Want to be a Successful Writing Professional?
Thursday, January 3rd, 2008Let’s Get Started on Your Game Plan For 2008!
You will hear me talk about my sales and sales management background, but I actually considered myself a consultant (to my customers) and a coach (to my sales reps). Even though none of you “work for me,” I still consider myself in the unique position to use my experience in both sales and management to help “coach” you to success. Hmmm … Suzanne Franco, The Sales Coach to Freelance Writing Professionals … I like it! And just like my other “coaching” positions, I will not be successful until each one of you are successful.
Because goals will be different for each and every one of you, I can’t list out your goals for you. But, I can give you some guidance on how to best set your business goals. Please make adjustments for your specific goals. I will assume that everyone here wants to make money as a freelance professional.
So first, you need to decide how much money you would like to make at your business this year. Then you will need to decide how many hours you have per day/week/month to work on your business. You can divide the annual financial goal by the number of hours you have available this year. That will give you the hourly rate you would need to earn to accomplish your goal. You should know what your time is worth per hour and an average pay rate for your specialty. This way you can see if you are in the “range” to meet or exceed your initial income goal. If you are in the range … great, if not, you will need to find more hours … or settle for less money.
Now that you know what you are shooting for let’s figure out how to get you there. If you’ve been responding to online freelance ads you should have some idea of how many ads you’ve had to respond to before you’ve landed work. Let’s do some more math. If you replied to 100 ads last year and landed 5 gigs … what kind of income did that give you? Will that be enough to get you to your goal this year? If not, we will need to make some adjustments. You will either need to respond to more ads, take a good look at your ad response letters, or learn some new ways to market yourself.
I’ve started a list of possible ways to market yourself as a freelance writing professional and I will eventually take you through them one at a time. If you are drawn to any of them in particular, please let me know. If I see a trend it will impact the direction I head.
How To Market Yourself As a Freelance Writing Professional:
- Website
- Blog
Forums
- Email Signature Line
- Newsletter
- 10 Second Commercial/Elevator Speech
Networking Groups/Mixers/Chamber of Commerce
- Write Information Articles
A Free How-To
- Contact Site Owners To See If They Need Content
Contact Webmasters of Sites In Your Area of Interest
- Network/Co-Market With Web Designers/Website Programmers
Squidoo – Social Networking
- Free/Inexpensive Classifieds
Ask for Referrals
- Who Do You Know Who …
Business Cards
- Apparel
Booth Space – Trade Shows
Attend Trade Shows In Your Area of Interest
Next time we will start to write concrete goals and how to stay on task with them.
Have a wonderful day … and remember to … MAKE EVERY DAY COUNT! *SmiLes* Suzanne
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