How to Land Your Own Column
With
Mary Rose Remington – I use my column for five different reasons. This is what I get from my column. Number one, I get a steady source of income. What’s nice about that is, if you’ve done any freelancing out there, you know that you have to woo these editors and then you have to send a query, and then you have to follow-up, and you have to do all this work before you even get to write. Once you land it, it’s sort of like the lazy freelancers way to earn money. It’s steady, it’s reliable, you know how much is going to come in, a baseline if you’ve self syndicated, and then sort of over and above would be gravy. So number one is a steady source of income. For those of you who are entrepreneurs out there—I heard some guy speak that entrepreneur is French for “no money”—you know that it’s steady.
Number two, the reason that I write a column is I sell my books. I have one book that’s already published; it’s Career Quest, and I have a big, fat extended byline at the end of the piece that I’ve written, the column, that tells who I am, what I do, the name of my book, and where they can order it. That’s number two reason why to write a column.
Number three is, you can advertise any kind of consulting services that you do. I have never paid, in ten years of being in business, I’ve never paid one red cent for advertising. I get it free. I get paid to advertise, so how sweet is that?
Number four, a lot of you do public speaking and motivational speaking. What I know to be true is, people in any kind of marketing, which Dan will tell you, you have to get in front of the person in some way, over and over again, and they have to kind of learn who you are and what you do. I advertise that I’m a motivational speaker, refer them to my website, and then the gigs come in.
Number five is it’s a creative outlet for me. It’s sort of free therapy. I get to decide what I think about things while I’m writing, because that’s the whole point is they want your opinion, so in order to decide what your opinion is, you have to spend some time on it and write. It’s a creative outlet and it’s a thousand times easier than placing individual articles. Those are the five reasons that you should be writing a column—you get so much from it.
Dan Janal – I’m sure all of our listeners can find a couple of solutions there that apply directly to them. What are the steps that we need to take to get a column?
