Writers have to do marketing too. That’s the truth, no matter what model they publish through. We hate it, but there are prices to pay for being one of the cool kids.
We’re always told to write a blog—get on social media—start a news letter. I’ll deal with the pros and cons of those somewhere else.
Right now, I want to address the bigger puzzle: what sort of content should you put in your blog? Or your newsletter, or put through your social media channels. The answers all stem from the same place, so that’s what I’ll talk about.
In digital marketing, we call the material that you put into your advertising/marketing channels “content.” That only matters because it’ll be using it a lot. So now I have defined it.
When you build a marketing machine, you need a reliable way to generate content. You’ll need content on a regular basis, because of the marketing principle that a viable marketing machine carries on for a long time.
So here’s how to generate ideas for content. Answer these questions:
What do you think is cool?
What do you do well?
What do you want to do better?
Why are you writing stories? (an essential one)
You don’t need a single answer to any of those questions. In fact, you don’t want just one answer. You might come up with broad answers to those questions–like, what do you think is cool? Is it vintage movies? That’s a broad category, and that’s good for this.
See, a broad and big answer has hundreds of little answers inside of it—like, which period of vintage movies? What’s a social trend that I like about that? What’s with those clothes? What are my favorite examples in it?
What writers should blog about is what they think of as cool stuff. That's not a bad spot to build your personal brand.
That's what writers should blog about
To generate content, you start writing down every little particular question within those broader answers.
And when you find it a little bit of a struggle to think of more questions, google the subject and see what the internet is thinking about it right now.
Every single time one of those answers or questions sounds cool to you, every one of those questions is a blog subject. Start writing those.
That’s your blog.
The free tip at the end of this one:
Your newsletter items can totally be shortened blog posts. Just take the first paragraph from your blog and link back to your website to tell people to read the whole thing there.
Your social media posts can be even shorter ones.
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