By Andrea Susan Glass
You’re a professional copyeditor. You’re in business. You need to let ideal clients know you’re in business. And one of the best ways to do that is to have a professional business website. If you don’t have one, then you’re not really in business!
Okay, so now that you took the time, energy, and money to create an awesome—or at least starter—website, how do you get people to find it? Well, that would be another whole post on the best marketing strategies and tactics. But the one I want to focus on here is blogging. Yes, blogging is an awesome way to enable ideal clients to find you.
It’s true that once they get to your website, you’ll need it to be engaging enough to have potential clients want to work with you. But again, building an incredible website is a topic for another detailed blog post.
First, let’s discuss what to blog about and why blogging is valuable to building your copyediting business. I recently discovered a site called www.answerthepublic.com. You insert a key phrase, something like “why you need a copyeditor”, and hundreds of questions pop up. If you click on “data” you can see the questions more clearly, and you can save these in an Excel spreadsheet. As an example, when I inserted this phrase, a few questions that showed up were “Why is copy editing important and what do copy editors do?” and “What’s the difference between copyediting and proofreading?”
These questions represent a compilation of what people ask about this topic. You could also access these questions by doing a Google search. The Answer the Public site limits you to a few searches per day, so Google is always available as another option.
What I’m proposing here is to research what people looking for copy editing services want to know, and use these questions and topics for your blog posts. When I used the term “writing a book,” 365 questions came up, enough for a daily blog post—if I wanted to blog every day!
So if you wanted to write a blog post on “Why is copy editing important and what do copy editors do?” I’m sure you could write at least two posts. To answer the question I posed earlier as to why blogging is important, it’s because your posts position you as an expert on your topic. It’s not enough to just be a stellar copy editor! You also need to let your prospects know you are. And blogging about topics that provide answers to the questions your prospects are asking is an ideal way to show up as the expert.
I know, most of us became copy editors because we have this great skill and we know people need it. We love what we do; however, we don’t love marketing quite as much. But with a blog, there’s not much marketing involved. Write your post, maybe 300 to 500 words, maybe one or two per month. Then go on your favorite social media platform—for me it’s LinkedIn—and write a quick sentence with a link to your blog post.
If you have a mailing list, you can also send out a few emails a month and include a link to your blog. I find this to be a simple, yet effective form of marketing. You now have a great source of topics, and you can even plot them out for the whole year. To mix it up, you could do interviews and site or book reviews. One more surprising use for your blog posts—after a year or so, you’ll have enough content if you want to write a book. That’s what I did with three years of blogging! Enjoy!
SD/PEN would love to have you contribute a blog post on our site on any aspect of copyediting. Send your post to andrea@writersway.com. And please post your comments below so we know what posts appeal to you and what topics you’d like to see here.
