Freelance marketers have one of the best jobs on the planet.

There’s a never-ending stream of exciting new projects to work on and clients to work with, and at the end of the day, your work is about helping business grow, which means a better livelihood for everyone involved. Not to mention that if you’re doing well, the money is really good, too!

In short, it’s rewarding, fulfilling, and very lucrative… a great gig if you can get it. So… how do you get it? Continue Reading

Nine out of ten freelancers will tell you that their biggest challenge is finding new customers.

And not just any customers – we’re talking about the good customers, the ones that really want to work with you, trust you to do a good job, listen to you, accept your guidance, and have a budget to pay for it all!

But finding customers like this isn’t easy, and that’s why so many freelancers find themselves pounding the pavement from networking event to networking event looking for their next lead.

And so they turn to the internet and blogosphere.

The promise seems to be that if you build a thriving online audience or community, you’ll have a never-ending stream of customers. So freelancers bite the bullet, add blogs to their websites, and work hard to update those blogs on a regular basis.

Except that most of those blogs have no readers, generate no business, and are nothing more than a giant, frustrating time-suck.

What are they missing? Continue Reading

Audience building is all the rage, and it’s hard to read a blog post that doesn’t mention social media or the importance of community.

But does it matter to freelancers?

You bet it does; an engaged and loyal audience means that you can work on the projects that you like working on best, and that you never have to worry about business, because there’s always more prospects waiting in the wings for you to have time to service them.

The question is, then, how do you do it? How do you build that engaged audience to begin with?

Keep reading, and I’ll tell you… Continue Reading

Finding customers is hard.

It’s hard for everyone, but especially for freelancers – they’ve got too much to do, not enough time in which to do it, and they’d much rather be doing what they do best than networking and prospecting for new business.

Which is why, once you’ve found a good customer, you can’t afford to lose them.

And yet, freelancers do – all the time.

Here’s why – and what you can do about it… Continue Reading

If you’re reading this, then you’re probably a writer.

And it’s probably occurred to you that since writing is what you do so well, you might as well turn your writing into a book, and get all the credibility, fame, and fortune that comes with it.

Well, credibility, anyways.

But the one thing holding you back has been a publisher – you don’t have one, and you don’t know how to get one.

Well, I’ve got news for you – even if you had a traditional publisher, it wouldn’t do you much good, and you will get the most mileage out of your work if you self-publish.

Here’s why… Continue Reading

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Would you spend $100 on your freelance business?

No, don’t think about it – what does your gut tell you?

When looking at purchases to grow your business, it’s an important question: would you spend $100?

Depending on your answer, you might find yourself throwing good money after bad chasing the next new approach for improving your freelance business. Or trying to grow a blog that will never get anywhere.

We all face this question. I do, and so do you.

The trouble is that the “right answer” might not be what you think it is. Three freelancers looking to grow their blogs faced the same question – let’s call them Charlie, Sam, and Will. Only one of them ended up being successful, and they had very different answers…

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“Should I work alone, or find a partner?”

There are some compelling reasons to find a partner: a complimentary skill-set, and an extra pair of eyes and hands, not to mention that it isn’t nearly as much fun to work alone.

On the other hand, there are some fairly compelling reasons NOT to find a partner: they get half of your business, you won’t always see eye to eye, and let’s face it, things can get messy.

So… what should you do? Is partnering a good idea?

I’ve been down both roads; I’ve started and run businesses on my own, and I’ve done it with partners. Of the businesses that did involve other people, some of those partnerships worked out, and some… well, not so much.

Let’s take a close look at the perils, pitfalls, and possibilities of partnering in this guide. We’ll extract from my experience and shed light on when to partner and when not to.

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Making information products is a way for freelancers to add another income stream to their business. It’s exciting to create your first product.

It starts with an idea – you realize that you’ve got some good information, and you think people would pay for it. So you choose a format for the product. Maybe it’s an e-book, or a video series, or an audio training program.

Then you outline the product, section by section. Then there’s content creation, design layout, and editing. And finally, promotion.

Many months and lots of late nights later, you’ve got a product all set and ready to go. You post about it on your blog, email your list, and ask your Twitter followers to take a look. And nothing happens. Nobody buys it. It turns out that you built the wrong product…

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