Creative Marketing? Whut?

This post is a part of the Double Your Followers blog tour to spread the word about April Bowles-Olin’s upcoming CreativeLive course. Does hearing the word ‘marketing’ make your armpits start to drip with anxiety? Are you terrified of sounding salesy or like you have the personality of a dead blowfish? If so, come join me and 2,500+ entrepreneurs who’re taking April’s latest CreativeLive course, Double Your Followers with Creative Marketing. You can RSVP and watch for FREE. Yep, free. High fives, wildflowers, wine samples. Who doesn’t love free?

As part of the blog tour, I’m supposed to blog about one of these topics: a) What I’d love to learn from April’s upcoming course, Double Your Followers with Creative Marketing b) My biggest marketing struggle(s), or c) My most successful marketing strategy to date (examples: hosting an Instagram challenge or guest posting on a popular blog) and why I think it worked so well.

I’m just going to talk a little bit about the “marketing strategies” I’ve done before and what I’d love to learn from the course. This post may come off disorganized and unfocused – which kind of reflects what I’m about these days – but I guess it’s more for my own benefit. Sometimes laying out things helps me get to what I really need to pay attention to. I will try to make this post easy on the eyes though – I also hate long rambling posts! – so please bear with me, okay? ;)

My experience (or lack thereof) with marketing (creative or not)

I’m a freelance writer but I’m not really actively doing any marketing work to get clients. I tried to do that when I first started freelancing. I created a new landing page that had my CV, contact info and a link to my blog (this one). I tried to write more freelance work related posts and even created a mini ebook about freelancing that I gave for free to email subscribers. It was fine. I don’t think the webpage, the freelance posts, and the ebook really raked in hundreds of followers, but they helped me work on my new “freelance writer” identity.

What brought in Twitter and blog followers

I did gain more Twitter followers from my work as a freelance writer. I landed a writing gig that gave me my own byline and that brought a lot of new folks to my Twitter profile and many of them started following me on Twitter. Imagine that.

When it comes to blog followers, what helped increase the number of my blog followers was my participation in bookish blog events. Around the same time I became a freelancer, I also decided to become a book blogger – which just means I began blogging about books more often than I used to and I joined blog tours, book blasts and giveaway hops. I became a member of the bookish online community and that helped bring in new blog followers and friends.

Basically that sums up what little experience I have in ‘marketing’. I gained followers by getting in on blog events and giveaways, but those were not necessarily for my freelance work; and it was my work itself that got me connections that could potentially benefit me as a freelancer.

What’s up now and why I am excited about April’s course

I should say that at some point I fell into a major reading-blogging-writing rut several months back and I’m still kind of in a weird place right now. I pulled back on the bookish blog events, nixed my landing page and stopped trying to gain more followers. Instead, I’m focusing more (or trying to focus more) on getting back to a nice, smooth blogging/writing groove. At the moment I’ve decided to keep my slightly bookish blog as it is (meaning, more bookish and personal than ‘freelance-y‘ in terms of content) and I’m still trying to figure out my next move as a freelancer.

So this is why I’ve decided to sign up for April Bowles-Olin’s course. I’m hoping to learn more about what creative marketing entails and learn ways to be more active marketing-wise. I would also love to be inspired to improve on my blog and use it more to help me with my freelance work.

Are you as lost or clueless as me? Are you having marketing issues or difficulties as well? Well, get on this course with us and let’s learn together! Check it out here: Double Your Followers with Creative Marketing. Hurry, friends!

Click on the image below to visit April Bowles-Olin’s website.