Group Discussions

Promoting yourself

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  Any experienced freelancers have tricks of the trade to work on promoting yourself? I'm sure we'd all love to hear about what has worked for you!!

  Flag as inappropriate Posted by mamajama on 12th May 2008
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  I've tried the program in the book "Get Clients Now" by CJ Hayden a few times - it's a 28 day marketing program, but I ended up getting side-tracked with client work each time that I never fully completed a program!
  
  
  
  I'm writing about it on my blog right now, though - hoping to keep myself accountable for my own self promotion, lol. I hope you'll check it out - I just started a program, but you can see if you like it and if so, I'm going to start another one next month - maybe we'll have a bigger group of people to support eachother.
  
  
  
  http://www.idesignstudios.com/blog/2008/05/07/get- clients-now-a-28-day-marketing-program/
  
  and
  
  http://www.idesignstudios.com/blog/2008/05/17/get- clients-now-the-first-28-days-week-1/
  
  
  
  The book focuses on 4 marketing stages - I'm still working on the 1st one
  
  
  
  * Filling the Pipeline
  
  * Following Up
  
  * Getting Presentations
  
  * Closing Sales
  
  
  
  Anyway, a lot of the suggestions (at least for this stage) have to do with networking and I've turned this into utilizing a lot of social media and such - things like commenting on blogs and forums, etc. Just emailing someone new each day or week, etc.
  
  
  
  I hope you'll check out the blog post - the book itself is really good. I found it very motivating and it really made me want to get serious about self promotion. I'm a web designer, but NOT a marketing person, lol, so this has (and is) difficult for me.
  
  
  
  I'd love to see what other people are doing too, though!

  Flag as inappropriate Posted by Selene M. Bowlby on 20th May 2008
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  This is a great thread to start. Tricks of the trade...that's kind of a tough one, because what works can vary from person to person and industry to industry as well as with the speed with which self-promotion evolves.
  
  There are always press releases...some of which can be sent for free through a service, some services are fee-based, and you can also do background work to find which reporters and markets are most-likely interested in your story/products/service.
  
  
  
  Then, there are content articles and article "mills", which as a magazine editor, I have to caution people about using for self promotion, because not all content articles are created equal. There are some that are excellent, well-written and well edited and give useful information, and there are others that are merely advertorials and are neither well-written nor well edited.
  
  
  
  Blogging also helps, but probably, the key thing to do, is to network and network well (which can also be time consuming). There's a great book by Jenifer Gniadecki called Non-Toxic Networking, that's a great resource for networking well.
  
  
  
  That's my two-cents anyway, fwiw. HTH

  Flag as inappropriate Posted by Erika-Marie S. Geiss on 20th May 2008