The One Man Band, Life of a Freelancer

Posted by Paul Thompson on April 18th, 2011

Freelancing.  Why do it?  What’s the benefit?  Well, for starters, you can sleep in as late as you want, and wear pajamas all day if you honestly wanted to.  I think this scenario is what initially attracts people to freelancing.  You get to be the boss, and do things on your own terms—but is this true in reality?

As a freelancer you have the flexibility to work on your time, and take what projects you want to take.  But at a price—if you don’t operate during somewhat office hours how will you communicate with you clients?  Bottom line is you are running a business, a one person business, but a business it is.

Once you become a freelancer you have not only decided to take on the role of web designer but also marketing, accounting and sales.  Taking your freelancing job just as seriously as any other job is the key to success—and allows you to do things, your way.

Marketing- How are you going to market your services?  Do you have a website?  Are you going to use social media?  The first thing you need to do for your marketing plan is to outline what you want to do, and how you will measure your success.  There are a million different marketing techniques out there to choose from—find what techniques work best for your services.

Social Media- Twitter, Facebook and YouTube are great tools to get your message across—and it’s FREE.  We all like free stuff, if we didn’t, make-up counters would stop giving out free gifts with purchases.  But the fact remains, these channels won’t work if your audience isn’t engaging on them. 

If you are tweeting a message about your site, set up a specific landing page to measure how effective your tweet was.  There is some science involved in tweeting and other social media tactics.  For example, is tweeting a blog post in the morning more effective than in the afternoon?  It’s a little bit of trial and error at first, but once you know what works best for your audience it should foster customer engagement. Not to mention brand exposure and loyalty.

Email Marketing- Did you know 88% of people have only one inbox for personal and business email?  I didn’t either, but according to Dan Zarrella, Social Media Marketing Scientist at HubSpot, the best time to send out your emails is on the weekend—a much higher click through rate.

The trick to a great email blast is to have something informational for your audience.  How many newsletters are you subscribed to?  Now, think about how many you READ.  Chances are the number is lower than the amount you are subscribed to.  Why is that?  Most likely because the few you do read is because you know you are going

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