Here’s a bit about me you might not know. About eight years ago now, I drove with my husband, son, parents, and cat from Iowa and a job as a desk clerk at a trucking company, to Pennsylvania and no job and no house of my own. It was an adventure for those first few months, but then I got a job. A desk clerk for a real estate company.
At first the jobs were very similar – photocopying, logging, miscellaneous et ceteras. Then, fortunately for me, my job description grew and developed into what it is now.
Marketing Goddess.
Okay, so that’s a little grand, but what I’m getting to is that I offer marketing materials and ideas for independent contractors trying to sell homes, and I’m good at it. I feel like if I decided to take the plunge into getting my own real estate license, I know exactly what I should do to develop my business.
But I don’t think I’ll ever make that plunge. The same thing that happened while I was working at the trucking company, seeing how the drivers’ lives were, has happened here. Sorry, not my cup of tea.
I sit at my desk, though, and I have all these ideas and opinions, and a lot of the time my agents aren’t willing to do what I suggest. I suppose it seems too radical in a delicate time where the environment and market is unstable. And when someone turns down one of my ideas, I think, “If I were a real estate agent, I would definitely do that.”
“IT” occurred to me in the past year. “IT” is that I am not all that different, as a writer, than these real estate agents I work with. I have a product that I want to sell independently, just like my agents do. I have ideas on how to market their services to the public – why can’t I apply some of my ideas the other way around?
I know how to do “IT”. I know how I would sell “IT”. I know that I can do “IT”, and that my ideas aren’t the ideas that anyone else would have (generally, I’m sure there are some similarities, but my stories aren’t anyone else’s).
And I thought maybe it would be good for me to share. I know I’m going to fight a bit against the opinion that the best marketing is writing more books, because once you have someone who likes what you’ve done, they want to read more by you, and why waste time with Facebook and Twitter and business cards and postcards and all that jazz? But I think there’s time for both. I think a person can churn out stories and still have a few moments for a bit of connecting to his or her audience.
So I’ll start sharing my ideas under this new category that didn’t really fit under any others that I had already established. I actually already have several, but I’ll try not to dump it out all at once.
Promise. 
