Professional Writing

Lesson 3: Market (and Market)

Vary Your Experience

Varying your writing experience offers numerous benefits. For starters, it aids you in actually having enough experience with the various writing forms to satisfy the needs of any business that knocks on your door. Your aim is to gain as much experience as possible, be it editing two-line company philosophies to writing best selling novels to writing corporate histories. This will hopefully allow you to combine ideas so you can soon live off your own business. And it will make updating your bio exciting!

As you've just learned, efficient marketing is the catalyst behind variation. You must train yourself in a potpourri of techniques to successfully market your work. Word programs like "Microsoft Works" provide writers with ready formats for the designing of business oriented gimmicks - newsletters and brochures, for example. The program even helps with direct marketing strategies via resume and cover letter formats. All these things equate to a number of learned tricks of the trade that are desirable in professional writers.

If you don't have a program like Microsoft Works, you may use colored or automatic fonts and shadings in word programs like Microsoft Word while using hard copy examples for guidance. Such examples might include free pamphlets and newsletters found in doctor's offices and grocery stores.

Read a career article in the current Writer's Digest. The article most likely reveals the life of a writer who started doing one thing and ended up doing another. Notice the different experiences of this person, and how they came to be a successful professional writer.

This will be you, as long as you use all mentioned ideas to fulfill the needs listed in the job markets found in your weekly/monthly resources.

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