The Quick and Dirty Approach to Marketing
It’s pretty easy to slap together a website, print up a few business cards and declare your marketing efforts complete. But the fact of the matter is that a freelancer’s marketing is never done — if we want clients after our current projects are done, we have to do the marketing necessary to bring them in.
More than a few freelancers struggle with marketing themselves, though. In part, that’s due to the fact that marketing isn’t a big concern for a beginning freelancer. Other issues, like putting together a quality portfolio, take precedence and finding work isn’t as big of a deal as one might think. Between word-of-mouth clients — friends, family and past employers who need a project completed — and low-paying jobs off of Craigslist and other job boards, most starting freelancers can at least find a few projects to work on. But as you advance and want to focus on higher paying projects, marketing becomes crucial. Rather than trying to follow any of the sample marketing plans meant to reassure big business stakeholders, though, you can cut directly to a quick and dirty marketing strategy.
7 Tips for a Winning Trade Show Booth
Exhibiting at trade shows is a very beneficial way to network for freelancers. Whether attending or actually exhibiting at the event, face time is essential in giving prospective clients the opportunity to get to know you. What could be better for business than having a bunch of one-on-one conversations about what services you offer?
If you’ve never exhibited at a trade show before, or if you are just looking for a few new ideas to freshen up your booth space, I’ve jotted down a few tips that have helped to make my trade show experiences a success.
Using Twitter to Promote Your Book
While I love the social aspects of Twitter, I also love the simple platform for self-promotion—especially for authors.
That’s why I’m also using the power of 140 characters or less to help promote my books, Ramen Noodles, Rent and Resumes and Creatively Self-Employed. Here are some tips to help you do the same for your book.
Make Nice With Your Competitors
It may sound counter-active, but teaming up with authors who have written books similar to yours is a great way to network and stay on top of what they’re doing—and what’s going on in your book niche industry that you may have missed. Many of the authors I know who have written career books take time to research statistics, for example. Because I don’t do that too much, I find their tweets (and blog posts) very valuable.
How to Create Memorable Business Cards
At a time when networking is extremely important, freelancers can’t afford to have a business card that isn’t eye-catching. My rule of thumb is if people aren’t complimenting you on your cards, then it’s time to make a change.
After collecting business cards over the years, I’ve seen some pretty interesting and creative designs along with some that just plain aren’t effective. Before going over some ways to ensure your cards don’t fall into the latter group, I think it’s important to ensure all of the proper information is accounted for. When designing cards for myself and my clients, I ensure the following information is included:
Four Excel Tools You Can Use
I recently concluded a series of articles on New Year’s Planning. And here we are, in the New Year, and I have it on good authority that some of you still haven’t created your 2009 client acquisition plan.
I’m also hearing that there are some freelancers who have yet to do an annual budget.
We’ll start with client acquisition. I’ve created a free Excel application that will allow you to track your efforts. Download the 10 Business-Building Tools Tracker file and open it in Excel. Since it’s in Read-Only format, save the file under a different filename so you can work with it.
9 Tips for Brand New Freelancers
As the new year is just around the corner, some of you might resolve to take a step forward into becoming a freelancer. According to what’s been written in the comments at FreelanceSwitch, there are those of you thinking about this.
With the way the economy has been, it wouldn’t be too surprising if the freelancer ranks grow in the next few months. Here are a few tips to get you started.
To Firm or Not to Firm? How to Choose Between Going Solo or Going Big
Before going out on their own, many freelancers struggle with the idea of how to position themselves in their market of expertise. Considering many freelancers have at one time worked in an agency setting, it’s tempting to have the agency mind-set when crafting your promotional materials.
For example, the decision of whether to use ‘I’ or ‘We’ can dramatically affect the way you’re perceived by prospective clients; “We can deliver excellent results” sounds much larger than “I can deliver excellent results”. The big question, then, is this: do you want to be an agency or a freelancer? Continue Reading
Effective Differentiation for Freelancers
One of the biggest struggles for many freelancers is finding a way to stand out from the crowd of others providing similar services. In many cases there really is a huge difference from one freelancer to the next in terms of quality of work, quality of service, specific services provided, experience, and turnaround time.
However, potential clients often seem to have the perspective that we’re interchangeable and all created from the same mould. Therefore, they usually see price as the main point of difference between freelancers.
If this is something you’ve been struggling with, you may reap significant benefits from developing a plan to successfully differentiate yourself from others. If you’re finding the intense competition to be limiting your workload or forcing you to lower your rates, take a look at what truly makes you different from the other freelancers out there waiting to land your would-be clients. More importantly, be sure that whatever makes you different is clear to those potential clients.
Differentiation can help freelancers in a number of important ways. The obvious benefit is more business, but there is also the ability to help you to avoid competing solely on price. If you’re tired of pricing your projects too low in order to secure and retain clients, find a way to be different than the others competing for the business. If you really are different, price comparisons become less effective for the customer, because they know they’re not paying for the same product. Continue Reading
Freelancers: It’s Not About You
It is no secret that human beings are pretty self-absorbed creatures, and while that sounds negative, a smart freelancer should actually think of it as a positive — because in the end people choose to hire you because of what you can do for them.
That’s right, “ask not what your clients can do for you, but what you can do for your clients”. Apologies to John F. Kennedy.
Despite the ubiquity of buzzwords like personal branding and other popular forms of self-promotion, in the end it stills comes to down to what a potential client gains from working with you or using your services: in other words, what is in it for them. You can use this natural self-interest to your advantage when crafting pitches and proposals by focusing on exactly that. Continue Reading
Freelancers: Here’s Why You Need a Blog
Everyone with a blog, please raise your hand.
Alright, those of you with hands up can leave the classroom and hit the bar early. The rest of you, stay here, because this lesson is important.
Lets start with the quick summary of what a blog is. Short for Weblog, a blog is a website that displays posts by the author in chronological order. Their popularity is immense since most blogging platforms make it insanely simple for anyone to publish their thoughts on the web.
You’re reading one right now.
But why do freelancers need one? Continue Reading
