Elizabeth Hanes 0:07
Welcome to The RN2writer Show where we help nurses and other clinicians become freelance writers. I'm your host, Elizabeth Hanes. I'm a nurse and a former six figure freelancer. And today I coach people like you on techniques and strategies that help you thrive in your writing career too. Before I get started, don't forget to expand that description box on YouTube for a list of all the resources I'm going to mention in this episode. So let's talk social media. Do you love it? Are you an ardent Instagram fan? Or maybe you follow your fave celebs on Tik Tok? Or do you hate social media? Do you stay the hell off Tik Tok hate YouTube and find the thought of needing to join Twitter alarming. If you're a social media hater, I have great news for you. You can succeed perfectly well as a freelance writer without being on a single social media channel. Take a moment to digest that because I realize it goes against the grain of everything you've probably read or that people have told you that says writers today have to be on social media. You have to be on there to market your services. No business can survive without being on social media. And basically one of the first things you need to do when you start a business is set up all your social media accounts. I mean, it's a given right? The moment you tell anyone you're starting a business, one of the first things they say to you is have you set your Facebook page up yet? Well, I'm telling you, that's all rubbish. Okay, let me back off a little and say it's mostly rubbish. I do believe you can enhance your brand by being uncertain social media channels. But you certainly don't have to be on all of them. And you don't have to be on any of them if you don't want to. In fact, I will go out on a limb and say that I think one of the biggest mistakes new freelance writers make is setting up social profiles on every platform, and investing tons of time and energy into their social media presence, with no plan in place whatsoever regarding what they hope to accomplish. By doing that. Now, get your pencil ready, because I'm going to lay some bonafide freelance coaching on you right now. This is the exact kind of stuff we teach in our get paid well to write program. So here goes. As a business owner, you need to market your business. But you should never engage in a marketing initiative without first having a plan in place to guide what you want to accomplish. This principle applies to social media, your website queries, letters of introduction, and any kind of marketing you want to engage in. Without having a goal in place to guide your participation in social media, you are simply wasting your time. If you have no plan for your social media, you are simply playing with a shiny object. The opportunity cost here is massive. If you don't understand the term opportunity cost, I'm going to ask you to check out our episode titled The Hidden Costs of writing gig newsletter subscriptions for an explanation of what that means. But back to social media. Honestly, if you have not created a social media marketing plan, then I strongly advise you not to invest any time in social media, until you figure out what specifically you want to accomplish with it. But I wouldn't leave you hanging with just that. Let's work through this issue together. So you can come away from this episode with an understanding of how to create a social media plan that's worth investing your time in. Any good marketing plan starts with a goal. I'm going to suggest to you that a good goal for a freelance writer is one new client. This is the easiest goal to start with no matter what stage you're at in your career. So our goal is one new client. This is an important piece of data because it's going to drive our first decision which is what social media channels should I be on to accomplish that goal. Getting clients requires what I call fishing where the fish are. So ask yourself, Where do my target clients hang out online? Do we think that editors are trolling Facebook business pages to search for freelance writers? I'm guessing not. Do we think content marketing directors are browsing Instagram looking for freelance writers? Again, I'm thinking not. I don't know this for a fact. But it feels unlikely to me. I don't think that editors who are actively looking for freelance writers are first going to try to wade through Facebook and Instagram to find someone. So I would say we can cross Facebook business pages and Instagram off our list right away as places to invest our time in marketing our business as writers. On the other hand, a lot of these folks likely do seek out writers on LinkedIn. That seems like a very likely place to accomplish our goal of one new client. So maybe in my social media marketing plan, under my goal, I add an action step labeled participate on LinkedIn. The next questions will be in what ways? Should I participate on LinkedIn? Like, should I simply connect with people? Should I join groups? Should I write posts every day? Should I publish articles instead of posts? And if so how frequently should I do that? At this point, I need to tell you, there is no right or wrong way to participate on LinkedIn. The reason you create a marketing plan is so that you can test various activities, gather data, and then periodically evaluate whether or not your approach is working. You also definitely can do some research into how freelance writers can best use LinkedIn. There are tons of resources available about this, including some from LinkedIn itself, that you can find with a simple Google search. Now the fun part of the marketing plan implementation. As the CEO of your business, you can decide how you want to implement your LinkedIn strategy. What activities do you want to engage in based on your goal of one new client? You can decide how you want to approach this. Choose specific activities, implement, implement them, gather data, evaluate the data, tweak your plan, re implement the plan, test some more, lather, rinse, repeat. By the way, does that process sound familiar at all? Does that process sound at all like, assess, diagnose, plan, implement evaluate? It should because honestly, a good marketing plan can totally follow the nursing process only applied to your business. Clever a as you participate on LinkedIn, or any social channel, continue to assess, revise and implement new strategies in your social media marketing plan as you go. And pretty soon that one new client might come knocking on your door. I hope I've succeeded in convincing you that a you do not have to participate in any social media if you don't want to, to be successful as a writer. And be that you must create at least a basic marketing strategy that outlines what you intend to accomplish by being on social media. If you do decide to promote your business that way. If you don't have a plan, then all of your time on social media is wasted. But if you do have a plan, then you can feel good about investing your time in a marketing initiative that should pay off. Thank you for joining me on this episode of The RN2writer Show. Don't forget to click the subscribe button here on YouTube so that you don't miss an episode. And hey, we have links to everything mentioned in this podcast in the show notes. You can find those on YouTube by expanding the description box. And if you prefer audio, please follow The RN2writer Show on Spotify or Apple podcasts. I'm your host Elizabeth hanes and until next time, keep pitching
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
