How To Market Your Skills as a Freelance Writer
Writing can be a very personal endeavor for some people, which makes the thought of self-marketing your work to an unforgiving public, a tough one. If you’re freelancing as a business writer, it’s the lifeblood of your business. Your skills as writers make you uniquely qualified to craft creative marketing materials to sell yourself! There is nothing wrong with this.
Three Easy Core Marketing Activities You Should Do
If you’re just starting out freelancing, there are some easy marketing tasks you need to start with. These will help to get your name out there and show off your unique writer skills.
1) Guest Posting
You're probably thinking, "Why would I give away my work!” The answer is because it’s one of the fastest ways to get coveted, published, writing samples with a by-line and promote yourself at the same time. The by-line is usually two or three sentences with a link back to your website. This not only provides an avenue for content seekers to find and hire you, but it also provides you with SEO content for your website as well.
When searching for guest posting opportunities, look for high-quality, authority site opportunities within your niche. Don’t make the mistake of guest posting your content on a site that is totally unrelated to your niche. You will not draw much of an audience if you’re writing about Political Correctness in Human Resources on a jewelry shopping site. No one would take you seriously.
When you are posting your articles on well-respected sites in your niche, it brands you as an expert.
Don’t feel you have to have just one perfect niche. Write for several niches to show potential clients how versatile you are.
2) Start a Blog
Blogging can really get your freelancing business off the ground, especially if you’re a brand-spanking-new writer. There are plenty of benefits to having your own blog. Blogging is a marketing tactic for freelancers that shows off your writing skills and knowledge in your niche. Think of it as an expanded version of your portfolio. You get to showcase what’s important to you, show off your stellar writing skills, educate the public, and attract clients, all in one go.
Another benefit is the web page ranking factor. When you consider SEO in your writing and web pages, you can rank higher in the search engine results pages (SERPs) resulting in higher visibility to potential clients. As long as your blog is current and active, a client is more likely to visit your contact page for potential jobs.
Tips:
- Create eye-catching, SEO-friendly headlines to draw your audience in.
- Be creative and engaging.
- Use a logical structure to make it easy to read and crawlers to scan.
- Always have a contact page and frequent “hire me” buttons everywhere, linking to it.
- Let your readers know you’re for hire by using your two or three-sentence by-lines on all of your posts.
3) Create a Social Media Presence
All business owners know today you must have a social media presence for several reasons. Not only do you need to build up an interested core group of potential clients, but target audience engagement is a necessity to the SEO of your website.
How that works is, when you post an item on social media, you use targeted keywords in your posts that relate to the article you’re posting about.
The more likes, shares, mentions, and retweets you get, creates “social signals” that push your post higher in the search engines. Social media sites are considered “authority sites” and all those social signals will add up telling the search engine that this post is valuable and pushing the post higher in the search engines. It follows then that if your post is linking to a resource on your website, this then gives that resource some added SEO juice for your website, giving it an extra bump up in the search engines as well. All this makes you more visible to potential clients.
Tips:
- When managing more than one platform, it might be easiest and leave more time for your writing if you use a service like Hootsuite to manage your posts.
- Be consistent in posting. You might schedule your posts ahead of time to keep your writing time free.
- Be sure to post and tweet about your latest blog post.
- Share useful info or other people’s blog posts that may interest your readers.
- Give shout-outs to other writers and businesses that impress you.
Conclusion
A little investment in yourself by guest blogging, creating a blog, and posting to social media will have short- and long-term results for your writing business if you’re consistent. These steps take some time, but these steps not taken will leave your writing as a hobby and not a true business venture.
Need help? You can always apply to be a Scripted writer where we do the marketing for you. You set your own fees and work at a pace that feels comfortable for you. Join our writing community and only apply for the jobs that appeal to you!
