Online Journalism News

Meet the Trainers: Guy Clapperton - Online marketing skills for freelancers

Journalism.co.uk has lined up a host of great trainers for our short courses covering social media, online marketing, podcasting, financial journalism and search engine optimisation for journalists and other communications professionals.

On July 8, Guy Clapperton, freelance journalist and author, takes our evening course on online marketing for freelancers, which focuses on how to make the right impression online and how to boost your profile as a journalist.

In the next in our series of interviews with the trainers, Journalism.co.uk asks Clapperton for his top tips on marketing yourself online:

What are your top tips for a freelancer looking to market themselves better online?
Allocate enough time to do it properly, and be aware that it's a marketing strategy like any other.

Spell your Tweets and Facebook updates properly - loads of people think they don't matter, well, they do. And when you put your website together, think about the reader rather than yourself.

Are their typical mistakes or bad examples of marketing that you come across?
So often I see websites that are unfocused - 'XX is a freelance journalist who has worked for the Penge Bungalows Advertisers and Wicker Basket Week, he started writing in 1990...' Ok, it's all true, but what does an editor get when they employ you? Do you handle corporate commissions? Tell me about this stuff.

If you're aiming at PR people, tell them about your specialisms up front so they can target you properly. So many journalist websites are all about what the journalist finds interesting about themselves - it's a business site, focus on the customer.

Why do journalists need to work on their online presence?
It's as much to do with making a statement as actually publicising yourself, to be honest. I had my first website in 1996; it was a single page and wasn't all that thrilling but as a tech journalist I felt I had to have 'something' up there to demonstrate that I knew the moves.

Likewise there are journalists out there who hate Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, all that stuff - but look at the coverage they've had; you can't afford to be seen backing away from these things and you need ideally to be seen as knowing the moves if not actually celebrating them.

Granted, within a few months of becoming active on Twitter I'd doubled the amount of media training I was getting and had secured a book commission on the subject, but that's not going to happen to everyone - it's more a matter of what's going to happen to your business when an editor can't find you and check up on clippings just by doing a quick Google on your name.

A full list of Journalism.co.uk's courses can be see on the training pages. For more information or to book a place, contact ed at journalism.co.uk.

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