was just part of my routine – before I got started on the day’s work, I did my handful of little tasks. Occasionally I would give it a think and decide if I should change something. But I didn’t really think of it as “marketing.”
In fact, your efforts will be more successful if you stay out of the marketing mindset. What I mean is that if you post articles to directories thinking, “This’ll sell some people on hiring me,” you’re going to write salesy, self-promotional garbage instead of good content that provides value. This is even more the case with forum posting and blog commenting. If you’re obviously just trying to get a backlink or promote your service, other forum members will know it.
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