Putting yourself about a bit: How to market your business services

This course is part of a series of evening courses for freelance journalists to learn and improve business skills that are an increasingly important part of life as a freelancer. You can book a single evening training session or the four-week course. Details below.

A course for freelance journalists who want to learn how to market their services.

Course tutor: Steve Bustin
Date: 7 February 2013
Time: 18:00-21:00
Venue: Friends Meeting House, Euston.
Number of places: 10 max
Cost: £95 (+£19 VAT)
Four-week course: £300 (save £80) (+£60 VAT)

Many freelance journalists want to sell their services as copywriters, PRs or trainers to businesses but don’t know how to start. This course gives you the skills to market your business-related services easily, cheaply and effectively. Topics will include branding, networking, advertising, marketing materials, online activity and other ways to communicate your services to potential clients.

The course will cover:

Talking the language of business
Networking: How to do it, where to do it, who to talk to, who to avoid.
Branding: Developing a business brand for your services
Advertising: Should you do it and if so, where?
Directories: Which ones are worth paying to be in?
Print materials: What your business card and brochure say about you
Online: Do you need your own website?
Social media: can you really tweet your way to new clients?

Who should attend?

This course is suitable for anyone looking to market services to business. It does not cover sales techniques or promoting yourself as a journalist to editors. (If you’re interested in seeing the latter, click see details of this course for PRs.)

What you’ll get out of it:

By the end of the session you’ll have a basic marketing plan and have identified actions necessary to kick-start selling your services. You’ll understand how to network and how to talk to businesses in their own language.

This course is part of a four-week evening course for freelance journalists looking to expand their skills and services. It can be booked as an individual evening course or you can book the series - and save £80.

This series of four courses offers:

About Steve Bustin

Steve Bustin has been a freelance journalist for 10 years, following 7 years at the BBC.

Alongside his writing work, Steve runs a successful PR consultancy and training business (and keeps his editors happy) and has even performed as a stand-up comic.

Testimonials

"This was a really interesting evening. Steve Bustin is successfully pursuing a multi-stranded freelance career himself, so has great insight into what journalists are good at when in terms of additional career paths, and a great knack for conveying the essentials.

"As a journalist, it’s easy to end up feeling that writing is the only skill you have. Steve pointed out that after years in journalism, we all had a large range of skills that were in fact very transferable to other areas, and gave us a clear steer on where we could take our talents, and how to start doing just that." Alice Hart-Davis