Own Brand Promotion

While writing may be what you want to do, it is by far and wide not the only thing you have to do. If you want your articles or books to be read you need clout. Writing a book or an article may be fun and it is certainly a lot of work. But no matter how well written your work is, it does need readers to come alive and bring you money. If no one reads your work, what you have to say will go unheard. It becomes, in fact, the sound in an empty wood. It may be there, but is it?

If you put out articles on a publisher's platform, then these publishers do take part of the work from you. They invest in the promotion of your writing. But it is still up to you to get the readers that your work deserves. The publishers only put in so much work and it is equal for all writers (a very democratic way of promotion). If you leave it at that, you are entirely reliant on search engines spitting up your work on top of their search results. Don't hold your breath that that will happen.

It is therefore up to you to put in the necessary work to elevate your writing over all the rest. Elevate everything that is, not only the content, the quality, but also the brand and the reliability. You will have to use as much imagination for your promotion as you use for your writing. Look upon it as a challenge to broaden your mind and understand your readership better. You just have to allow enough time for it besides your writing, budget it into your planning. If you run your own blog or sell your own book, your promotion work is even more important as you have to do it all on your own.

To do your promotions, you have social networks to work with. Use the ones you feel comfortable with. I use Facebook in a very limited way as it is not very good and tends to block my blogs for being offensive. Currently that is my history blog; search me what should be offensive about history. Let me put a rider to that; the Fascists were very touchy about getting out their invented history over the factual one.

My Twitter account does much better in promoting my stuff. I also have about 60 times more followers there than with my Facebook account. That would explain the better return, I suppose. And you have to be on it constantly. Search engines are suckers for activity. One way to guarantee daily activity is to link your Twitter account into you blog and keep on sending tweets. Every time you send a tweet, your blog projects activity and keeps the search engines happy.

The crux with those social networks is that you need a following again; if no one follows you, no one will see your tweets or your Facebook posts. We are back in the proverbial woods, so to speak. Feeling like a hamster in a wheel? Join the club.

Further reading
Use Pictures for Brand Recognition
Your Penname as a Brand
The Well-Fed Writer