If I’ve learned anything at the AMWA conference, it’s that writers are not necessarily marketers. Perhaps more accurately, writers are not self-marketers. I’ve handed out a few dozen business cards and every person has commented on my tagline: “Clarifying complex ideas! That’s fantastic — how did you come up with that?”
Two words: Dyana Valentine.
I met Dyana last year at the first Creative Freelancer Conference. She was doing a session using her “Hello, I’m really good at” name tags. We used Dyana’s techniques to walk through what we did well. One was really good at creative lettering. Another was really good at puzzles. And in that exercise, I figured out how to boil all of my skills and experience down to three words. My elevator pitch went from a rambling, “Hi, I do both marketing and technical/medical writing for medical device, high tech and healthcare IT companies, everything from whitepapers and clinical abstracts to press releases and web copy,” to a simple, straightforward sentence that gets to the essence of what I do.
Hello, I’m Alisa, and I’m really good at clarifying complex ideas.
What are you really good at?