FREELANCE 411: Who in the World is Alexa Pareto (and How Can She Help Me Get More Clients?)
July 3, 2008 by Jodee
Filed under Freelance Writing
by Mary Hay Davis
Remember the popular children’s game show, Where in the World is Carmen San Diego? It was an educational sensation – the perfect marriage of learning and fun.
Well, luckily Carmen has a cousin – one who can educate us writers just as Carmen educated a generation of children.
Who is this favored family member, and how can she help build your writing career?
Her name is Alexa Pareto, and she’s a Marketing Specialist’s best friend.
[NOTE: Yes – a Marketing Specialist. Remember? Last week’s post? If you’re going to become a successful freelancer, you’ve got to switch your mindset and start thinking of yourself as a marketer first, and a writer second.]
And okay, I’ll confess. Alexa Pareto isn’t an actual person, but a combination of two tools that, when combined, can help propel your freelance writing career to new heights.
The first part, Alexa, is the website that monitors web traffic and ranks websites according to popularity and traffic. Alexa is a Marketing Specialist’s best friend because she makes marketing research a breeze by doing much of the hard work for you – sorting websites (aka prospects) by popularity, topic and industry.
This is where it gets good. Not only can she help you find potential companies to contact for work, she can even help you break into specialty niches. Click on ‘Directory’ and you’ll find a main list of 16 topics. Click on one of those and you’ll see Alexa’s gone a step further by breaking them all down into subcategories.
So say you’re a writer – er, I mean a Marketing Specialist – who’s trying to break into the health field. Sure you’ve written a few health pieces, but you’d really like to build your client base (and portfolio) in this area. Just click on Alexa’s Health link and you’ll find 39 subcategories. Keep clicking through the navigation until you’ve narrowed it down to relevant sites for your topic of interest, then watch as the list of potential clients appears.
While Alexa is indeed a powerful prospecting tool, you can really turbocharge your freelance career by adding another core marketing concept – The Pareto Principle.
The Pareto Principle is actually a concept that’s been utilized across a variety of industries, but its premise is this: 20% of your efforts will produce 80% of your results.
What this means for us Marketing Specialists is that 20% of our clients will likely generate 80% of our work volume/income, so it’s the wise writer who develops and nurtures relationships based upon this principle.
So by all means work on the 80% of projects that will only produce 20% of your results. Just don’t become a slave to them and focus on them at the expense of the bigger picture.
When you first start out, it’s easy to spend an inordinate amount of time perfecting the one project you do have. But in doing so, you put prospecting and marketing on the back burner, which is a very short-sighted strategy that will hinder you when that project ends.
A good guideline for beginning writers is to strive to spend as much time marketing as you do writing. Once you build momentum and get the client-generating wheels set in motion, you can taper off your marketing and prospecting efforts to a more reasonable 80/20% writing/prospecting ratio.
“You mean I’ll always have to prospect?” you say?
The answer is, “No – only if you want to work.”
Too many freelancers (in any profession) have garnered a big-paying client and then watched as the cash-cow dried up for any number of reasons. Those freelancers then go back to starting from square one – an empty prospecting pool.
So take some time today to learn more about your new friend Alexa Pareto, and see how she can help take your freelance writing career to new heights by helping you find not just clients, but those 20% of quality clients that will produce 80% of your results.
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RESOURCE NOTE: A good book to help you start churning your prospecting wheels is ‘Get Clients Now!’ by C.J. Hayden.
Mary Hay Davis is a professional writer whose work has appeared in The Christian Science Monitor, The Costco Connection, Family Times/Parenting Today and San Diego Family, Magazine. She specializes in writing SEO web content, advetorials, informational articles and marketing material. Before becoming a writer, Mary worked over two decades as a police dispatcher, an occupation rich in anecdotes about the foibles and frailties of the human condition. You can contact Mary through her two websites: www.webprowriting.com and www.maryhaydavis.com.
I really found this post helpful. I love the creative spin. I have an appointment with Alexa tommorrow morning. I hope she will not be late.
OHMYGOSH. You’re so right. I have a cash cow I’ve come to depend on and this month when they had fewer projects for me, I really felt it! I need to get back to my basics and use some of these tips. FWJ Idol has been beyond helpful for me in so many ways. Thanks, Deb and Jodee and candidates!
Seriously. The 20/80 rule only applies when you do 100% all the time. So focusing on the 20% is a myth. Sure do the successful things more often, but don’t call it a principle, call it common sense.
As for Alexa, the sites are only ranked by people who have the Alexa toolbar, which is not 100% of the population. If the people in your niche use the toolbar that’s a great option, but otherwise, you’re using a tool without fully knowing where the data comes from.
This article is, in my opinion, bad advice. Well written bad advice, but still…
@anonymous — that is the beauty of this forum — everyone is free to express an opinion.
You are absolutely right that people need to give 100% of themselves in order to succeed. My take is that many people, myself included, tend to overly focus on things that in the long run are not as productive for them. The Pareto Principle is only a tool — one that can help some people take stock of where they are focusing their efforts, so they can then evaluate if they are best served in continuing to doing so.
As for Alexa, it is at least a starting point and offers a comprehensive compendium of companies for freelancers to consider in their marketing efforts.
While you seem to be very internet savvy, not everyone reading this is at your level of proficiency, and many people are *NOT* aware of this site.
I am not sure how directing people to new avenues for prospecting and client acquisition can be construed as ‘bad advice’, but I do appreciate you taking the time to read my post and respond, and for your kind remark about my overall writing abilities.
#6
Just a quick note to say that I think you handled the anonymous comment well, #6. Sometimes I struggle with finding the words to say to critical comments or comments that are complete hogwash.
Thanks for setting a good example.
I think this is the best article I have seen yet. It was very helpful to me. I already knew both things, but I had never put them together in that context. I spend some time trying to raise my own Alexa rank, but I never considered that it is an excellent (and fast) way yo target clients.
Really good advice. I also think that with the 80/20 rule, it partially means that we are “inactive / not productive” 80 % of the time. To me it is a time management thing. Batching tasks helps, and staying organized helps. I always like to think that if I am doing this well with 20%, just imagine what I could do if I ever really got up to 100% efficiency?
I agree about your response to the negative comment. It is hard to have grace under fire. It’s something Deb and Jodee have always been very good at.
Thank you for this post. I’ve not heard of either that you wrote about so it certainly is worth a try. Also, as others have noted, you did very well in your response to the negative comment about your post.
Interesting way to use Alexa. Some good suggestions.
Creative approach with the Alexa idea. Definitely something to try out!
# 6, I voted for your post last week, and I was looking forward to seeing what you had to say this week. Thanks for another excellent post. New information, solid writing, and entertaining to boot.
It’s also a great tactic you use by starting your headline with Freelance 411. It got my attention and showed me that you know what you’re talking about when you say marketing is important.
Thanks for keeping up the great work.
#6 Great title. Well written and entertaining. Graceful and considered response to comments. I am looking forward to reading more of your work.
Nice rundown of some useful tools. The Pareto Principle is applicable in all sorts of situations, and I liked this explanation of it. The issue with Alexa is that many people think it’s inaccurate to the point of being useless. This TechCrunch piece is an interesting read on the subject: http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/11/25/alexas-make-believe-internet/
@Jay — Thanks for the link to that article. To be honest, I am not really familiar w/what apparently is the intended purpose of Alexa — rankings. What I’ve found very helpful is the concise compendium it offers for doing marketing research and finding companies to target.
I appreciate the heads up on it’s questionable rankings accuracy, so I can be cautious in the future were I to refer someone there for that intent.
Thanks for reading and responding to the post, and again for your helpful resource/link.