7 Cheap Ways to Promote Your Development Skills
Marketing yourself is no doubt an important part of freelancing. There’s a lot you can do to find and approach new clients. Some of them can cost you a nice sum of money, others you can do for very little cost.
Especially for software developers, here’s seven ways to make yourself known and to turn your name into a brand.
Write A Blog. It may seem an obvious one, but many people miss out on this fantastic opportunity to make yourself known.
Writing a blog (or writing for other blogs) doesn’t have to be personal. For personal issues, write a separate blog. To promote your development skills, write about things that concern your profession, your everyday work, and the problems you run into. If you find a solution to a nasty problem, chances are other people will find it useful as well.
Of course it’s no use looking for those nasty problems. Your job is to find solutions to problems every day, be it small problems or big ones. Potential clients will hire you because they realize you’ll be able to solve their problems too.
The bottom line is to find an effective way to put these solutions into words and post it on your blog. This also has the advantage that you have a searchable archive, so if you run into these problems again you can go to your own blog.
Blogging about what you do shows you care, which is exactly what potential clients want to see.
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How to Become a Freelance Blog Writer
For years now, I’ve done freelance writing for newspapers and magazines as a way to make side income, supplementing my full-time job. But this year, I’ve made the conscious move to freelancing for blogs instead of print publications, to the point where I now make about $2,000 a month as a blog writer (not including my own blog’s income or my full-time salary).
Becoming a freelance blog writer isn’t always easy in the beginning, but I’ve found that it’s vastly more fun and rewarding. It’s worth the effort.
First, let’s talk about what it’s like to be a freelance blog writer. To write a good post, you’ve got to do some research first, and add to that the writing time, and it can take between 90 minutes to 3 hours to write your best stuff. I can generally research and write a good post in 90 minutes if I’ve given it a little thought first (I do my thinking while exercising, driving, showering, etc.). So if you plan to do some freelancing, be sure you’ve got the extra time. I write between 6-7 free-lance posts a week (in addition to the 7-10 I do for my own blog), so that’s about 9-10 hours of work on top of your regular job.
But the cool thing about freelance blog writing is that you can do it from any place, any time of day. So you can write late at night, during your lunch hour, or in the early morning hours. You can do it while traveling, or while sitting through a boring conference. There’s a freedom to it that’s very appealing.
So how do you go about becoming a freelance blog writer? Here are some of my best tips:
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How to Get More Referrals
For the full set of lead generation ideas see: 101 Ideas to Get More Freelance Work and Generate New Client Leads
Getting a new lead referred to you by a previous client or friend is probably the single best source of work for most freelancers. Not only do referrals usually happen organically but they tend to start off with a high degree of trust and positive expectation.
The downside to referral clients is that most freelancers don’t feel any control over where and when it happens. Some months you have lots of new leads and others none at all, seemingly without rhyme or reason.
In this article we’re going to talk about how to make yourself referable and how to actively encourage those referral leads. Continue Reading
Enlist Your Family and Friends
Last week we published 101 Ideas to Get More Freelance Work and Generate New Client Leads, and promised that we’d cover every single tip in detail. So without further ado, here is our first tip for how to get more leads:
Enlist your family and friends to spread the word about your services…
Most people will contact their friends and family when they first dive into freelancing, but it’s easy to forget what an incredible resource they can be. It is rare to come across a client who will be dying to talk about your skill and talent to those they know, and yet most of us have a ready-made team that will talk you up despite themselves. I’m talking about your family and friends.
Now I’m not suggesting that you do the hard sell on your Great-Aunt Moira, but instead simply make it easy for your family and friends to spread the word about you (even if they’re not really sure what it is you do). I found when I started freelancing that supportive friends and family offered to mention me to anyone who might be interested. What held them back was not knowing how to describe what I did or it being a bit of an effort on their part. So I did a bit of work that made it easy for them to promote me.
Staying on Top of Your Game
Stay on the cutting edge – Image from iStockPhoto It is important to stay on top of your game as a freelancer if you want to stay valuable and in demand. This means continually improving and honing your skillset. When you work in a job where you are surrounded by others, or when studying your trade at university, you will feed off other people and naturally push yourself to compete.
However as a freelancer, often working alone, you can easily fall into a vacuum where your current level of expertise feels good enough. Give in to this and your service may lose value over time. Unless you have a burning internal urge you may find it helps to put yourself into situations that force you to stay on top.
As a freelancer it is your job to keep yourself improving. This is true no matter what field you are in, but perhaps most critically those fields where you deal with technology – programming, web design, flash animation and so on. But even if you are a writer or illustrator, just keeping up with current styles and new ideas is invaluable.
Here are some things you can do to help keep yourself on top of your game:
Harnessing Mailouts – A Complete How-To Guide to Email Marketing for Freelancers
As a freelancer there are three main purposes for which you are going to use email marketing:
- Finding Your First Clients
- Staying in Touch with existing Clients
- Getting new work from existing Clients
In this article we are going to discuss the what, why, where, when of using email marketing, look at different products you can use including a review of MailChimp and then talk about the different types of mails you can send and look at some samples.
Getting Past Your Fear of Pitching
Sometimes you just have to jump…As a freelancer, getting gigs often means pitching your ideas to potential clients. This is especially true for writers like myself. However, what holds many aspiring freelancers back is fear.
Personally, I’ve held back many of my ideas for fear of looking foolish to the potential client, but certainly the big one for most is simply fear of rejection.
Because of my fears I’ve spent a lot of time only pitching articles that I knew would be accepted (mostly business stories for small trade publications) even though it means fewer jobs and nights working in a call center to pay the rent.
Then while reading newspapers and magazines on shift, I’d see articles, usually personal essays, that were less than impressive and couldn’t believe someone got paid to write that drivel.
“Why?” was always what I would ask.
