As freelance writers, most of us blog as a way to generate traffic and showcase our own content. If that’s the case, your goal is probably to keep your readers coming back and recommending your work…right?
Like most of you, I was an avid blog reader long before I was a blog writer. Over the years, I have subscribed to hundreds of blogs. Some I stuck with and some I discarded along the way.
Marketing is not a task most writers look forward to. It is, however, a necessary evil.
I hear you groan at the thought already. It’s nice and safe behind your laptop. Getting out there is scary. But the importance of including networking in your marketing strategy cannot be stressed enough. To land clients and grow your business, you need to get out there.
It finally happened:
You landed a guest post on a very popular website. You don’t want to screw this up, so you take the next week to fine tune your piece.
You research extensively, make sure to link back to other popular posts on the blog and spend hours crafting the perfect headline.
Already have a LinkedIn profile? Good! Perfecting your LinkedIn profile is the first step to finding freelance clients through that network.
That’s not merely enough, though. With over 380 million users already on LinkedIn, you are in for a tough ride if you rely solely on your profile to land writing gigs.
How you handle yourself on the network and how you communicate with your connections is far more important for your success on LinkedIn.
Freelancing has taken off in a big way in the last few years and it is predicted that by 2020 more than 40% of the US workforce will consist of part-time or freelance workers.
Certainly, the US (and to some extent the UK as well) dominates the freelance industry and making a success of a freelance writing career is much easier if you are based in the US or UK.
For the rest of us international writers, it’s a lot more challenging. We face challenges US and UK-based writers do not have to contend with.
As you learn more and more about being a successful freelance writer, you may come across advice about displaying your client testimonials. They’re labeled as “important” for your business, but how do you actually get them? And why are they so important in the first place?
Client testimonials are important for a host of reasons. Most of these reasons boil down to things like “marketing.” Here’s what that looks like –
So you don’t want to spend hours upon hours drafting up query letters, pouring your heart and soul into a relatively short email, just for an editor of a publication to turn you down, or worse – not even give you the time of day.
I’ve been there and, after being ignored over and over again, I decided I needed to make a change.
I didn’t even want to write for magazines, so what was I doing pitching to them? I set out to research what my other opportunities were as a freelance writer if I didn’t want to write for publications.
You read different freelance writing sites hoping to get the scoop on becoming a freelance writer.
But, after reading a couple posts, you come across terms you don’t know or never heard of. Clips? B2B? LOI?
You decide this is too much and give up before really giving freelance writing a shot. Well, let’s hope that doesn’t happen to you! There are many things to learn as a new freelance writer and blogger and one of them is the Letter of Introduction.
