My editor has just walked out on me – can you help?
Customer acquisition is a topic all business owners are focused on – but for me the most profitable route to date is this, ‘my editor has just walked out on me – can you help?’.
The first was at a networking dinner, when after talking about my plans to work for myself – my neighbour said:
“My editor has just walked out on me – can you help?”
The project was an idea for a customer magazine. But when the freelance editor backed out, it looked dead and buried.
Until I came along.
From an initial meeting we brainstormed some ideas and I set to work.
Two years later and the fifth edition has just gone to the printers. The magazine has come on leaps and bounds since then – morphing from what was originally an extended sales letter idea into a fully-fledged customer and staff centric magazine.
How a Twitter post led to another successful project
The second was sparked by an exchange on Twitter which led to an invite to review a brochure.
In this case, the editor hadn’t left as such but there was a feeling among the in-house team that they hadn’t quite captured the brief, and they wanted a fresh set of eyes to have a look.
Here again I came in and stripped the brief down to its component parts and then with the help of a designer I work with, started the whole thing from scratch, getting the brochure into the hands of its target audience and hitting their deadline.
Winning work via LinkedIn – and another editor walkout
And the third was via a Linkedin connection when a commercial project was about to go south because the editorial team had backed out at the last moment.
After getting hold of the brief and calling on an old journalist colleague of mine (it needed a motoring expert) – we got it back on track, and in fact even over delivered as we located extra images for the project.
Now this may sound like an appalling way form of customer acquisition, and was probably not the way I expected to market my services to businesses and organisations – but hey, it’s incredibly effective, and if it means I can get the job done, then why not?
Developing a reputation as a ‘Fixer’
In some ways this plays to the strengths I’d developed during my 16-year career in the media industry as a ‘Fixer’.
Put simply, if somebody had a project that needed delivering or a ‘distressed asset’ that needed turning around, I was the person who got the call.
In football terms you would probably call this being a ‘utility player’, but whatever it was being the person who could come in and sort things out without any fuss, has been the hallmark of my career.
In fact, I’m pretty good at it.
Although at one point, I thought it did me more harm than good because whereas I was hoping to become a newspaper editor (yes, really), I felt I was being held back as I was too useful to my bosses for sorting out commercial projects – or in several cases, turning them round.
Now that I run my own business, I think that being given those tasks was probably the best thing which could have happened to me – even if it took me away from the newsroom (I’m an ex-journalist) and towards more commercially focused projects.
Here’s hoping for the next business whose editor has just walked out on them
So while I would hate for anybody to experience that feeling of dread when their editor walks out on them, it’s been a real boon for me in terms of my business.
And if it has happened to you…? Yep, I really can help.
The call to action bit: I’m looking to work with businesses or agencies with a publishing need, whether it’s creating bespoke content or articles, or training and mentoring their staff to build their own bank of content.
I also want to work with publishers who need to inject some fresh thinking or commercial savvy into their projects. If either of those sounds like you, or if your editor really has just walked out on you, then don’t hang about ring me on 07708 855 486.
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