Creating a Presence Online As A Writer: Build a Platform, Get Readers, Make Sales

This article first appeared in Fab Freelance Writing Ezine on January 9, 2008. Fab Freelance Writing Ezine is my ezine for freelance writers who want to surpass their writing income.

Success as a writer comes when editors, agents and other people who need your writing skills approach you to ask you to write for them. They’ll approach you when you have a presence online. Your presence can be a Web site and blog, or many Web sites and blogs.

In this article we’ll discuss why creating an online presence is vital, so you can build your platform, get readers, and make sales. Let’s start at the beginning, by talking about marketing.

You’re a writer, and taken as a group, writers are lousy at marketing their writing skills.

(By the way, if you’re new to marketing as a concept, all “marketing” means is this – identifying the needs that your writing skills can meet, tailoring your writing services to meet those needs, and finally promoting your services as an answer to your customers’ needs. You’ll note that marketing starts with identifying the needs your buyers have.)

When I say we’re lousy at marketing our writing skills, I mean that most writers are focused on writing what they want to write, and then trying to sell the products they produce. Any marketer will tell you that trying to sell something for which there’s no identified need is an uphill battle. In business, it’s a way you can guarantee bankruptcy.

Unfortunately, for most writers the process of writing and then trying to sell what they write has always been the way they work.

This process is inefficient. If you’re writing for magazines, it will take you up to ten article proposals to sell a single article. This means that you’re wasting time and energy that could go into writing. If you’re writing a book, selling your book proposal can take a year. Or two. In the meantime, you’re working at boring jobs, just to make ends meet.

You follow this process because you have no clear way of identifying your buyers’ needs, so you follow your own inclinations.

You need a way of identifying needs.

Let your buyers tell you what their needs are and sell more

But how do you identify needs? EASY. Your buyers will tell you. But they must know that you exist.

The answer to spinning your wheels as a writer is creating a presence in the online world: when you become known as a writer, that is when you build your platform and get readers, buyers of your writing come to you. Magazine editors and book agents and editors will approach you to meet their needs. If you’re a copywriter, businesses will approach you.

So how do you get to the stage where your buyers approach you?

You build your Web presence, starting with your Web site.

Your Web site is your full-time 24 x 7 x 365 sales person

I’m sure I’m not the first to tell you that you need a Web site. Your Web site is your full-time sales person.

Many people need your writing skills, but they also need to know that you exist. Developing a Web site and blog is a way of telling the world that you’re a writer. The benefit of your Web site is that people will approach you to write for them: they will tell you what their NEEDS are.

Can you see that having people tell you what they need, is much more efficient than writing dozens of proposals for which you’re never paid at all?

Create a Web site. Add content to it. Add more content when you have the time and inspiration. You’ll receive a trickle of buyers of your writing services, which turns into a flood.

I know that many writers are intimidated at the thought of creating a Web site, so I wrote “Super-Fast Money-Making Web Sites For Writers: Join The Web-Publishing Bonanza” to make the process super-simple. If you can use a computer you can create one site – or many sites.

Once you have a Web presence, you will be amazed at how much your life will change. If you want to become a full-time writer, then this is where you start.

Develop your presence: editors, agents and business people will approach you – you’ll have more writing gigs than you can handle. They’ll tell you want they need.

You’ll develop a writing career which is beyond your dreams at the moment. That’s the benefit of an online presence for writers. I wish you much success.