Web whiz remembers Durban roots

Former Mercury advertising representative Paula Wynne, who became a best -selling author, award-winning online entrepreneur and popular UK keynote speaker, will arrive in South Africa today to speak at a book fair in Cape Town.

Wynne, who is now living in the UK, was born in Durban and worked for the then Natal Mercury in 1983.

“I started my career as an advertising receptionist and because I couldn’t sit still and was always a ‘busy body’ my boss at the time offered me a job as an advertising rep. I mostly worked in the Durban CBD and most of my clients were businesses in the area,” she said.

Wynne started by selling space in the Women’s Weekly supplement in the paper and then moved on to selling space for the main section.

When the Natal Mercury amalgamated with The Daily News and Sunday Tribune, she became a representative for all the titles and started work outside of the CBD, while completing courses at Damelin in Public Relations and Marketing Management.

“I loved my work as a rep for the newspapers. I used to sometimes walk out of the building and meet my clients. I have fantastic memories working in the print industry,” she said.

After working as a representative for the newspapers for 12 years, she worked as a public relations officer for Hyperama and the Berea Centre before moving to the UK, where she worked with various companies in London as a freelancer and wrote several novels.

In 2009 she wrote the best-selling book Create A Successful Website and, later, Pimp My Site.

Wynne has achieved renown as a public speaker by taking a show-and-tell approach, with each step explained in screenshots and illustrations, even for complete novices.

At her sessions she aims to educate those who attend, to teach them about how they can optimise their websites to become more successful in various spheres of business, and ensure that people who need services can find them easily on the web and from search engines.

“I taught myself most of what I know, I try to explain things without the jargon and in layman’s terms, because I understand the terminology, but many people don’t,” she said.

The Cape Town Book Fair has invited the South African-born author back to home shores to share her practical tips and insights with their audience.

Wynne will speak to agents and publishers on Friday based on the theme, “Sell more books – how to get authors to pimp their books”.

Later that day she will deliver her extremely popular UK talk entitled “Pimp your book – How to become Google’s No 1” and speak to authors, writers and self-published authors.

She will continue her address to business owners, start-ups, online entrepreneurs and authors at the weekend when she will be speaking on “How to promote your book to the media with free publicity” and how to “Create a successful writing platform”.

If you want to know more, visit Wynne’s website at the address http://www.paulawynne.com or you can follow her on Twitter http://twitter.com/paulawynne