Do Freelancers Have to Blog To Get Clients?
Would you like to have a freelance blog that attracts clients? It’s a freelancer’s dream — you dash off short blog posts now and then, prospects read them, get impressed, and ring you right up.
Unfortunately, that often doesn’t happen. Instead, freelancers get into blogging because they feel they have to, and often end up frustrated.
In reviewing hundreds of freelance blogs over the years, I’ve found they tend to come in three typical flavors:
- A blog about your freelance work that you hate writing and rarely update.
- Several different blogs on various topics you started, but then quickly abandoned.
- No blog at all because you “can’t decide what to write about.”
All of these types of freelancer blogs pose a big problem. If you’re investing precious marketing time in writing and styling up your blog it needs to get you clients.
When Your Blog Fails as a Marketing Tool
Here’s the thing: A blog on a topic you’re not enjoying often comes off stiff. Readers can feel your lack of interest in your topic.
With no blog, your freelancer website may not rank well in search engines, so fewer prospects find you.
These blogs look like ghost towns — they get no comments or social shares. If there is a place to subscribe by email (a vital element many bloggers miss), no one is signing up.
If you’ve given up and stopped posting on your freelance blog, your dusty, abandoned blog may be worse than no blog at all. It sends the message, “I tried blogging, but I don’t get it.”
With no blog, your freelancer website may not rank well in search engines, so fewer prospects find you.
If you know the basics of good blog-post writing, and you’ve got a clean design, but your blog still isn’t working as a marketing tool for your freelance business, it’s time to look deeper.
Maybe your blog went wrong right at the start — when you chose a topic.
Busting a Common Freelance Blogging Myth
There’s a popular myth in freelance marketing that your blog simply has to be written for your clients. A graphic designer’s blog has to be about how good graphic design helps businesses meet their sales goals, for instance.
But it’s just not true.
Here are the critical elements of a freelance blog that result in client leads:
- The blog is frequently updated.
- Post headlines are strong and the posts deliver useful information.
- The blog has engagement — prospects can see comments, your responses to those comments, and social sharing going on.
- It’s easy to tell you are for hire on the blog, usually via a ‘hire me’ tab.
- The blog is a good showcase for the kind of freelancing you do — it has a good design if you’re a designer, etc.
You may notice the glaring omission from this list: That the blog’s topic be aimed at your target clients.
It may seem weird, but your blog doesn’t have to be written directly at your clients.
Think of your blog as simply another portfolio sample of your work. If it shows your skills, it still works, even if the particular topic isn’t of interest to your clients.
3 Workable Types of Freelance Blog Topics
Here are the basic options in terms of choosing a topic for your freelance blog:
1. Related topic. Many freelancers have had success blogging on a tangential but related topic to the work they do. For instance, my own blog offers writing and marketing tips for an audience of freelance writers. It’s not tips for business marketing managers or publication editors — my freelance clients — but it’s about what I do: writing. I’m able to showcase my writing and headline skills there, too.
As long as it’s not porn, politics, or anything else polarizing or unpleasant, it will be a strong sample for you if it shows off what you can do.
I’ve gotten a ton of clients who’ve seen my blog, and even had one say that knowing I was helping other writers impressed her and made her want to hire me. The gig was to write her government agency’s annual report. Go figure.
2. Completely unrelated topic. I’m told tattoos are a great niche that gets loads of traffic…but whatever your personal interests are, consider writing on the topic you love.
As long as it’s not porn, politics, or anything else polarizing or unpleasant, it will be a strong sample for you if it shows off what you can do. And when you write about what you love, you tend to stick with it and strive to improve it. That blog will be more likely to attract an audience and will end up serving as a stronger marketing tool than your lukewarm blog about your photography business.
3. Written for clients. If you have a passion for helping your clients and would love giving prospects a few free tips in turn for getting marketing leads, angle your blog to appeal directly to your prospects.
You can demonstrate your expertise as you teach them a little about how to do it themselves. You probably know a lot about your freelance business, so posts should be easy to write. Then you’re the first freelancer to pop into their minds when prospects realize they’d like to hire a pro instead.
Create a free report for subscribers that helps your prospects, and you should find it easy to build an email marketing list. This ability to capture prospect emails, rather than waiting for prospects to email you, is an advantage you won’t get with the other two types of freelancer blogs.
A Different Freelance Blogging Strategy
If keeping up your own blog seems overwhelming, consider another strategy: Guest post on the popular blogs your clients read.
You could do this occasionally, and get a link back to your freelancer website in your tagline. That would allow you to blog and drive clients your way without the pressure to post regularly.
Guest posts on bigger blogs also catch more eyeballs than does a post on your solopreneur freelancer’s small blog. The fact that you’ve scored a post on a big blog also wows clients and gives you a better chance of getting client leads.
After considering all the angles, you may still conclude blogging isn’t for you. If you aren’t excited about doing it — and aren’t angling for paid-blogging gigs — then I recommend you pass. There are plenty of other ways to market your freelance business.
What’s the topic of your blog, freelancers? Leave us a comment and tell us why you chose your blog subject.
Leave a Comment
Would you like to have a freelance blog that attracts clients? It’s a freelancer’s dream — you dash off short blog posts now and then, prospects read them, get impressed, and ring you right up.Yeah! this is right.A graphic designer’s blog has to be about how good graphic design helps businesses meet their sales goals, for instance.In the sense that creating a good headlines will make it known that is famous.If it has a good designer will have more clients.
I disagree…a graphic designer’s website has to have great graphic design, where prospects can see how that design is helping your blog be successful.
It doesn’t have to be a blog about graphic design…the topic could be anything, in my view, as long as you’re passionate about it and stick to your topic.
I don’t think a blog is necessary to attract clients. It can help but not required.
I agree on that. I find myself wanting to talk freelancers out of blogging all the time, when I hear them say, “I just can’t decide what to blog about…”
Then I know they don’t have a passion for promoting in this format and should do something else.
In my experience, my customers don’t have time to read blogs about design, etc. Thus, I put my efforts into top-notch customer service, which in turn generates a lot of word-of-mouth. Plus, all of my customers have given me permission for potential new clients to contact them directly for a referral. That has been the biggest goldmine for me personally since I started doing this kind of work in 1996. Blogs are fine if you need that creative outlet…but for me, I’d rather always be focused on client work.
I think you bring up a great point, Jameos — if you don’t have the passion for blogging, don’t do it! Promote your freelance business other ways.
But if you do blog, be sure to position it so that it helps you get clients…
Totally agree, Jameos. I also found it odd that the article assumes that you don’t have a blog because you “can’t decide what to write about”. I don’t have a blog because I’ve decided that it’s not the best use of my time and doesn’t produce a real ROI for the particular way I do business. I also realize that if I attempted to start a blog, I really wouldn’t have time to put produce the quality content I’d want to, so it would actually be a detriment to my reputation. I use the time I could be writing blog posts to work directly with paying clients, which works out much better for both of us in the end!
Nice article Carol!
I think videos are great substitute to writing. I think blogging is essential. I do agree that its always best to write about what you love.
I am a graphic designer as well. What I realize is that I am more drawn to marketing (social media, email marketing etc.) than actual graphic/web design. I would like to have a healthy mix of videos and written posts for my blog. At the moment, I am writing an ebook about social media. I hope to get it ready soon!
Great topic. I speak about this topic a lot. Blogging is one of those things that helps differentiate yourself from other designers. In a world where designers can become somewhat of a commodity, the question is what can you do to differentiate yourself?…blog. Blogging for designers can simply be just a way to give potential clients (or potential employers) a chance to get to know who you are, what you like and how you think. I think a blog scares designers because its all about writing. But a blog full of images can be just effective. I like to tell aspiring web designers to take snapshots of sites they admire and post them to your blog (no words required). Just the idea of posting inspiring work on your blog can give insight into what you like and how you think as a designer. It can help you land jobs and clients.
I love that idea, Mike! And I agree a designer’s blog could be a very visual experience and doesn’t have to be writing-heavy.
When reading this post, Mike’s website was the one that I thought about.
Hi Carol, I like how your article mentions that blogging isn’t an absolute requirement for attracting clients, which blogging “gurus” would refute. But you’re right—blogging is one way to attract client’s but not the only way. Some freelancers are better off not attempting to blog so they can spend more time doing quality client work and waste less time writing a blog they can’t keep up with. Others find blogs as a great way to get found in search engines and to get the word out about their business. Last but not least, many freelancer writers use their blog as a showcase for their writing skills. In this instance, the tip for not necessarily needing to write for clients but to still maintain a professional blog is spot on (as proven by how much it works for Carol).
Blogging as a freelancer has a built-in paradox: we often CAN NOT write about what is, in our hearts, the the cool projects we’re working on now, or have just completed. Such posts often step on a client’s toes, risk giving away proprietary information, or actually violate contracts. Just today I signed an “independent contractor agreement” with a marketing agency that said I WILL NOT post about my the work I create for them anywhere, or even LINK to the work if the client posts it, without express written permission. Sure, the checks still cash, but to creative people, it is dispiriting to be the SOURCE of a great idea, but not the “owner” of the idea. (I’ve been lucky to get permission to post older work, but that’s getting trickier by the day.)
Great post I’m a web and graphic designer and I blog about better ways to make your business standout online. Blogging has helped me attract clients and seal the deal with clients. It’s also a very big SEO boost that static pages and constant pictures will never give you. I also love the idea of guest blog if you don’t have time I tell my clients the same thing or instead of blog post, take the date off and call them resource pages. With resource pages you can still show you expertise and give useful content to your visitors but no one expects it to be updated as regularly.
Nice tips in here, Carol.
If you blog about a subject that your target customers are not interested in, then they are unlikely to be hanging around your blog. It doesn’t matter how passionate, articulate and well-informed you are, people who don’t care about that content will not be listening, and therefore they won’t be giving you their business either. You have to communicate in a way that addresses what your customers really need.
If your blog is effectively only of interest for your colleagues, then you may well get some referrals along the way, but it’s not the most productive way of focusing your marketing effort.
Blogging can be good for SEO.
Search engines love articles, all that text gives them something to work with.
The higher your position in search engine results, the more traffic you get, the more potential customers you’ll have.
Thanks for the post and the ideas. I do #3, although I only post monthly but regularly since I started last year, I believe I’ll branch out to #2 related posts. Can that pose a problem? At least, I’m thinking of briefer posts that keep the blog more active and, as Jameos mentioned, are possibly a quicker read for busy clients.
I think blog is definitely useful in reaching out to more people and showing what one is passionate about, and what he/she is currently working on. It is a tool to market yourself.
It is definitely is a required tool these days.
Thanks for the nice post.
We are excited to announce that will be launching our freelance app marketplace (Weblance) on May 10th. We already over 5,800 beta sign ups for launch!! We are a funded start up and plan on shaking up the current freelance marketplace models.
We are really hoping to get some coverage of our launch on your blog. We created a Press Kit so it would be possible to learn quickly what Weblance is all about. Let me know if there is anything we can do to get our launch published on your blog!