Are you getting any results from all the time and effort you put into Twitter?

How can you really know whether Twitter is working for your freelance business?

In one sense, the answer is simple. If you’re meeting potential clients, networking with other freelancers, having a good time, learning new things, and watching your follower count grow, then Twitter is clearly working for you.

For many freelancers that’s enough.

But for those who’d like to know the mechanics of how Twitter is working for them, there are easy to use and low-cost tools available to help you dig deeper.

Keeping track of your metrics is a form of research. Your aim is to find out what works at engaging clients, and what doesn’t.

In this article, I look at what you can (and can’t) discover by digging into your stats, the types of stats you should be measuring, and the tools you can use to measure them. Continue Reading

When you’re first marketing yourself as a freelancer, you have to make sure that your clients trust you. The entire point of your marketing is to convince each prospective client that you, personally, will do an awesome job on their project. But that approach doesn’t work when you won’t be personally doing every piece of work that passes through your agency. You’re going to have to make some major changes in how you handle marketing in order to get your agency’s name out there. Continue Reading

Now that you’ve set up your Twitter account, it’s time you got some followers.

Followers are great for two reasons:

Followers provide social proof. The more followers you have, the more people will assume you’re good at what you do. Every follower is like a micro-testimonial. Think about it: if you were hiring a freelancer, would you first check out the freelancer with 10,000 Twitter followers or 10 followers? The more followers you have, the quicker you gain the trust of potential clients.

Followers help to spread your message. When you want to use Twitter to promote your blog, business or services, the more followers you have, the bigger your reach.

In previous articles, I’ve covered the basics of what it takes to grow your Twitter following. First, you must complete your Twitter profile. This includes a biography targeted at your ideal followers, and a smiling picture of your face. In your biography, give people a reason to follow you. Make sure you mention what you’ll be tweeting about. Second, write top quality tweets that are valuable and relevant to your audience.

Before taking a look at some more advanced tactics for growing your following, let’s consider what your mindset needs to be to become a Twitter authority with a tribe of loyal followers. 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

To paraphrase Shakespeare to the point of mangling:

To schedule, or not to schedule, that is the question:
Whether ’tis better to always be present
In person when you tweet,
Or to prepare tweets in advance,
Ever ready for what you will say next.

Whether or not to schedule Twitter updates is a topic of hot debate in the social media community. Numerous tools – including BufferApp and Tweetdeck – allow you to set up Tweets in advance, helping you save time while boosting your Twitter presence. On the other hand, opponents of scheduling argue that pre-scheduled tweets are lazy, and show a disrespect for your audience.

In this article, I look at the cons and pros of scheduling. Admittedly, I favor a mix of scheduled and live tweets. For me, scheduling a tweet is similar to scheduling a blog post. It’s convenient for you, as it saves you time, and it’s convenient for your audience, as it spreads your tweets across the day.

I’ll be as objective as I can, but bear in mind I’m biased towards scheduling. Continue Reading

As a freelancer it’s critical to keep projects flowing and LinkedIn is a powerful tool for finding small and large clients. In this video, you’ll learn tips and tricks I use to keep projects flowing and how to get your LinkedIn account up to speed fast using the latest features.

The key points of this video include:

• Preparing your LinkedIn profile
• Using the Endorse feature
• Finding and engaging groups
• Searching jobs
• Getting in touch with industry specific individuals

To keep your Twitter account active and your followers engaged, you need to send out several tweets a day. A mere 140 characters sounds easy enough to write. That is, until you have to do it daily, over and over again.

In this article, I’ll provide a framework for what freelancers should Tweet about, and ask thought-provoking questions to help you create your own freelancer Twitter editorial.

I’m not providing a “one Tweeter strategy fits all freelancers” solution for one simple reason: There’s no right answer for choosing what to Tweet about. Every freelance business is different, and it’s a matter of what works for you, your business and, most importantly, your clients. Continue Reading

You’ve decided Twitter might be a good fit for your business, and you want to give it a whirl. In this article, I provide a step-by-step overview to setting up your profile and freelance brand on Twitter.

I don’t get too deep into the technical side of things. If you’re web savvy enough to be on Twitter, chances are you can navigate your way around the site. Rather, I show you what’s important from a marketing perspective. If you need more in-depth technical help with setting up your profile, you can check out the Twitter Help Center.

Let’s get started with setting up your freelance presence on Twitter. Continue Reading

Nowadays, it’s rare to meet a freelancer who’s not on Twitter. Most of us have an account, and many of us hang out there in our free time. Sharing our lives, and glimpsing into the lives of others in bite-sized chunks of 140 characters is strangely compelling.

But how about using Twitter for your professional life?

In a new series of FreelanceSwitch articles, I’m going show you how to make the most of Twitter as a freelancer. In particular, I’ll be looking at how to use Twitter as a marketing and networking tool.

If you’ve yet to dive into the world of Tweets, I’ll show you how to set up your Twitter account. If you don’t get Twitter, I’ll show you how to make sense of it.

I’ll also be looking at what to Tweet about, how to record and understand Twitter metrics, how to grow your Twitter following and find clients on the network, using Twitter for research, and the dilemma every professional Tweeter faces: to schedule or not to schedule?

Before we get into that, it’s worth deciding whether Twitter is right for your freelance business. Ultimately, you’ll only find this out by trying Twitter for yourself. However, this article will serve as a handy primer to help you make your decision.

Twitter’s a communications platform, which makes it suitable for marketing your services. But is it worth your while, and all the time and energy you’ll invest?

Let’s take a look, starting with the argument for Twitter. Continue Reading

Nine decades ago Claude Hopkins advertising classic, Scientific Advertising was published. Hopkins argued that marketing was “a gamble” unless those doing the marketing measured the results of their efforts.

When marketers measure their results, Hopkins wrote, marketing becomes “one of the safest business ventures.” Metrics allow you to see the results of your advertising efforts compared to the time, energy and money you put in.

In Hopkins’s day, gathering marketing data was time consuming. The results of every marketing campaign had to be counted by hand.

With the Internet, tools such as Google Analytics and Facebook Insights automate the process of gathering some data. However, just because some of the data is easy to get hold of doesn’t make it simple to understand and analyze. Even with data readily at hand, marketing is as much an art as it as science. You need to know how to read the data to make it meaningful to your business.

As a writer, I see it this way. Data tells a story. When you’re using data to improve your marketing, you want to find the stories within the data that help you boost revenues, find new clients and grow your business.

In this post, I’ll show you some helpful stories you can look out for in your Facebook Insights data to improve the way you use Facebook. Continue Reading