Friday, July 25, 2008

Feeding the Self-Promotional Beast

I spent part of yesterday and most of this morning on nothing but self-promotional activities — all the stuff that writers/freelancers need to do to stay on clients' minds and initiate new contacts with peers.

Sample tasks:

Getting in touch with clients and other colleagues. I needed information from a few people, owed correspondence to others, and needed to remind a couple of folks that I still exist.

Creating a profile on relevant networking sites. I set up shop on JacketFlap , an online community of people working in children's publishing. I think I first became aware of it 2 years ago . . . so, bad me for taking so long to go back and get started. I did the same thing on BlogHer, an online community for women in the blogosphere. We'll see whether I really find/take the time to reap the benefits from joining the sites. Right now I intend to try, but only time will tell if I find them as useful as they seem . . . or if I'm just not going to add them to my to-do list.

Discussing promotional ideas with my painter. He was here doing interior work all week, and we traded self-employment stories. We're in totally different businesses, but hey, a good promotional idea is a good promotional idea. Thing is, I just haven't done anything more than send a few flyers — and that was "once upon a time" at that. It's good, though, to periodically reconsider the value of investing in advertising, mailings, giveaways, and so on. What doesn't make sense one year might be a no-brainer must-do another.

So, those are the types of PR tasks I try to fit in every now and again. How do you promote YOU?

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