You might not always know when an opportunity for networking or the chance to expand your client base will present itself. Incorporating personalized business cards into your professional and personal marketing efforts is a positive way to ensure opportunities will not be missed.

But before you can promote, you need a well-designed business card.

There are many options when considering what information should be included on your business card. The choices you select should clearly represent your brand or business, but there are many different techniques available. Continue Reading

At the end of last year, a fellow freelancer and I were discussing how 2011 panned out for each of us.

“It was overall successful, but when I reviewed where my income came from, I realized I’d become too focused on just one market,” she told me. “I need to spread myself out.”

The beginning of a new year is always a good time to take stock of your business, and plan your direction for the coming year.  Some freelancers work toward building up a name for themselves within a niche; others intentionally avoid focusing too much in one area.

Here’s a breakdown of the pros and cons of each approach. Continue Reading

Freelancers new to flying solo can be overwhelmed by the mass of marketing opportunities on the web. And while social media is a great way to promote your business, it can be enormously time consuming.

Like any marketing activity, it takes time to build up your brand, but there is no need for promotional work to distract you from your core business. With careful planning, some quality writing and a time limit on your efforts, you can soon have a strong reputation across a large network of potential clients and promoters.

Setting up an online brand can be done quickly by following these simple steps. Continue Reading

Credit: Pressmaster on Photodune

To describe SEO as a simple process would be a lie, but it’s not magic. There are quite a few simple things you can do for yourself that will improve SEO on your website.

Bear in mind that search traffic generally has a higher conversion rate compared with other online sources, so if you are going to invest time and resources in online marketing, SEO is definitely worth considering.

Search engine optimization in its most basic format can be separated into four areas; keyword research, on-page optimization, content development, and link building.

Follow this DIY guide to increase your search engine visibility, get more visitors, and grab more clients.

Continue Reading

In this issue of Ask FreelanceSwitch, we look at promoting yourself as a freelancer and pricing. Ask FreelanceSwitch is a regular column here that allows us to help beginners get a grip on freelancing. If you have a question about freelancing that you want answered, send an email to askfreelanceswitch@gmail.com.

Question 1

Hello, I am a Publicity student, in my last year of college and I’m starting doing some freelancing. I want to know if the use of online portfolios and also talking in specifics communities in the social networks is a good thing to try to catch some freelancing jobs?!

Creating an online portfolio is a must for freelancers these days. While you used to be able to take your portfolio around to prospective clients, you’ll find most of them will prefer to look at your work online. It’s also far more efficient than lugging around a big portfolio. The big question is whether to use a portfolio site or set up your own website — and I absolutely recommend setting up your own site. You have no control over whether a portfolio site might go down at some point, but you do have a lot more control over your own website.

Continue Reading

I’ll be the first to admit that I’m a skeptical person when it comes to the value of most forms of social networking. While there always seems to be stories of a friend of a friend who is landing clients with Facebook, I’ve yet to see most social networks as little more than a way to connect with your peers or a way to waste a huge amount of time.

Part of my problem is that I have never really invested in creating a strong social presence or spent the time on learning how connection points like Facebook can be run to deliver value to potential clients. So before I write off Facebook completely I figured I should learn a little more about it. For this reason I was looking forward to Rockable Presses’ most recent book Successful Facebook Marketing.
Continue Reading

If you have more than one freelance specialty, one strategy is to dedicate a separate site (blog) to each specialty, develop strong targeted brands, and grow them independently across multiple social media. With this strategy comes the question of how can we manage all our sites, keep up with our branding efforts and handle our social media accounts (such as Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin) all at once?

There are pros and cons to having different social media accounts for multiple websites. It’s important to choose a social media promotion plan that fits your business structure and future goals best.

Though I’ve been writing for a long time, I started publishing when I discovered blogging is a wonderful way to share my interests, and build a portfolio along the way. However, it is also a demanding activity that requires one to be their own blogger, editor, web designer, marketer, SEO specialist, and social media manager. While I mostly enjoy these tasks, it is becoming harder to stick to my own deadlines while I am managing multiple sites. After all, I have an entertainment blog, a writing blog, and several others. Numerous blogs mean that all these tasks are multiplied.

Continue Reading

Credit: Yuri Arcurs on Photodune

As freelancers, our focus is almost always exclusively on getting paying work and getting it done. After all, it’s difficult to pay our bills or buy food with anything other than money. So investing time into a project that isn’t guaranteed to pan out doesn’t always seem to be the best investment of our time.

But there are some contests and challenges that can be worth a great deal to a freelancer if you win — provided you know exactly what you’re getting yourself into ahead of time.

Continue Reading

By now, thousands of freelancers tweet, growing their brand and connecting with others 140 characters at a time. It’s an important tool for promoting your freelance business. And one of the most powerful aspects of promotion on Twitter is to get retweeted (or RT in Twitterspeak).

It’s the Twitter equivalent of forwarding an email or sharing a link you enjoyed in Facebook. RTs benefit freelancers by helping them spread content, grow their followers, and position themselves as experts. So, how can you help ensure that your tweets get retweeted and (hopefully) go viral? Follow these tips.

Continue Reading

I live and run my studio in a house that’s 53 years old. Like most houses its age, it has issues. (Translation: It’s an emotionally needy house.)

Earlier this spring, I was repairing the plumbing in the shower. When I went outside to shut off the house water, I noticed that the water line was leaking.

Uh-oh.

However, I knew that this would eventually happen. My water line was rusting out when I bought this place five years ago. And, shortly after I moved in, a neighbor’s water line ruptured and caused quite a flood. Martha the rookie homeowner made a mental note to keep a cash stash handy for the replacement of her water line.

Continue Reading

If you’ve devoted weeks or even months to a major project, you want to end it right. For some freelancers, a good end to a big project is an equally large check — but there are few extra steps you can take to use the last days of a project to your benefit.

You can take steps to find future work through this project, use it to promote yourself and to simply tie up some loose ends.

Continue Reading

Photo by jaaron.

As a freelancer, you have a wide variety of marketing options available to you. Just which ones will bring you the clients you prefer to work with depends — it’s important to make sure that the methods you use allow you to reach the places prospective clients will be.

It’s worth considering a wide variety of options. For that, it’s useful to have a list of options to consult:

Continue Reading