SARAH Cruickshank is a Lancashire-based freelance journalist, who previously worked as a supply teacher, Sure Start project worker and in other education, arts administration, retail and housing jobs before becoming a full-time writer last year.
She writes about parenting, childcare, education, play and she says "anything else that grabs her interest" for print and online publications.
Here, she tells us about how building an online presence through a number of sites, has allowed her to reap the benefits of direct contact from useful sources and increased awareness about her specialism.
I SAT down to write this the other day and checked my email before I started (as you do), and there in my inbox was a commission offer from an editor. I emailed her back and – as I hadn’t done anything for her before – asked her where she’d found me? She told me that she was looking for some new writers, so had been flipping through other magazines and googling people. My website looked “very encouraging”, hence her email and an agreement for what I hope is the first of many articles.
I have to admit, I wasn’t too convinced about how useful having an online presence would be, but when I took the plunge into full-time freelance writing last year, I looked around at what other people had done and set up a site including some clippings, a CV and about my background and specialisms at www.sarahcruickshank.co.uk I guess people other than me look at it as its always in the first six hits on Google.
I’m 40 this year and a I started a related blog because I thought it would be cool to do 40 things before I was 40 (it wasn’t, but that’s another story!) This blog just had pretty random ramblings on it (not the best way to blog at all), but it bring me some writing work, thanks to a gorilla...
Yes, a gorilla.
We visited Blackpool Zoo and I took a picture of their Silverback, Jitu. I posted the picture on the blog with a write-up and thought no more about it. The marketing and PR Department have Google Alerts set to flag up stuff posted about the zoo and as a consequence of my blog post, they checked out the blog, saw I was a journalist specialising in education and childcare and flagged up to me in an email that they have a childcare facility on-site.
From this one photo on a now defunct blog, not even related to work, I managed to sell a feature to one of my regular magazines about childcare at the zoo and got a piece written about me in Writers’ News. This is the thing that really convinced me that a presence on the web is worthwhile.
To help push my specialism in home-based childcare, I set up a site at www.thehomecorner.co.uk to share articles and product reviews – I was getting quite a lot of contacts from PRs following a post on Gorkana and I didn’t really have an established market for shifting product reviews. So far, I haven’t made any money from this site, I’m still really working on the content and its only had a “soft launch”, I’ve not done any PR to promote it, but that’ll come over the next few months.
I spend about an hour a week keeping my sites and blogs updated, but I do it all myself using Apple’s iWeb software, so I’m not relying on having to get copy to someone who then has to find time to do it. I bought domain names and web hosting and worked out how to do all the uploading and stuff myself – its not hard.
The only way I’ve promoted my web presence so far is on my business cards and on email and web forum signatures, but it seems to have worked! I think as long as you keep your intended audience and focus in mind, and make sure you update at least two or three times a week for blogs and a couple of times a month for personal websites, you should be able to keep people up to speed with what you’re doing.
I’ve just started an e-newsletter to send out to editors and PRs to let them know what I’m working on in the months to come and I’m doing a weekly podcast of seasonal activities for thehomecorner. Its too early to tell if they’ll bring me any new projects, but I have high hopes!
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