By Daniel Scocco

To blog or not to blog, that is the question!

Could a blog be the right marketing tool? The blogging phenomenon is expanding rapidly. It would be difficult browse around the Internet for 30 minutes without crossing one. As a freelancer, however, would a blog represent a smart career move? In one word: absolutely! Below you’ll find five reasons why any freelancer should blog.

Grow your network

There is an old business saying that goes like this: “It is not about what you know but who you know.” As a freelancer, this is particularly true. The difference between getting big projects knocking at your door and having to hunt down for cents here and there might come from your network.

Ideally you want to have as many people as possible aware of your work. Better yet, you want this people to endorse your work and refer it to their friends.

What a better tool for that purpose than a blog? Some time ago websites would communicate unilaterally. The website owner would publish some information and the visitors would absorb it. That was quite unbalanced, and it was difficult for relationships to blossom along the way.

Blogs, on the other hand, have many features that make this communication bilateral. Readers are able to comment and interact directly with the author and with fellow readers. Other bloggers are also able to interact with the author, creating a vast web of relationships.

This structure makes blogs almost perfect networking tools.

Showcase your expertise

A blog is the perfect venue to showcase your expertise. Sure, a resume and a portfolio of past works are also important, but a blog can give you an edge over the competition.

Clients will be impressed if they see that you are able to produce quality work. But they will be even more impressed if they see that you actually teach other people how to do so, too.

Lets take a look at the Search Engine Optimization market, for instance. There are literally thousands of SEO consultants on the Internet. The vast majority have a website outlining the offered services. A few of them, however, have blogs where they share SEO principles, tactics and techniques.

The blogs that contain the most accurate and useful information end up becoming “authorities” of the niche. An average SEO consultant charges around $50 hourly. Aaron Wall, author of one of the most popular SEO blogs on the Internet, charges $500 hourly…

Generate a side revenue

While a blog will certainly help you make more money from freelance works, it might also produce a healthy side income.

An average blog attracting 1,000 unique visitors every day should be able to generate $1,000 monthly without problems. It might sound challenging to generate such traffic levels, but if you have expertise on your niche, people will want to read about it.

Focus on providing useful information and the readers will come. And don’t worry, you won’t need to stick flashy banners and annoying popup ads everywhere in order to make money. There are many monetization methods that will not compromise the user experience ( e.g., direct sponsors and relevant affiliate programs).

Test drive new projects

Companies around the world spend millions of dollars every year in market research, where they test new products and try to estimate how the customers would respond to it.

As a freelance worker you probably also have innovative ideas for products and projects, but unlike these companies you don’t have millions to spend in market research.

Fortunately you can use your blog to test drive these ideas. Suppose you are a freelance logo designer, but you would like to enter the “website design” segment. Instead of starting to offer website design services overnight you could create some free templates and share them through the blog.

This would enable you to collect people’s reactions before taking the decision of whether to invest time and money into this new venture or not.

Become visible in Google

French Philosopher Descartes once said “Cogito, ergo sum,” which means “I think, therefore I am.” If this statement will ever mutate it will be something along the lines of “Google, ergo sum.”

Like it or not, the majority of the Internet users find information via search engines, and the majority of the search queries is executed by Google. In the first quarter of 2007 Google carried more than 10 billion search queries in the U.S. alone!

In this sea of bits and bytes that we call the World Wide Web, how do you ensure that Google will be able to find you? The first step is to create a blog.

Search engines love blogs for several reasons. First of all blogs are dynamic content management systems, as opposed to static websites. Google gives preference to websites that are constantly being updated.

Secondly, most blogging platforms (Wordpress above all) have a very search engine friendly structure. This structure involves an efficient usage of meta tags, internal links and headers, which carry a lot of weight on the search algorithms.

Finally, it is much easier to attract backlinks with blogs than with traditional websites, and as you probably know, backlinks are the currency of search engines.

What are you waiting for? Get your blog up today!

Daniel Scocco is the author of Daily Blog Tips, a blog focused on web design, online marketing, SEO and monetization tips.