Unlike a sales pitch, the marketing plan is a back-office document that outlines the following:

• Introduction to your product
• Features and Benefits
• Unique Selling Proposition (USP)
• Target Demographic
• Market Analysis
• Competition
• Marketing

Introduction

Briefly describe your product. What is it? How does it work? What are the components? If it has a trendy angle, like being “green”, mention it here.

Features and Benefits

List the features of your product. If it’s an e-book or course, list the chapters or outline. Now, tell us how each of these areas can benefit a buyer. What do they stand to gain from purchasing your product or service?

USP

What’s so special about your product? Why should a consumer choose yours over any one of the myriad choices out there? For example, if you are teaching a PR course, and you come from a strong PR background, including having won awards or got a candidate elected, mention this here.

Target Demographic

Who are you aiming to sell this to? Will it be yummy mummies or hipsters? Students or established entrepreneurs? Stockbrokers or recent grads? Knowing who your ideal customer really is and how he thinks is key to being able to pitch to him. Get inside his mind. List his hobbies, his income, his leisure spending. Knowing how he speaks is also a great way to know what keywords he will use to search for a product like yours.

Market Analysis

Find out how much money people are spending on products similar to yours. For example, the weight loss industry is worth over $6B every year. If you are pitching a new pill or diet plan, you need to outline how much money is out there for the taking. Then expand: Gym memberships, exercise DVDs, membership sites… these are all related to the weight loss industry in some way. Include this information.

Competition

Direct and indirect. If you are selling a diet, other diets (Atkins, South Beach etc) are direct competition. Membership sites (Biggest Loser, Self.com etc) are indirect competition. List them all in order of popularity.

Marketing

This can be broken up into many subheadings, depending on the scope of your marketing. This is where you list your overall marketing budget, and break it up accordingly (a pie chart can really help). Subheadings might include Online Marketing (website), Social Media, Event Sponsorship, Contests and Give-aways, and Traditional Advertising.

Especially in your initial drafts, be as detailed as possible. Brainstorm. List everything that comes to mind. Nothing is too far fetched or too distantly related in the initial stage. Then use subsequent drafts to narrow down your playing field and target your exact niche.

How To Deal When You Want To Have Sex With A Client

No idea. But let me know if you come up with anything.

Moving on.

Coffee aaallll over my keyboard. Now that’s a headline guaranteed to draw traffic.

Anyway, it was a Thursday afternoon around 2 o’clock. The bookstore was full. It wasn’t a deep downtown mall location – I live uptown. The high schools hadn’t let out yet by that hour. And the people in the store weren’t just browsing to stay out of the cold, either. There was a line at the till.

What is driving all these people to spend their scarce dollars on books and magazines?

Hope.

President Obama does not hold the trademark on hope. Biz books on managing finances and starting a home based business are flying off the shelves. Books about investing and recovering your investments are gaining popularity.

Books from the bookstore are expensive, yet people are still buying books en masse. Think about that from an internet perspective… If you are marketing e-books with this same investing and home business information, you are selling them for probably half the price of a book from Indigo or Barnes & Noble, and you are getting more profits on each sale than you would be if you sold your book in a bookstore.

Day after day people are scouring the internet looking for jobs, business ideas and most of all hope. Is your marketing in line with today’s needs?

That said, the climate, the environment and Global Warming™ are big business. Al Gore won and Oscar and a Nobel Prize in the same year, for heaven’s sake! Eco-fear, like other marketing, is a multi-billion-dollar industry. And what do freelance writers do? They write marketing copy!

Fear sells. If you can write copy that a) scares the hell out of people, b) makes them feel insanely guilty and then c) tells them how they can alleviate the guilt and sleep better at night, you are going to make a mint.

One of the first (and one of the best) copy writing jobs I had was for a company that provides an environmentally safe and efficient way to clean up oil spills. I was like a kid in a candy store writing copy for that. Big Oil™, that much maligned boogeyman, has a lot to atone for. What better way to atone than by using a clean bio-fuel source to clean up their nasty fossil fuel messes? (as an interesting aside, the company also sells a private-label version of their product to the Israeli military and police for cleaning up blood in bomb blast zones. seriously.) By tossing the “green” label around for this product, the business increased sales. And by purchasing the product, companies could say they were doing something positive and responsible for the environment.

It’s a win-win.

Going in, I didn’t know a thing about the product or its environmental benefits. What I did know is what I said earlier: Fear sells. So I began there and fleshed out page after page of glorious marketing prose. As I reviewed company documentation, I also saw there was a cost-benefit to the product, too. That way, the rare person (such as myself) who doesn’t self-flagellate daily over the destruction of the yellow-breasted-tit nesting habitat could still see the benefit in purchasing product from this company.

Whatever your writing niche – be it medical or cosmetics or coupon clipping – find a way to slap a green label on it and you will generate more income. And somewhere out there, you’ll be helping an anxiety-ridden person sleep better. How cool is that?

No paper was used in the writing of this blog post. This story is 100% recycled, as I told it at a dinner party last month.

Have I bought it? No, not yet. Trying to scrape up the dosh.

Do I want it? Hells yeah! Who wouldn’t? She practically sitting there doing the work for you, all you have to do is tune in to watch it happen.

The idea is Naomi takes her experience in web writing, marketing and consulting, and walks you step by step through it. Like learning the Colonel’s 11 secret ingredients. And the guarantee she’s offering is supreme: If you aren’t making money, she’ll either refund you or personally coach you. I would take the coaching, no question.

Off to go count the pennies in my piggy bank…

When I was a child I dreamed of being a writer, of not having to leave the house on rainy days (like today), of being able to move around and not have to switch careers mid-stream. Now I’m finally doing it. However, it meant leaving a $45,000-a-year lifestyle. No, it’s not a lot, but it was more than enough for me.

Now I have to learn to work my freelancing model so that I can start earning the same amount again. I’m hopeful. My first month I made $130. The second and third months I made $50 combined. This month’s earnings will be over $500! I have made good contacts and been given repeat assignments. I am building a good base for myself. I am marketing my skills as a freelance writer.

I still have so much to learn, but as it turns out I know much more than I thought I did. The years of blogging for free are finally paying off – now I can blog for money, too! I spend a lot of time reading articles by other freelancers who have been at this way longer than me, too. And books! Lots of books! I’m a member of MediaBistro, where the higher end jobs are posted. They have a book I will be ordering, Get a Freelance Life.

Another one I want is My So-Called Freelance Life. The table of contents makes it not only seem informative, but it is written in the easy-going style I appreciate. Not for me the collegiate texts of yore! In fact, the opening section is called “You fled the cube – now what?” How perfect is that?