Optimizing Your Writing Business for Success
We’re no longer an in-person profession when it comes to connecting with others. Like all businesses – and writing is a business – the digital age has transformed the way we buy, sell, and connect.
Multiple platforms for doing business, marketing, and publicity have opened up for writers just as they have for other successful companies. As writers, think for a moment that you are not selling a book, a speaking service, even yourself, but a widget. How other companies sell widgets is immediately transferrable and repeatable to your own products (you, your books, your speaking business, all that you do).
These multiple online platforms employed by all companies incredibly increase the way that we generate income, brand, and connections in new and creative ways.
So how do you adjust or modify your own existing writing/speaking/whatever business in order to maximize profitability and market reach?
You start looking at key strategies used by the most successful present-day businesses. Again, don’t think of yourself as selling books. We’re selling widgets.
So how are some of the ways we can go about this?
We can diversify our writing services. Look at different markets or ways to repurpose what we are doing. Think about some markets you might be missing. Think about something you wrote that can be tweaked a bit and sold to another market.
We can increase our marketing reach through the various methods used by traditional businesses. We need to explore those. Read books on marketing. Look at how businesses – not authors – are using the world wide web.
We constantly need to increase and enhance our skillsets. In business, one would think of the areas of R&D (research and development), production, and sales. All three need to constantly be reevaluated in how well we are doing and how better we can do each of them.
We need to look at our pricing. It’s easy for writers, who seem to suffer from low self-esteem it seems, anyway, to undercut their pricing. Place value on who you are. If you want to make a career totally from your writing, then you need to price yourself competitively and that means not too high or not too low based upon your skillsets and resume.
And, lastly, everything we do now, everything we buy, we seem to do because we feel a relationship and trust with the person or company with whom we are doing business. What can you do to help build these lasting relationships?
Examine the above and look at yourself honestly as to where you are. Even one great idea from the above can completely change your trajectory as a writer.
Then, you’re no longer just selling widgets.
You’re selling books.
You’re selling an experience.
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