The world of freelance and micro-jobs is growing at a massive rate, and with “work at home” efforts now in place globally, these numbers just continue to increase month over month. While a lot of money continues to pour into this space, it’s also leading to more competition for freelancers and content creations across the globe.

With micro-job and freelance job sites leading the way in terms of business being passed off to freelancers, there are some great ways to stand out from the crowd while also increasing your earnings and long term business in the process.

In order to survive in the extremely competitive world of freelancing and internet marketing in general, you need to be willing to do more than your competitors, while also building a solid brand and reputable business in the process. Today we are going to highlight how a blog can help with all of these factors.

1) Starting a Blog is Extremely Easy and has Minimal Costs

First and foremost, the most obvious reason for starting a blog to improve your freelance expertise and brand, is because it’s so easy and affordable. Another huge benefit to having a blog of your own, is that there are little to no programming and design skills required.

If you already have a blog, excellent! If not, I highly recommend you read through this guide to starting a blog, as it’s loaded with all of the necessary details and breaks the process down into just a few simple steps.

In short, if you don’t already have a blog and have been sitting on the fence because you aren’t sure what to do next, that excuse is no longer valid.

2) It’s a Great Way to Get More Traffic through Google and SEO

As we all know, Google is one of the most important driving forces for traffic and information in the world today.

Without a website or blog, how are individuals and companies supposed to find the services you are offering? In short… they won’t.

With a site of your own (and some extra promotional work), your blog could start ranking for various terms and keywords that could result in more traffic and business from your freelancing efforts. Best of all, you won’t even need to process or handle orders, you can simple pass them off to wherever you might be doing all of your own freelance work already — such as Fiverr or Freelancer.

3) Allows You to Build Your Own Brand and Portfolio

If you were to buy a new product or service online, would you be as likely to purchase from a no name site that you’ve never heard of, and just has the product and a check out form? Probably not… you would ultimately be looking for a brand that you can learn more about, gains your trust and has a proven track record.

This is exactly what is accomplished when a freelancer has a blog of their own.

Through the use of a blog, there are many ways freelancers and content creations can provide more value and gain trust through the use of their blog. Such methods include:

• Showcasing your content and services in a site portfolio
• Ranking in Google for your brand name and services
• Displaying that you know how to build a brand online
• Having a contact form and phone number for support
• Offering different services and up-sells
• and much more…

As you can imagine, a blog can really make yourself stand out amongst a crowd of freelancers that don’t have one.

4) Your Content is Always Being Shared on Social Media

In addition to the end goal of having a site that is growing in content and traffic all the time, it’s important to add social media into the mix as well.

As mentioned, Google is great for search engine traffic, but it’s also very competitive. With social media, there is still a lot of clutter out there, but it’s also great for tagging companies and individuals, while also making use of trending hashtags and talking points as well.

A perfect example of this would be if you just wrote an article on how to improve your site reach with SEO and social media. That would be a great post to continually promote and share through social media, while also tagging any references or experts that might have been mentioned within your area.

Through the use of social media scheduling tools, it’s a great way to keep sending new audiences and traffic to your top posts and evergreen content.

5) A Blog Opens Up a Whole New World of Opportunity

As someone who has been blogging since 2007, I can tell you that blogging can do wonders for your brand and business when done right.

For the most part, blogging is just an excellent way to build a spot for yourself on the internet, while giving you the opportunity to create valuable content for other people around the world. And the coolest thing is… you never know who might be reading your blog or getting inspired by your content.

Some of the most popular entrepreneurs, influencers and businesses in the world today have started out as simple blogs and went on to become much more. Just a few examples of this can be seen with Perez Hilton, Tech Crunch, Pat Flynn and many more.

The biggest risk you have, is simply not creating a blog. It’s just way too simple, fast and cheap not to.

How to Grow Your Freelance Business with a Blog

After reading through the five tips and recommendations above, you should have a much better idea on how to grow your freelancing business through the use of a blog. However, don’t just read the working methods above and then leave it at that. You must take action!

With more than a billion websites and blogs in the world today, there is a lot of work to do after your site goes live. Be sure to invest the necessary time into learning about how to make the most out of your content creation and marketing efforts once your site is live.

The world of freelancing and content writing is not only a very lucrative industry to be in, it’s also one of the most competitive as well. One of the best ways to compete and demand higher premiums on your writing, is to make sure you have a domain name and website of your own. This ultimately helps with allowing more clients to find your work, ranking in the search results, and also building a personal brand for yourself in the process.

One of the most common obstacles in this process however, is that most writers are site designers or bloggers. The good news, is that WordPress makes this process a whole lot easier. In short, there are pretty much zero technical and design skills required to have a site of your own.

This is all done through the power of WordPress, which is a free software solution that can give you the ease to create your own website with all the features of an completely custom site, but without the headaches. It is the most popular platform for blogging as well. In fact, WordPress has helped in the hosting or creation of more than 60% of the websites present on the Google search engine. 

In this article, today you will learn about the many benefits of using WordPress to power your site and grow your freelance writing business, while also learning more about tools, tips, and tricks for when it comes to using WordPress plugins to rank higher in the search results.

Why and How to Get the Most Out of WordPress

As covered, WordPress makes the process of site management and content creation extremely easy. All you need to do is pick a domain name, set up your web hosting, and start using WordPress to create content for your site. If you don’t already have a website of your own, be sure to read through these VPS hosting reviews and you can learn more about the different options, rates, and hosting plans out there to choose from. If you’d like to see what’s possible through the use of WordPress, follow that link and see what a customized site with a lot of reviews and a custom theme in place looks like. FreelanceWritingGigs is also running off WordPress as well.

WordPress themes and plugins will also come in handy during this process, as they are the little bits of software that are added to your sites to enhance it’s functionality. WP plugins are written in PHP and you can create your plugin in WordPress that suits your requirement. They are very important in improving Google rankings.

How are WP Plugins Used to Improve Google Rankings?

As freelance writers, you are probably already familiar with the concept of writing content for a site — and then having the client use that content for their site, and also in hopes to rank it in Google. In order for content to rank in Google, it actually comes down to a number of factors. Featuring the best visual and amazing website is worthless unless you add the quality content and the other most important things that are necessary to rank your website in Google search engine.  Some of the most common ones are:

• Focus and length of content
• Age and domain rankings for the publishing site
• Backlinks and social shares to an individual article

As important as these are, on-site SEO improvements can help as well. This is where WordPress plugins and settings come into play.

Default interface of WordPress is not very user-friendly, so you need to optimize that according to your desire. Similarly, as you change the setting on your laptop and phone to make it more comfortable to use.

Now here are a few tips that can improve your Google search ranking.

The setting of permalinks.

Permalinks are the URLs of your website that are searched and referred by the users or another website to give a reference to your site. Initially, your URLs are very short in forms and they are not supposed to have any keywords that are searched most commonly on Google. But you can edit the settings of permalinks easily. You just need to be careful that your permalink contains the keyword that you want to be searched. It is the first step that can improve your Google ranking.

Impressive title tags.

The beginning title of your site must be attractive and comprehensive as well. The title depicts the content and moreover, it is the hook impression of your site. It must be 50-60 characters long. You can take a guide from headline analyzer to improve the impact of your title tag. Add the most searched keywords from Google to make it appear in the top sites. 

Give a sitemap for your website.

WordPress introduces plugins called GOOGLE XML SITEMAP. This sitemap help to index the number of pages you are having on your website. This XML sitemap is very easy to use. Just by using this plugin, Google can reach the right index of your site.  It can help Google to improve your site ranking.

Google analytics.

This very helpful tool in analyzing the source of your traffic, the behavior of your audience, and to examine the basic attributes. This tool is offered free by Google and moreover, this tool helps in improving and targeting your source audience. Google analytics gives a brief discussion on your traffic and their behavior’s. It can help to improve your ranking as well. All you need is to observe your strategies more carefully by getting the analysis from Google. This can help you in locating error 404 and examining the behavior of your audience. 

Use of optimized content.

1 – Using appropriate tags.

You can add a media file to grab the attention of your readers. But before adding the media file just be careful to add at least one keyword in the image title. Images are the most important tool that helps to attract the reader but it can help you more if you use them in the right way.

2 – Proper use of HTML readings.

Proper use of HTML readings can enhance the impression of your content. Yoast can give you better examples of using headings in the most appropriate way. Using H1 for the main heading then secondly, H2 for subheadings and use H3 for the subheadings of H2. Keep the headings in order to keep the content flow in order.

3 – Linking with high ranked sites.

Linking to higher ranked authorities can improve your rank in the search engine. It casts a positive effect on the search engine. Outbound links are very helpful in upgrading your rank in search engine.

4 – Linking to the internal links.

Well if you will provide the internal links of your pages on the top of your site then it will prevent the bounce off rate. This is just to provide ease to your targeted audience.

5 – Length of content.

Most of the high ranked content is of least 1500 words. You should be careful to use the least count of 1500 words in your article. It can help your site to reach the high ranks in the search engine of Google. Most of the blogger have opposite reviews on this; they say that quality is better than quantity. Summarizing this means that short reading stuff is more attractive but the results of Google search shows that high ranked sites are contained up with least of 1500 words.

6 – Social media sharing buttons.

Creating social media sharing buttons on your website can give the opportunity of sharing the relevant stuff on audience profile as well. It helps to attract traffic more. These buttons can give a fascinating look of your site as well.

Use of optimized theme.

Now there is a large variety of themes on WordPress but you are in need to put the one, which is more optimized for search engine. The best-practiced SEO theme is far better than the beautiful appealing theme. Always chose the one, which goes best with your search engine requirement. Here are some crucial factors that are needed to be discussed. (as referenced here)

• Open graph meta tag incorporation to improve social media sharing
• Appropriate use of meta title tags and heading
• A neat and clean structure that employs valid and proper HTML.
• Correct use of the canonical URL meta tag.

Use SEO plugins.

There is a variety of SEO plugins provided by WordPress. You can select the one for yourself. Yoast SEO, ALL-IN-ONE so, and many more are there to use. They give you ease to introduce Meta title, Meta description, Meta tags, and most searched keywords. They provide all the solution for SEO in WordPress.

These plugins can help to generate an XML sitemap for your site. These plugins can help to add more functionality in your site to give it best look.

Google page speed insights

These are the tools to insight the page loading speed of your site. It is considerable fact on the Google ranking. You can view the loading speed of your pages on the Google page speed insights. They provide you the ease to enhance that as well. All you need is to stay updated with your work and its progress.

Responsive design.

There are a large number of people who access the website through their mobile phones. Recent research shows that the responsive design of your site attracts more. You can view that from the browser’s viewport. If you are using WordPress then your website has the most responsive design already. While making it more responsive, just give it an overlook from your phone as well.

High quality is written content.

High-quality content must have a number of qualities but the most helpful one are uniqueness, shareable, informative and helpful. Google is really strict if someone steals the content of the other site, and in worse cases, a site can be completely penalized and dropped from their search rankings altogether.

With this in mind, always be original in writing your own content. Use your creative skills to create unique content for your site. It’s also a good idea to quote references of any case studies or stats you are writing about, as this will help with improving the overall quality of your content as well.

Google is helpful in providing you’re the concepts but it never allows copying the efforts of others. Make sure that content is unique. Then it must be informative and it must fulfill the initiative of the writing. If the audience will not find it informative then they will never search you back again. Always keep in mind that you must provide information to your targeted audience. Just keep focusing on the quality by adding more of the research work. You can also add more facts and figures that actually depict the high informative content.

Now the last important fact is to make your content shareable. When a person can share your content with his friends and followers, it will give a heap to your site. It can be effective in publicity of your content even more. People can make the reference of your site in their content also. So be sure that you are facilitating the audience with the sharing options.

When it comes to content creation on the internet, the great majority of it is produced with the common goal of generating leads online. Without the revenue and lead generation from such content, there wouldn’t be the budget to outsource and create such content for freelancers to write in the first place. This is why it’s so important for both the ‘content website’ and the ‘content creator’ (also known as the freelance writer) to understand how to write content that results in audience engagement and has the necessary call-to-actions in place.

If you have a website or online business, you are likely already trying to collect leads and bring in as many new customers as possible. No matter what type of marketing budget you have in place, there are plenty of ways to make your content, marketing, budget and time go a lot further if you know the right methods to use.

To help with this process, I wanted to highlight some of the best working methods for both lead generation through SEO, content creation, and marketing — all important components of the content writing and outsourcing process. Best of all, no matter what type of brand or business you currently have in place, you can start implementing each of these methods today and start seeing steady results tomorrow.

Create Great Content to Rank Organically

If you want to offer real value to your audience and also have a long-term strategy for ranking in the search results and continually bring in new traffic, you are going to want to invest in some quality content for your site. When done correctly, creating content for your site that provides is a win-win situation for both your audience and your business. Search engines like Google love really good content — but it has to be really good! Gone are the days when a 500-word article gets the job done. Now it’s all about creating 2,000+ word resource guides, tutorials or how-to posts. If you know what your audience is looking for, you simply need to create a great reference and value for them, while also giving them a solution to their problem.

Once your article is live, it’s then time to put in the necessary time and effort to make sure it gets promoted to the right audiences and referenced on other sites within your niche. This all goes back to the quality of your content. The better your content, the more likely you will find willing sites to link and reference your site within their own content (thus further improving your search results). If you are completely new to the concept of how to rank in Google, check out these simple SEO tips.

Skip SEO and Simply Pay for High-Quality SEO Leads

As effective and wonderful as content creation and ranking within Google is, it definitely takes a lot of time, work, and effort. This is especially true if you have a website or blog that doesn’t have a lot of authority, or is already in quite a competitive niche. The good news, however, is that there are other ways to rank at the top of Google, or simply get leads from other sites that do. The first and most obvious example of this is to simply create a Google Adwords campaign and pay a high cost per click to rank for whatever keywords you like. Another option is to buy data from sites that are already ranking in the search results organically and generating leads that would apply to your business or lead-gen process.

A perfect example of this would be Buy SEO Leads. Instead of scaling out their business to serve the excess of leads they are generating, they instead created a service to pass such leads to relevant clients. They explain this process on their site as “All Leads are people that expressed interested in SEO or related service such as Reputation Management or Web Design“. Since millions of sites are ranking organically in Google for millions of search terms, it only makes sense for businesses to cater to this audience, when not every site can rank at the top of Google on their own.

Use Whiteboard or Explainer Videos to Increase Conversion

When you’ve mastered the art of content creation and getting people to visit your site, then it’s simply a matter of testing different methods to see how you can improve the conversion process. In most cases, your content and backlink references are going to help with the rankings for your site. However, getting traffic to your site is only the beginning.

One method that has been working extremely well for websites and brands over the past few years has been whiteboard and explainer videos. We all know the power of online video, but whiteboard and explainer videos have been proven to work extremely well because of how they engage with the audience and makes them want to keep watching and learn more. The more a visitor watches a video on your site, the more likely they are to complete the specific call to action you might have.

While the concept of creating a whiteboard or explainer video might seem exciting, it can also be quite costly and time-consuming process to figure out. Fortunately, there are some better solutions out there for any site owners or brands working on a limited budget. MySimpleShow.com has created a platform where such videos can be created with a simple drag and drop platform, while also adding in your own text and voice overs. This is definitely something everyone should check out and invest some time and resources in.

Publish a Unique Infographic in Your Industry

While “Content is King” is a popular saying for content creators around the world, it’s also important to remember that not all content needs to come in the form of basic text. An excellent way to bring your content to life is through the use of a custom infographic. Infographics make the process of consuming ‘boring’ data a lot more fun. At the same time, they are one of the best methods for generating additional traffic, social shares and backlinks to your site.

The best way to create an effective infographic for your site is to first decide what type of content your audiences likes best — and where you can also provide the most value. A good example of this would be if you had a social media marketing based-business and wanted to highlight trends on Twitter, Facebook or Linkedin for your audience. You can actually see a live example of this here.

Once you’ve pulled together enough content and data for your infographic, find someone who can design a custom image for you, or simply use a free solution like canva.com to get the job done. After you’ve created your infographic, it’s then time to post it to your site and also share it with your audience. Be sure to also reach out to other relevant sites in your industry to see if they’d like to post it to their site with a unique article as well. You can also view this list of infographic directories for quick and easy infographic submission.

Go Live with an Expert Roundup with Industry Experts

One of my favorite methods for creating high-value site content, while also featuring authority expertise, is through the use of expert roundup posts. The way an expert roundup post works is simple. All you need to do is come up with a simple question for industry experts in your space to answer, then compile all of their answers into one big mega post. You can see 17 examples of this here.

The concept sounds easy enough, but this can be a very time-consuming process the first time around. This is mainly due to the outreach process and making sure you get the right contact information for each of the experts you want to feature. When sending out your email, be sure to make it short and sweet — simply asking them a question for your upcoming roundup, and also letting them know they will get a profile picture and backlink to their site as well.

Focus on Your Content Strategy to Expand Your Business in 2017

It doesn’t matter if you are currently writing your own content or outsourcing it through freelance writers, the end goal is still the same — which is to provide value to your audience, while also converting new visitors into valuable leads and paying customers.

The game of content creation and SEO is a long-term strategy, but one that works extremely well when you put in the time and effort. Run through the list above and see which of these best working methods for generating leads and traffic through content creation and SEO might be best for you. Each method is unique in it’s own way and will vary depending on the niche you are in. The important thing to remember is to put in the time and effort to research how you can best provide value to your audience and make sure your content is getting seen in the process. The more value you have in place, the easier it is to attract new audiences and grow your brand.