Episode 84: Marketing Boost – Guest Authoring

The best approach for marketing a creative practice involves PinPoint Positioning followed by a consistent content strategy. The long-term benefits of this approach pay huge dividends to creative entrepreneurs. Of course executing on a content strategy requires a significant time investment. If you make weekly or monthly deposits into your content investment portfolio, you may want to consider some additional opportunities to diversify and extend the impact of those contributions.

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A good financial advisor will show you how the long-term results of a slow and steady investment strategy can pay off tremendously due to the impact of compounding interest. There’s a similar effect when it comes to investing in your content strategy. Making regular deposits into your content library steadily builds up resources that lead to discovery and new opportunities. But also, like investing money, if you wait too long to start investing, you lose the benefits of time and interest. And there’s just no way to make up for that lost time.

And so the sooner you start to invest in content the better off you’ll be. And one of the additional benefits of writing content that’s focused on the needs of one particular industry is that your thoughts and ideas will become valuable to other entities that service your chosen niche. Industry publications and associations are always hungry for content that will serve their audiences. And when you’ve been thinking and writing to a shared audience you can offer some of your content to these groups.

Writing guest articles for industry publications provides the valuable opportunity to get your name out in front of a larger group of well-qualified prospects. And when your content is delivered through an industry publication your expertise gets significantly boosted and your positioning gets validated.

When you get an opportunity to write for such a publication you need to keep a few things in mind. First of all, your article will face a higher standard of relevance than you might put on yourself for a typical post. And so be prepared to work a bit harder on these pieces. And let the increased scrutiny of such an editorial experience rub off on you when you write your own content. Frankly, you should always keep your own content highly focused on the practical needs of your chosen industry, and not so much on your personal interests or on promoting your past work.

Also, when you write for an industry publication, don’t expect to get paid very much for the article itself. In fact you might even offer to write one or two articles for free. Even if they do pay you, it’s highly unlikely that their remuneration will come close to covering the time involved. But the value in writing within your industry is not from a check you might receive, rather it’s the powerful lift to your reputation, the expansion of your audience, and the increased level of trust you gain from such opportunities.

One other thing to keep in mind when you offer to write for industry pubs—if at all possible make sure that the publisher links back to your website. That’s because, in the same way that your reputation and authority increases in the minds of your prospects when you are connected to a trusted industry publication, that link forms a technical connection from their website to yours. And search engines use those kinds of associations to rank websites which determines how all your pages rank in search engine results.

Lastly, when you get a writing assignment in an industry publication, make sure to promote the article on your own website and social media channels. The news alone, that your article is going to appear in these contexts, is itself an added validator to your industry expertise.

Writing content takes discipline. But it pays dividends. It increasingly performs for you as you build up a content library, but it also opens up doors that can expand your reach. A well executed and maintained content strategy is a gift that keeps on giving.

Until next week: don’t let the business of creativity overwhelm your creative business.