Public speaking is hard: we’ve all heard that it’s the most common fear, above and beyond death. Everybody in the room is staring at you, which is enough to make most of us want to run.

There are some lucky people who seem to not experience that particular sensation or who even seem to be natural speakers, but for the majority of us, there are always steps to take that will make us steadier on stage.

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In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to land your very first speaking gig, before you have any experience speaking in public. It’s an approach that can get you more than just one speaking gig, so that you can get on your way to establishing a speaking career.

Come up with the perfect idea for your presentation, target your audience with your message, pitch your ideas to event organizers, utilize time-saving techniques, track responses, and get speeding towards touching down your first speaking gig. Continue Reading

Guest posting on blogs is a fantastic way to build brand recognition, establish yourself as a credible expert in your field, and drive traffic to your website.

Guest blogging champion Danny Iny bulit his Firepole Marketing business through the power of guest posting on popular blogs. I’ve established my name as a freelance writer through guest blogging. I’ve won regular writing gigs on a number of blogs, most of which started by pitching a guest post.

In this tutorial I’ll guide you step-by-step through the process of pitching a guest post to a blog. You can use this technique for pitching to any blog in any niche.

Even if you never plan to write a guest post, it’s worth learning how to pitch by email. Pitching, after all, is how you sell your services and expertise to clients. Continue Reading

One of the great benefits of social media is the ability to reach a large audience at little cost. Using the popular hashtag notation, you can spread your brand, take advantage of popular trends, and get your message out.

Hashtags are a great way to promote your business. Learn how hashtags work, as well as how to use popular tools to assist you with reaching your audience through social media. Continue Reading

Whenever a reader marks your email newsletter as spam, you’ve got problems. The better classes of email service providers keep track of how many times they’re told a particular email newsletter is spam. If the number gets too high, they’ll shut down that newsletter. There can even be legal repercussions for sending out newsletters that are considered spam — including a $16,000 penalty for each recipient of an individual piece of spam in the US.

If you’re publishing an email newsletter — for marketing purposes or otherwise — you need to make sure that you can minimize the chance it can be mistaken for spam. There will always be occasional marks against you, from people who don’t remember signing up for your newsletter or who just want to get it out of their inboxes quickly. But the more you can do to keep those problems to a minimum, the better.

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Once you’ve got a newsletter set up to bring you in new clients, you may start to think about what else you can do with the newsletter format to promote your freelance business. One of the options worth considering is sending a newsletter to the clients you’ve already landed.

The logic behind this is clear: if you’ve knocked the socks off of a client already, that company may be more than happy to work with you again. But you need to remind them that you are available and point out the services you offer, particularly beyond what you’ve already done. A newsletter can provide a useful reminder to past clients of your existence.

Of course, you have to be targeting a specific niche of clients if you really want to make sure that your newsletter is effective: it’s much harder to create a broad newsletter that appeals to every client who has ever hired you to design a website than just writing for those clients who operate ecommerce sites. When it comes to newsletters, narrow is good. Continue Reading

“How do I find work?” is one of the toughest questions freelancers face.

While there’s no magical work fairy to grant your wish for new clients, there are things you can do to make it more likely that potential clients find you and hire you. In today’s world, using social media effectively is a key component of this.

In this article, I show you how to use Google Plus to attract, seek out and engage with prospects. I also explain why Google Plus is the place to be – right now – if you want to stay ahead of the game with your online marketing.

Hold tight, it’s going to be an exciting ride! Continue Reading

If you’re a freelancer and you have a blog, you’re probably hoping your posts will impress clients and get them to hire you.

Unfortunately, most freelancer blogs don’t get so much as a nibble, much less a steady stream of clients.

If your blog has a nice clean design and you know how to write an interesting blog post, it’s time to look deeper at why your blog isn’t getting the results you want.

Here is my list of 12 different ways to get prospects subscribing to your blog — and keep them on your email list: Continue Reading

What’s the point of having a newsletter if it doesn’t provide you with paying clients? It takes a lot of work to put together a newsletter regularly, as well as to make people aware that it exists. Unless you’ve got prospects coming from your newsletter, it’s not going to pay for itself.

There are some people who will argue that even if an email newsletter isn’t directly creating new clients for you, it’s a worthwhile endeavor for a freelancer; however, given that we’re more likely to be short on time than companies with multiple team members, there’s no reason to focus on any approach that isn’t directly bringing you new clients. It can take a little while to get a new newsletter performing to its full potential, but if you’ve been publishing emails for months on end with no results, it’s not worth the effort.

That means that you’ve got to invest some of your time into ensuring that your newsletter readers know that you’re selling something. Continue Reading

Freelancing is increasingly a digital profession, especially when it comes to marketing your services.

From writers to designers to coders, most of us spend our lives sitting behind a computer screen with a constant connection to the net.

Even if what you do is rooted in the real world, such as gardening, home help, or construction work, getting clients for your business means engaging online.

One of the best ways to get potential clients to check out your services is having a high search ranking on Google.

Around two thirds of online searches are conducted through Google. That means if you want potential clients to find you easily, your business must show up in Google’s search results. Being on the first page of search results is essential. Research by online advertising network Chitika in 2010 found 94% of traffic from Google comes from being ranked on the first page.

Because of this, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a huge industry in online marketing. Until recently, this was often a sleazy “dark art” involving keyword stuffing, backlink building and automated content. Changes to how Google ranks web pages in search results have fortunately put these techiques on the shelf.

That said, there’s still an art to showing up on Google’s front page. Ranking high on Google is now all about producing quality content that’s useful, entertaining or inspiring to your readers. It’s also, increasingly, about engaging socially, and Google Plus is the most important social network in this respect, because it’s the network owned by the search provider.

SEO is no longer a system you can game with cheap tricks. Rather, it’s about being authentic, engaged and socially active.

That’s great news for you, as a freelancer, because it means you can spin search results in your favor without using any high-risk or high-cost SEO tactics.

Let’s take a look at some of the top ways you can use Google Plus to boost your search rankings as a freelancer. Continue Reading

Back in the bad old days, many people would maintain email lists by hand: they would have a text file saved somewhere, with a list of email addresses. Then, whenever they were ready to send out a newsletter, they’d copy all those addresses into the ‘to:’ field of an email. There was no way to easily deal with bounced emails, unsubscribes or anything else that came up.

The right software can make a world of difference in managing your email newsletter. It can automate most of your responsibilities, letting you focus on coming up with great content that will bring in readers.

Deciding between the many options out there for running your newsletter can be a difficult prospect, but if you consider some key points, you can narrow down the field quickly. This will help you choose the best email newsletter software for your freelance business. Continue Reading

Your freelance business is doing something great—no, colossal—and you want to share the news with the world! Before you start emailing your press release and calling every newspaper, magazine, blogger, radio and TV station in the tri-state area, take a deep breath and make a plan.

As the editor of two glossy magazines, I know a thing or two about how to pitch someone like me. There is a right way to do it, and a wrong way to do it. You don’t want to alienate the people who have the power to give you press, so here are some suggestions on how to make a great first impression: Continue Reading