In a world dominated by businesses competing for every imaginable facet of the world’s attention, nothing is more important to your marketing efforts than the creation and spreading of a brand. Encompassing who you are, what you do and what you have to offer, your personal brand is your business’ gateway to the world at large, beckoning customers with logos, catchy slogans and product promises that you hope will draw them in for a closer look. Knowing how important a carefully constructed and well-used personal brand is, consider attending one of these five personal branding events to visit this year [Read more…]
Creating Your Own Freelance Writing Gigs
November 30, 2010. 7 Comments
I believe that one reason writers aren’t in higher demand is our collective shortcoming in marketing our gifts and their value. We have a tendency to wait until people see a need for us when we should be telling them why we’re so damned valuable. When you’re rainmaking, that’s exactly what you’re doing.
Building Your Freelance Writing Brand – Part 12
October 27, 2010. 1 Comment
So far in the Building Your Freelance Writing Brand series, you’ve learned: The fundamental steps of building a brand How Google and the social Web can help you build your brand Tips for responding to negative or erroneous publicity How to develop and manage your online brand reputation Fundamental SEO tips How brand loyalty, brand advocacy and word-of-mouth marketing can help your business reach new levels of success How to position your brand in consumers’ minds and against competitors That’s a lot of information! Today, you’re going to learn the fundamental strategies that you can use to market your business [Read more…]
Building Your Freelance Writing Brand – Part 11
October 21, 2010. 2 Comments
In Part 10 of Building Your Freelance Writing Brand, you learned about brand positioning in terms of owning a word in consumers’ minds. There is another part of brand positioning that you need to consider before you begin to develop strategies to market your business within your industry. There are three basic positions that your brand and business can hold in the marketplace — market leader, market challenger, or market follower. It’s important for you to evaluate the position your business currently holds in comparison to your competitors in the market today, and determine if that is the correct positioning [Read more…]
Building Your Freelance Writing Brand – Part 10
October 12, 2010. 2 Comments
Brands aren’t built by companies. They’re built by consumers who develop emotions for brands after they interact with them or experience them in some way. The consumer perceptions that develop enable consumers to develop expectations for those brands. If a brand consistently meets those expectations in every customer interaction and experience, consumers will get a sense of security from that brand, which turns into loyalty and generates word-of-mouth marketing. Suffice it to say, building your freelance writing brand can offer significant advantages to your business and bottom-line in the long-term in the form of sustainable, organic growth. The most powerful [Read more…]
Getting More Work from Your Existing Clients
October 7, 2010. 2 Comments
I don’t think it’s enough. Getting work is wonderful, making it is even better. Writers need to put their creative thinking, experience and skills to work to create new projects.
An Interview with Dan Schawbel – Author of Me 2.0
October 4, 2010. Leave a Comment
I was fortunate enough to have international best selling author and personal branding expert, Dan Schawbel, write the forward for my book that’s coming out next month, 30-Minute Social Media Marketing. The second edition of Dan’s incredibly popular book, Me 2.0, comes out this week. You can read his bio at the end of this post which demonstrates just how well Dan knows what he’s talking about! I spent a few minutes with him discussing how freelance writers can build their own personal brands in order to build their businesses. Dan’s insightful answers to my questions are included below. Be [Read more…]
How to Make a Living as a Writer
September 30, 2010. 23 Comments
You want to make a living writing.
Here’s how I do it. It may not be a good way for you to do it. Then again, it might be advice that transforms you from a feast/famine disaster into a consistent earner.
Building Your Freelance Writing Brand – Part 9
September 30, 2010. 1 Comment
The next section of the Building Your Freelance Writing Brand series is about positioning your brand and comes in two parts — 9 and 10. Part 9 teaches you about the three most basic positions a brand or business can hold in the market place, which I’ll expand on in Part 10 next week. In simplest terms, your brand position is the place in the market where your business sits in comparison to your competitors in consumers’ minds. Knowing where your brand is in relation to your competitors in the eyes of consumers is a critical part of developing the [Read more…]
Building Your Freelance Writing Brand – Part 8
September 22, 2010. 1 Comment
Part 8 of the Building Your Freelance Writing Brand series explains how brand loyalty, advocacy, and word-of-mouth marketing develop as your brand grows. The most important thing you need to understand about brand building is this: Consumers build brands, not companies. Therefore, the actions you take to build your own freelance writer brand must be done so with the end goals of creating consumer expectations for your brand, meeting those expectations through every consumer interaction with your brand, and allowing consumers to become emotionally involved with your brand. You can do that by following the three steps to building a [Read more…]
Building Your Freelance Writing Brand – Part 7
September 13, 2010. 2 Comments
So far in the previous parts of the Building Your Freelance Writing Brand series, you’ve learned the fundamental steps to building a brand, how the social web and compounding effect of blogging and content marketing can boost your online presence and brand, how to monitor your online brand reputation, and how to massage the search results that lead people to your brand online. Part 7 introduces you to the tangible elements of a brand and why they should be important to you as a freelance writer. In simplest terms, the tangible elements of a brand are the physical representations and [Read more…]
Should I Write for Free?
August 13, 2010. 11 Comments
There is a huge debate about whether or not writers should write for free. My thoughts about writing for free are rooted in my background as a marketer and an entire field of marketing called content marketing that companies are desperately trying to understand and integrate with social media and traditional marketing tactics and strategies. To me, writing for free and allowing that content to be published on websites and in media that will help build awareness, recognition, and loyalty to a brand equates to free advertising. Rather than investing hundreds or thousands of dollars into advertising placement and creative, [Read more…]
Building Your Freelance Writing Brand – Part 5
August 2, 2010. Leave a Comment
Part 5 of the Building Your Freelance Writing Brand Series here on Freelance Writing Jobs is all about online reputation management and search engine reputation management (SERM). It’s a direct follow-up to Part 4, which dealt with manipulating search engine results and handling negative conversations about your brand online. You can get links to all previous parts of the Building Your Freelance Writing Brand series at the end of this post. Online reputation management deals not just with responding to negative conversations but also monitoring what is being said about your brand across the social web on an ongoing basis. [Read more…]
Building Your Freelance Writing Brand – Part 4
July 28, 2010. Leave a Comment
It’s time for Part 4 of the Building Your Freelance Writing Brand series here on Freelance Writing Jobs, and today, you’ll learn about manipulating search engine results and how to handle negative conversations about your brand online. You can find links to Parts 1-3 of the series at the end of this post. First, it’s important to understand that this is not a lesson in search engine optimization, although some of the suggestions in Part 3 and Part 4 of the Building Your Freelance Writing Brand series certainly do apply to SEO as well. With that said, here we go… [Read more…]
Building Your Freelance Writing Brand – Part 3
July 22, 2010. 1 Comment
Freelance writers are positioned to build powerful brands online because a huge part of brand building online is based in creating content that people want to read and share. Part 3 of the Building Your Freelance Writing Brand series explains why creating content online matters (you can read Parts 1 and 2 by following the links at the end of this post). It all comes down to Google. What do you do when you need to find information about a product or business? The vast majority of people answer that question with a single word, “Google.” That’s because search engines [Read more…]
Guerilla Marketing Tips for Writers
July 22, 2010. 5 Comments
I never really understood the term guerilla marketing. There really isn’t anything to do with scratching your armpits or bananas, when you come to think about it. (I’m only half kidding.) Earlier in the year I talked about querying out of the box – going out and finding those off chance opportunities. Now I’d like to share some thoughts with you on how you can really maximize your marketing presence without a big budget. What does guerilla mean for writers? Well, guerilla for writers to me means doing something so utterly ridiculous that it works – because nobody else thought [Read more…]
5 Online Tools Freelance Writers Can Use to Make Life and Business Easier
July 21, 2010. 4 Comments
There are a lot of free and cheap tools available online that freelance writers can use to make both their lives and work easier. Some make a simple task easier while others streamline processes so you can spend more time writing and finding new business and less time on busy work. Following are a few of the free tools that consistently get great reviews from small business owners. I use (or have used) most of these tools and each offers its own benefits that may or may not be right for you. Since most are free to try, you can [Read more…]
Building Your Freelance Writing Brand – Part 2
July 20, 2010. 1 Comment
If you missed part 1 of the Building Your Freelance Writing Brand series, you can follow the preceding link to read it. Before I dive into more information about how to build your brand here in Part 2, I want to point out that years ago, freelance writers had to rely on advertising, direct mail, and word-of-mouth marketing to build their clientele and their businesses. Today, freelance writers have an entire world at their fingertips thanks to the World Wide Web and the tools of the social Web that enable anyone to have an Internet presence with little technical knowledge [Read more…]
Building Your Freelance Writing Brand – Building a Freelance Writer Brand Part 1
July 16, 2010. Leave a Comment
Welcome to the first post in the new Building a Freelance Writer Brand series on Freelance Writing Jobs. Have you considered what your brand is as a freelance writer? In simplest terms, a brand is a promise to consumers (or clients). It sets expectations for what that consumer will get every time he takes out his hard-earned money to pay for a product or service tied to that brand. As a freelance writer, your name is your brand (unless you write under a separate company name or pseudonym that has become your brand identity), and you need to do everything [Read more…]
Freelance Writing Business Multipliers… Are You Using Them?
July 14, 2010. 3 Comments
If you’re asking the right questions, you’re opening doors to additional opportunities.
Those five articles may have turned into ten articles, some additional web content, a better squeeze page, a white paper or special report for list building, a regular blogging gig, assistance in constructing additional content for inbound link creation and who-knows-what-else.
Those questions are business multipliers.
5 WordPress Themes for Freelance Writer Websites
July 8, 2010. 7 Comments
Every freelance writer should have a website, and building a website using WordPress.org is perfect for making your life easy, boosting search engine optimization efforts, and looking great. What’s the first thing people do when they receive your query letter, resume, or email? They Google you. You need to make sure your website, blog, Facebook profile, Twitter profile, and every other online touchpoint accurately reflects who you are and what you can do for potential employers and clients. Ultimately, all roads should lead back to your core branded online destination — your website. How do you find a great WordPress [Read more…]
Query Letter Writing: Get Organized
June 10, 2010. 9 Comments
Unfortunately, the world of query letter writing is one of numbers: the more you write, the more responses you get. Now that gets a little daunting at first, because you might not get any (or few) replies – even rejections! Hopefully, if you’re following along with our other query letter tips, you’ll be getting better and better. But I’d like to focus on another important aspect of your query letters: getting organized. What You Need to Track Well, I think this is pretty straightforward, but it might vary depending on your niche and topic. Here’s what I’m tracking: Publication Name [Read more…]
