It doesn’t matter if you’re a freelance journalist, corporate ghostwriter, romance novelist, or free-verse poet, to build and maintain an income stream from your writing, you must proactively market your brand or service. The tools for doing so are always evolving. Twenty years ago, the key advice was to maintain a website and mailing list. Fast forward 10 years, and the purported must-have was an active blog. Now, the push is for social media.

Marketing eats up time that could otherwise be spent writing. And adopting new tools and abandoning the old doesn’t necessarily save time. Thankfully, an effective middle-ground exists.

Invest in online real estate, and make sure all roads lead home.

Paying for a domain, web hosting, and email marketing software is a wise investment.

“Email marketing is a core component of any digital marketing campaign and one of the least expensive, most effective ways to get your message out there,” Gadjo Sevilla wrote in PCMag’s “The Best Email Marketing Software.”

Why spend any money when you can use social media for free? Because “free” still comes at a cost.
Few social media platforms allow you to export a list of followers, so your connection to that audience is fleeting. It’s like reciting poetry from someone’s front lawn. The property owner can kick you off if he doesn’t like your poems, and the crowd will move on.

Author Katrina Shawver learned that the hard way. Her award-winning nonfiction book – Henry: A Polish Swimmer’s True Story of Friendship from Auschwitz to America – attracted a large international Facebook following. One day, Shawver posted a historical photo of Germany invading Poland in 1939. The tech giant’s algorithms flagged the post for “violating community standards,” despite its historical accuracy and relevance to Shawver’s work. Within weeks, Facebook shut down her author page.

“Facebook kicking me out was a wake-up call,” Shawver said. “Don’t take any social media for granted. Don’t expect it to be there tomorrow. Always drive people to your website.”

Social media can help you find the people who pay for writing – avid readers, website editors, anthology publishers, communications professionals. Maintaining a website and email list provides a dependable home for that writing audience and a reliable means of communicating with them long-term.

Maximize your reach with a presence on as many platforms as possible. For each one, create a landing page that entices followers to visit your website and sign up for emails. (This SmartBlogger post on effective email-list incentives has ideas.) Use landing-page analytics to see from where your audience migrates and to hone your social media activity.

Be consistent with messaging and efficient with time.

Actively post on only a couple of your favorite or most productive platforms, Shawver recommends. In the others, pin a post that says something like, “I’m on a Twitter hiatus to focus on writing my next book. Want to be the first to hear how it’s going? Subscribe to my newsletter!”

Use scheduling software to simplify your social media communications. Create messages at a time convenient to you, and schedule them to post at different times across multiple platforms. (Read a review of top software at Influencer Marketing Hub.)

Connect your website to all your accounts so blog posts are automatically shared.

Use a password manager. Access all your online accounts through one site with a master password to save time (and make your online data more secure in the process). (Read about password managers in PCWorld.)

No matter what your genre or publishing goals, investing time and resources to market your brand is the key to building and maintaining an income stream. If you’re strategic, you can efficiently leverage new tools to build upon time-tested ones.

NOTE:
Be wary of tying your writing income exclusively to free social media. You need solid real estate to ground your audience. (Image by Comfreak from Pixabay.)

BIO – Jessica McCann has earned a living as a freelance writer and editor for 30 years. She’s an award-winning novelist and creative nonfiction author. Sign up for her free email newsletter and monthly giveaway for readers and writers at https://jessicamccann.com/monthly-e-news-and-give-away/