Worry: Marketing | Write Uncaged

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Marketing Schmarketing!

It?s the portion of my writing life that I estimate will take a little bit of time, when in reality, it takes quite a bit. Mark B., you?ll understand soon enough, and I know Deb has walked the marketing path. And I?m fully confident all you MA-ers will be grappling with the marketing beast soon enough.

When my friends were raising support, they heard an interesting illustration. ?Raising support is like hunting for the thirty or so pieces of gravel that have been painted red on the backside. Your job? Start at the beginning of a gravel driveway, and start turning over rocks until you find them all.?

That feels like marketing to me. Or at least it did.

God provided a surprising way for me to hire a marketing mentor to help me sift through my marketing efforts. It?s been enlightening. Instead of turning over thousands of rocks, he?s helping me locate the red rocks strategically, thus saving me time. And a little sanity. Here are some things he?s helped me do:

• Develop a brand: Live Uncaged. This covers fiction and nonfiction.
• Encourage me to do a redesign on my website. Hop on over to http://www.marydemuth.com/ and tell me what you think.
• Help me develop products to sell on my site.
• Help me strategize places I can send articles to for free, in order to generate buzz.
• Encourage me to send out a snail mail newsletter to potential speaking venues.
• Inspire me to add to my email database.
• Help me form strategic alliances with ministries who might need my books. (Missions organizations in Europe for Authentic Parenting in a Postmodern Culture, Counseling entities for my novels, and several moms ministries for my conversation starters).
• For speaking: he?s helped me hone the way I speak, offering painful, but helpful critique on one of my speeches. I?m a much better speaker now, and hope to have a high quality recording of my speaking soon to give to potential speaking gigs.
• Coach me on effective radio techniques, including learning the beauty of sound bites, and tying in my topic to a giveaway on my website.
• Remind me to put my book cover and contact information on any free article I send out.
• Show me the importance of selling my books on my website. Before my new site was up, I created a paypal page on my blog to sell Authentic Parenting while the blog tour was going on. This gave us tangible numbers on the success of the tour, whereas, if we had relied on Amazon rankings, we wouldn?t really know how many we sold as a result of the tour.
• Probably the most important thing he did was help me come up with value statements; in other words, what kind of value do I bring to my listeners and readers. Here are a few to help you wrap your mind around what I mean. (And, hey, this took me a month to get my mind around it. Not easy at all.) I help people so fully heal from tragedy that others would never know the trauma had occurred. I help parents create a haven in their home so their kids are wildly enthusiastic about coming home every day. I help people approach God in such a way that they know His reality and His direct dealings every single day.

So I?m more strategic about my gravel turning these days. All this stuff has taken me months to accomplish, and I still feel like a neophyte. Two cool things happened in the midst of all this:

1. As I discovered what God had made me to do, and the life message He had given me, revival blew through my heart. I never thought I?d find more of Jesus in the midst of marketing. Wow.
2. Even though I?m working hard at finding those red rocks, I see God?s sovereign hand often in the way He finds rocks for me. I may be strategic now, but He is the Great Helper when it comes to marketing. Speaking gigs only He could orchestrate have fallen into my lap. Writing opportunities, too. I have found that trying to market myself on my own would be a futile, silly endeavor. Oh how I need Jesus! And even in all of my strategies and His sovereignty, I rest in the fact that He holds my career and ministry in His hands.

This is a long post, I know. But my prayer is that something inside it will be a help to you as you market yourself or your books and articles.

Source: http://www.writeuncaged.com/2012/07/worry-marketing/

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