Every freelancer needs a website, no matter your specialty.

A website gives you a way to provide information to interested parties that are searching for your services online. However, a website launch can be both expensive and time-consuming, which is why some freelancers shy away from it. Fortunately, there are options for creating a free website and you can get it launched in less than a day!

This is where WebStartToday.com comes into play. It is an amazingly simple site builder tool specifically designed for freelancers and business owners with little technical experience. The process of launching a website with WebStartToday is intuitive. The other great benefit is that they allow you a free website for an entire year (with the domain name of yourbusinessname.webstarttoday.com).

For those of you who would like to give WebStartToday a try, use this tutorial for tips on how best to go through the process for creating your own freelance website in less than a day. Continue Reading

For freelancers, especially those just starting out, it can be difficult to find the time and money needed to launch your website.

Many, in fact, simply opt to use social media sites in place of a website in the beginning of their career. This can be quite detrimental to a small startup, however, and end up causing your career to grow more slowly than necessary.

A dedicated website shows prospects that you are serious about your business – that you believe in yourself as a viable resource. A website adds legitimacy to your freelance work; without it prospects may turn away, scared you may be just another scam artist. Also, a website makes it easier for would-be clients to find you on the web.

You may already know just how important a website is, and your only drawback is that your budget cannot afford to hire a professional web developer. Or maybe you know a little about web design and development but simply do not have the time to put together your own site.

This article helps to solve all of these problems for you with step-by-step instructions on launching your own freelance website in a single day – or less – by gathering the right supplies and using a site builder.

So set aside a day, and be prepared to complete your website launch by the end of this article. Keep in mind that even those of you who have no technical experience at all can still easily walk through these freelance tips in a matter of hours.
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One of the most common struggles in freelancing is making sure that you get paid enough for your time and effort for every project. Determining the right price for the job can be a difficult assessment to make. As a result, we freelancers have to be stingy in offering discount prices.

In fact, you may be wondering why you would ever want to offer discount pricing, and you may be right.

If you are backed up for months on projects to complete, then you probably do not need to offer a price discount. And sometimes being too quick to take up a project for a lower price can hurt the perceived quality of your work. Some clients would rather go with a higher priced freelancer than a lower priced one simply because they believe the quality of work to be better.

Yet, there are times when you may need to turn to discounts to bring in more work. When you do offer discounts, you want to make sure your approach benefits your freelance business. Continue Reading

Are you having trouble balancing your project time and pay?

As a freelance writer, I have a horrible tendency to spend way too much time on a single writing project. I’m a bit of a perfectionist, so I often catch myself still editing long after I should have finished. Simply put, most freelance writing rates simply do not allow room for this extra time. I have to learn how to write faster or be comfortable with my longer pay to time ratio on a given writing task.

Those of you in freelance journalism, and other freelance writing gigs, need to write faster without losing quality. After all, there’s no point in learning how to write faster if you can’t provide the quality of work that real writing jobs require.

The following 10 tips are an expansion of Leo Babauta’s list of ways to crank out articles. Hopefully between Leo and me, you will find which methods work for you in improving both the speed and quality of your writing. It’s time to earn more as freelance writers. Continue Reading

Search engine optimization, better known as SEO, involves more than just integrating your freelance blog or website with keywords and building up links that point back to your site. While a searchable website or portfolio is certainly a bonus, it’s actually not a huge factor in helping you build up your freelance business.

Your connections are your best asset in building your business, and the best way to build up connections is by increasing your visibility and popularity on the web, even if you don’t have a professional keyword-rich website.

The main function of SEO practices is to help search engines find you and rank you accordingly. However, a very important side function of SEO is building up your network. If you build up the amount of links that point to your site, then you are more likely to be seen by a wider audience. Continue Reading

My personal experience as a freelancer so far has included lots of juggling kids, errands, running a household, family and friends who think you don’t need to work during the day, and – as a result – trying to get some bits of work done here and there. My iPhone has been my saving grace in the last couple of years. I can easily check and send emails, keep up with social media news, even make edits to documents in Drive using my Google mobile app.

However, I have found that one of the best ways to take advantage of my time – while waiting in the drive-thru line, waiting for an appt., or watching my kids at sports events – is to get some social media marketing done. This helps with efficiency when I am sitting down at my computer trying to get some writing done – I can easily tell myself that I do not need to get onto Twitter or Google+ because I just updated them earlier while sitting at the doctor’s office.

The following are some very cool apps for getting your social media marketing done while on the go. Continue Reading

Content marketing grew in popularity among marketers last year, and this year it promises to be one of the top online marketing strategies. As a freelancer, starting a blog to help promote your business is one of the best ways that you can set yourself apart, increase exposure, build relationships and trust, increase page rank, build backlinks, and boost traffic.

Even if your writing skills are slim to none, a blog as an internet marketing tool is so powerful that it’s simply one strategy that you really can’t avoid as a freelancer. The good news? You don’t have to know perfect English nor know how to put together a complete sentence with perfect grammar to establish a popular niche marketing blog.

In fact, you can actually build one of the best marketing blogs in your industry without ever writing a single sentence. You just need to know where to find the right resources and how to best take advantage of these resources to create a killer blog marketing strategy. Of course, your freelance blog won’t just grow overnight, but follow the right steps and it will steadly become one of the most valuable online marketing tools you build. Continue Reading

All freelancers come to a point in their career where they have to promote their business or else slowly become non-existent.

It’s a potential problem though, when we come to this point and do not have enough capital base to spend on costly marketing campaigns. This is why social media is such a valuable tool for freelancers, it’s effective and affordable.

Social media statistics of 2012 point to this theory – that social media is a major promotional avenue for many companies within many industries, and I would add especially for freelancers. The following are just a few of the most important social media facts that I noted, including guidelines on how you can take advantage of them. Continue Reading

Freelancing is all about networking, and surprisingly networking extends beyond just people. How? The Internet can organically drive traffic to your site. That’s why you need to be link building or backlinking – the art and science of getting other sites to link to you.

But you can do yourself more harm than good if you don’t know what you’re doing. Search engines like Google are very sensitive to the links that point back to your site. So how can you make sure every link you get is helping and not hurting? Make sure to focus on the right link building strategies and avoid those that will harm your website. Continue Reading

As a freelancer, I often forget that there are valuable books out there in addition to all of the online reading I do. Recently, though, I’ve taken back up the art of reading a book, rather than just blog posts. And I’ve found a world of knowledge I had been sorely missing.

The following list of 15 freelance business books are ones that I would recommend for any freelancer to own. A few are industry specific, but most are ones that freelancers in any field can benefit from, whether you’re a graphic designer, freelance writer, or specialize in another niche.

The range in the topics below include general business advice, freelance lifestyle advice, marketing advice, and more. I have to admit that I haven’t read all of these, but the ones that I have not personally read come with the highest recommendations.

It’s time to fill your Kindle (or favorite E-reader) with top-notch freelance books. Continue Reading

Freelance graphic designers and web designers often have to get creative with their marketing efforts. Sometimes the budget simply does not allow for outsourcing.

Even more so, freelance graphic designers simply do not have enough time to spend on marketing. This is why social media is such an excellent method of marketing for freelancers – social media is free and can be updated regularly without a huge, initial time commitment.

For freelancers in the graphic or web design fields, Pinterest is just as important as Twitter or Facebook, or even more so, simply because of the nature of the site. In fact, it is now considered the third largest social media platform online.

Pinterest users search sometimes hours a day for inspiration, crafts, blog articles, and much more. When they find something they like, they repin it. This means that all of their friends can see this new pin and repin it too. Images and graphics are very popular on Pinterest, hence the connection with graphic design. You can almost think of Pinterest as a freelance graphic design resume of sorts.

While you may not have yet jumped on the Pinterest craze, as a graphic designer you may want to seriously consider getting involved. To make the most of your Pinterest marketing efforts, you’ll want to take some necessary steps for ensuring success.

The following is a complete guide to marketing on Pinterest for freelance graphic designers. However, with a little focus, any freelancer can benefit from the 14 points that follow. Continue Reading

As we approach the end of the year, it’s a good time to begin thinking about next year’s goals for your freelance business.

Maybe you’ve played your freelance marketing strategy loose so far in your freelancing business. Or maybe you have put together a roughly functional marketing plan in the past but want to improve upon those past efforts.

No matter your level of business marketing skills, building an effective marketing plan for the upcoming year is doable. It is also highly recommended as it will help you with your budget, marketing methods of choice, and results. Plus, you will feel much more confident and organized in your marketing efforts with a set of guidelines in place. Continue Reading