Friday, November 23, 2012

FreelanceSwitch Marketing Roundup: Branding, Facebook and More

Image from PhotoDune

Whether you’re a freelancer or marketplace author – or both – to see significant growth you must embrace marketing. That’s often no small feat – it requires a change in the way you see yourself.


Besides identifying as a creative or marketplace author, you also need to see yourself as a marketer. In fact, your own marketing manager! And that requires constant action, a proactive attitude, and lots of experimenting.


Fortunately, over the last few months FreelanceSwitch has published a bunch of helpful articles that show you how to do just that. They cover branding, Facebook, and other marketing strategies.


So dig in, and try a few out. And please let us know in the comments which articles you found most helpful!


Market Yourself!



Learn to Love SalesLearn to Love Sales


As a freelancer, your success depends on how well you can sell. Don’t like to sell or don’t know how? Too bad. Time to put away the excuses and buckle down. The future of your freelance business depends on it.


The first thing you need to do is change your attitude about sales. Dispel any notion from your brain about sleazy used car salesmen right now. There is a great blog post on Inc.com about this very topic that I’d like to pull some wisdom from. Author Geoffrey James singles out three beliefs people who hate to sell hold close to them.

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You Need to Think Like a Customer: The Concepts You May be MissingYou Need to Think Like a Customer: The Concepts You May be Missing


Clients do crazy things. There are entire sites devoted to letting freelancers vent about the most recent piece of nonsense that has come out of a client this week. But while it’s easy to get frustrated at clients who just don’t seem to understand, the reality is that there’s a fundamental disconnect between how freelancers and our customers think.


You had better believe that there are plenty of clients out there who get frustrated by what the freelancers they work with are saying. It’s that same disconnect: each side has very different priorities, experiences and even expectations for a given project.


It’s easy enough to suggest that we should communicate more with our clients, but communication isn’t really the problem. It’s understanding.

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Create Your Brand



Get Started with Crafting Your Freelance Brand ExperienceGet Started with Crafting Your Freelance Brand Experience


Many freelancers work with clients in some capacity or another to create a brand identity. But few enough of us actually invest a lot of time in our own brands — it’s a case of the shoemaker’s children going barefoot more than anything else.


But a brand can be valuable, making it easier for prospective clients to find you and reassuring them that even if you’re just one individual working on their project, you’re a consummate professional.


Brand experience is what your clients will feel at every point of contact with your freelance business. It starts with a strong brand identity, but requires quite a bit of implementation, such as: crafting a relatable persona, communicating expert status, and delivering excellent customer service. It’s up to you to craft a brand experience for your clients.

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Freelance Brand Preparation: What is Your Mission?Freelance Brand Preparation: What is Your Mission?


Your brand is crucial: it’s everything that makes a prospective client happy to work with you, or even reminds the client that you exist. But a brand isn’t something that you come up with overnight. You build a brand, brick by brick. You need the right foundation and the right supplies.

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12 Steps to Building Your Stand-Out Freelance Brand12 Steps to Building Your Stand-Out Freelance Brand


There are a million freelancers out there. The question is, how are you going to get noticed and help people remember you and the type of freelance work you do?


The answer is branding yourself. As a freelancer, you need to create a memorable way for prospects to easily recall who you are and your freelancing specialty. I’ve reviewed hundreds of freelancers’ websites, and most of them don’t do a good job of presenting a memorable brand. But the good news is, it isn’t hard to improve your branding and gain a higher profile as a freelancer.

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15+ Buzzworthy Techniques to Promote Your Freelance Brand15+ Buzzworthy Techniques to Promote Your Freelance Brand


One of the biggest mistakes you can make as a freelancer is to ignore building and promoting your brand. Starting my freelance business in 2010, I shrugged my shoulders at the thought of branding strategy. It sounded like something that only larger businesses engaged in, not freelancers.


Over the years, I’ve learned that brand promotion is actually a critical part of a freelancer’s overall business, no matter how small. With a little effort, you too can build a better freelance business with strategic branding.

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101 Ways to Improve Your Freelance Brand101 Ways to Improve Your Freelance Brand


As freelancers, we sometimes tend to think that branding is only about being different enough to attract clients. We want to stand out, so we spend hours adjusting our logo.


But great brands are more than an attractive symbol alone.


Great brands have values. They’re passionate about these values too. They respect the goals of their customers and they keep their promises. They strive to make a positive impact. They tell stories and capture the imagination of those they speak to. Brands that believe in the work they do for others are the exceptional ones.


Nike+ doesn’t tell you that wearing their shoes will make you the next Michael Jordan. They focus on helping their customers be the best athletes they can be because they believe in human potential.


Creating a great brand is essential to the success of your freelance business. Go beyond the skin and dig for the core of your brand identity. It’s a story, a feeling, and a goal to create things of value. That’s where your brand exists.


Here are 101 branding tips to help you improve your freelance identity and help your business succeed:

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Use Facebook Effectively



Freelancers: Is Facebook Right for You?Freelancers: Is Facebook Right for You?


Is there any freelancer in the world who hasn’t heard of Facebook?

It’s the place online to hang out with friends, share family photos, follow updates from your favorite brands, and find out what your fellow high school students have made of their lives.


For many people, Facebook is synonymous with the Internet. It has become such an integral part of life that many smartphones come with Facebook apps and buttons built-in.


But is Facebook a good fit for freelancers?

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Facebook for Freelancers: Groups, Pages or Profiles?Facebook for Freelancers: Groups, Pages or Profiles?


Once you’ve decided Facebook is right for you as a freelancer, you’re ready to put together an action plan on how you’ll use it to promote your business and market your services.


Your next step is to decide whether to promote your business with a Profile, a Group or a Page. These are the three set-ups Facebook offers, and each has its advantages and disadvantages.

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How to Present Your Freelance Services on Your WebsiteHow to Present Your Freelance Services on Your Website


When constructing the perfect freelancers’ website, you want visitors to know what you do the moment they reach your site — at least generally speaking. For the specifics, you’ll need to give them a clear idea of the services you offer.


For most freelancers, that means creating a services page that lays out the details, along with a little information about how you provide such services and what results your clients can expect.

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A Few More Marketing Strategies to Try



How You Should Use Google+ for Your BusinessHow You Should Use Google+ for Your Business


Chris Brogan is the author of the new book, Google+ for Business: How Google’s Social Network Changes Everything.


As a Google+ skeptic (heck, I’m skeptical of all new social media) I was interested to learn more, so I sat down and watched this video where Michael Stelzner of Socialmediaexaminer.com interviewed Brogan about how Google+ can help small businesses.


As a freelancer, you are running a small business—a very small business that probably includes just you. And you should think of yourself as a small business when it comes to representing yourself both online and in the real world. If you are thinking about creating a page on Google+, you might want to watch the video for yourself (or check out Chris Brogan’s book)—here are some snippets and take-aways from Brogan’s interview.

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How to Set Up Your LinkedIn Profile: A Freelancer’s GuideHow to Set Up Your LinkedIn Profile: A Freelancer’s Guide


LinkedIn makes sense for professionals, but what about for freelancers?


In my experience, LinkedIn is an important tool in my marketing toolbox. Being on LinkedIn allows me to showcase my skills and experience. Additionally, LinkedIn is a networking platform, which makes it perfect for finding prospects, hooking up with new clients or reconnecting with past clients.


In this article I show you how to set up your LinkedIn profile as an effective marketing tool. Setting up your profile for success is important because it provides the foundation on which to build your LinkedIn networking and marketing efforts.


Here’s what you want from your profile.

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How to Use Blogging to Market Your Freelance BusinessHow to Use Blogging to Market Your Freelance Business


You may have started off your freelancing career like I did by picking up one large client and a couple of small ones right off the bat. This worked for awhile until my husband lost his job and I suddenly needed to bring in enough to make up for his income. Fortunately, he joined me in my freelancing endeavors, and added his marketing expertise to my business.


Like many of our fellow freelancers, though, we didn’t have any extra money to put toward marketing expenses. We had to find a way to get the word out about our content writing business, for free and as quickly as possible. Social media and blogging (these two go hand in hand, as I’ll point out below) became the fastest, easiest, and cheapest way for us to gain new freelance writing gigs.


While my husband had some experience in social media, our use of blogging as a marketing medium involved quite a bit of trial and error. Even so, we suddenly found ourselves acquiring new clients, so many, in fact, that we had to become selective and only partner with those clients willing to pay what we needed to get our bills paid. We became highly desired experts in our freelancing field almost overnight it seemed without spending hardly a penny.

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The Freelancer’s Quickstart Guide to Email MarketingThe Freelancer’s Quickstart Guide to Email Marketing


So maybe you’ve heard about the benefits of email marketing for your freelance business or maybe you’ve heard about the crazy ROI email marketing can get: The DMA puts email marketing’s ROI for 2011 at $40.56 for every $1 invested.


But starting a new marketing channel can appear overwhelming when you don’t know what to do or where to start.


Forget about being overwhelmed. Here are 3 simple steps to get started with email marketing TODAY.

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