30-Day Marketing Challenge: Terms of Engagement

Let's just assume that marketing is about both selling the stories you'd love to cover and maximizing your income.

To those ends, we'll be covering ways to make passive income and also ways to make marketing a regular part of your workweek. Some of this, I'll be learning along with you. In other posts, I'll be sharing what's worked to increase my income by 24 percent in 2008.

And finally, an offer: Let's do a literal marketing challenge. Here's my proposal:

Every Sunday, I'll create a post asking you to comment with the number of marketing efforts you made, including:

• Letters of Introduction
• Queries
• Pings or Soft Touches
• Follow ups
  
• Meetings where you pitched an editor in person.
• Phone pitches
• Launching a Web site

Keep track, because if you're the winner, I'll ask you to send a list of who you queried, etc., for a modicum of fact-checking. At the end of the 30 days, the person who reported the highest number of marketing efforts will win a one-hour consultation with me. You see, this year, I'm formalizing what I've been doing casually for a few years: Freelance business consulting. I'll share my organizational, marketing, business plan, serenity and other expertise, and if I don't know the answer, I'll find someone who does.

Deal?

So what are you marketing today?