I’m in the process of entering a new market and am writing a book in the niche relating to leadership development and having it commercially published, rather than self-published as part of my initial marketing strategy. This is an extremely resource/time intensive approach. But at least I get help on the marketing of the marketing approach – the publisher will play a part in promoting the book.
I have self-published books and ebooks as part of my offerings and marketing. This gives me greater control over time and format, but again, find this to be extremely time and resource demanding, especially when I am solely responsible for marketing the marketing approach itself – I have to market the ebooks/books!
Of course, I also have blogs. For small business entrepreneurship, I write in blogs like this one. I also keep blogs in other topical areas like healthcare and mental health. I also participate in many social network discussion groups, and many of my responses are the length of small articles.
So you can see how quickly all these writing activities suck up my time!
How do you efficiently build up a content-driven web presence when you feel like you have no time left?
1) You can re-purpose your content. This article you are reading started out as a discussion on another website.
This is a great way to save time and build your credibility online – but it can only work IF and ONLY IF the content is aligned with your audience expectations on your site. For example, if I talked about this on my mental health website, I would confuse my readers.
If you find that you cannot re-purpose a lot of what you share online for your blog that is meant to also build your online presence, then you need to ask yourself why you are spending so much time on diverging activities. Is it time to evaluate how you spend your time?
2) if you find that you have gained good visibility doing what you have done, to the point where you are turning away more business than you can handle – then keep doing what you are doing because it works!
There is no reason to “blog just because everyone and their grandma are blogging”. I used to blog prolifically, and I am talking about a dozen blogs. I even ran my own blog network. But it was time consuming, and I did not have a sound strategy of how I was going to generate returns on the time i was investing in writing. Now I barely / rarely blog – and when I do finally add a post – it is in my currently active areas of interest, like this one.
3) That said, my blogs collectively earn enough to pay the bills on a monthly basis, so I haven’t axed ALL of my blogs yet.
Again, if something is working for you and you don’t have to keep working at it to get it working for you – then you do not necessarily have to get rid of it unless you feel it is distracting your personal brand.
Of course, you can also keep a blog for personal reasons. I started my mental health website in 1998 when I was suffering from clinical depression. I no longer suffer from clinical depression but I keep this website because it is dear to me, and its presence continues to help a lot of people.
There are many ways to become efficient at writing as a strategy for branding yourself, but that is only the first step. Once you wrote it, you then have to still market your brand strategically.
What this means is that you need to be very careful about using written material as your marketing – and whether these end up requiring you to market your marketing if the marketing material happens to also be one of your products.
