As a creative professional, you’ll no doubt always be looking for new ways to get freelance clients and improve your prospects, but in today’s competitive market with more freelancers than ever before, that can be challenging.
Below, we’ve put together a few ways you can use content marketing to boost your profile as a freelancer, stand out to businesses and bring in new leads and clients.
Related reading: Establish Yourself and Get Jobs on Upwork
Are you looking for ideas on how to grow your freelance career? We put together the best ideas from across Nation1099 into an ebook — 15 Easy Hacks For Finding More Freelance Clients. Even better, this ebook includes two fantastic giveaways to valuable services.
1. Launch your own blog
If you’ve yet to build a website for your freelancing career, now is the time to do so. Not only can you showcase your previous experience and work, but you’ll have a home for your contact information and give businesses and potential customers an insight into who you are.
After all, why should a company trust your word on LinkedIn when there are hundreds of others trying to get freelance clients by offering the same services at better rates?
A professional-looking website will help you stand out, and can showcase your knowledge with a blog. Make sure you sign up for a web design builder like Squarespace or WordPress and enable blogging functionality as soon as you can.
Related reading: How To Make A Great Consulting Website
2. Post valuable content and tutorials
Now that you’ve got a website and a blog to call your own, it’s time to start populating it with high-quality content that your potential customers will want to read. There are a great number of benefits of content marketing for any business trying to attract new clients.
One of the biggest is its ability to position you as an authority figure in your niche. If you’re consistently producing valuable, informative posts that answer questions and provide information that can’t be found elsewhere, individuals and businesses will see you as a “thought leader” and be more inclined to recommend or reference you online.
Tutorials and how-tos are the most popular forms of content marketing for freelancers, but you could go down a different route and blog your freelance journey.
Indeed, companies like Buffer and GrooveHQ have shared their secrets to finding customers and success and attracted the attention of thousands of newsletter subscribers and social media followers in the process.
3. Start guest blogging
Guest blogging is a great way to get freelance clients by putting yourself in front of a new, engaged audience. (Oh, and before you go any further, keep in mind Nation1099 is looking for contributors to submit content).
If you’ve got knowledge and a flair for writing, the chances are that blog owners and webmasters will want to hear from you and publish your stuff.
Start small. Reach out to bloggers in your niche with small to medium audiences, and ask if they are currently looking for contributors. As your confidence in writing and guest blogging increases, you can reach out to bigger websites with larger, more impactful audiences.
These websites include the top blogs in your niche, and news websites like Forbes, The Huffington Post and Inc. If your name is in the byline of an article on one of those websites, you’ll find it much easier to attract clients and prove your authority in your niche.
4. Take part in expert roundup posts
Expert roundup posts have exploded in popularity in recent years. Just in case you’re yet to hear about them, they go a little bit like this: a blogger will interview 20 or so experts and influencers about a particular topic, and then share the best thoughts, insights and opinions in one article. Here’s an example from Shane Barker, who interviews 91 experts on web traffic.
Related reading: Advice for My Younger Self: Independent Contractors Share What They Wish They Knew Starting Out
Spend time online building your persona, commenting on blogs, engaging with bloggers and posting your own material. If you’re good enough, you’ll naturally be asked to appear in these expert roundups. Sure, they might take half an hour, but they can result in your name appearing in an article, a link back to your website and an increased authority in your niche.
5. Offer a lead magnet
Perhaps one of the most common reasons businesses create content for their website is to generate organic traffic and push those visitors through a sales and marketing funnel.
While it sounds complicated, you could easily apply the same tactic to your get freelance clients – and to generate leads to take your freelancing career further.
- Start by creating genuinely useful and valuable content that can be downloaded, like an ebook, a planner or a manual.
- Then you require contact information, like a telephone number or email, in exchange for the resource.
- From there, you can reach out to leads and give them more information about your services.
As the prospective client already has an interest in your niche – and they downloaded your content – they’ll likely be more inclined to take you up on your offer of work.
Related reading: You Can Do It! Get Freelance Writing Jobs For Beginners In Just Weeks
Bottom line: Get freelance clients by showing off your passion
Content marketing requires patience and hard work, but with the right strategy, you can transform your prospects as a freelancer and find new clients around every corner.
Simply put, every article you write gives you the opportunity to showcase your passion and knowledge for your industry, whether that’s in marketing, admin, sales or construction.
By starting a blog and making content marketing part of your strategy, you’ll soon find success. Good luck.
Max Greene
Max Greene is the Managing Director of Muffin Marketing, a marketing agency specializing in content marketing, social media marketing and search engine optimization.
Great piece here! This DOES work – I’m proof! Started my own blog, then started guest blogging. That led to being included in round-ups. I do need to work on e-book for my biz, that’s the next step.
Thanks Michelle. I’m often struck by how clients are really focused on finding marketing help from freelancers who have domain expertise. The comfort threshold before you can engage them in buying your services is “Do you know this industry?’ Having your own platform where you can build up a reputation as “micro influencer” gets you permanently across that threshold.
By the way, we became of Max because of an excellent article he did on how to guest blog effectively. Everyone who is pursuing this approach should check it out.
Thanks for stopping by, Michelle. Guest blogging is, without doubt, one of the best ways to find new clients. We’ve actually pitched a couple guest blogs and found clients direct that way, simply because they loved our writing style and wanted to commission us for their own blogs.
Ebooks are great, too, but they’re hard work. Make sure you’ve got a clear plan and topic that’s unique, or you could end up writing for months only for your ebook to go unread!
On the ebook idea, my approach is to think of it as a “leave behind” as they used to call them in the old days. I want some kind of impressive asset that I can put directly into the hands (or inbox) on a 1-1 basis of my strongest prospective clients. Picture the thing that will make them go, “Wow. I like how this person thinks. They have a lot of insight. We should work together.” That’s the ebook or white paper or other asset to focus on developing. (Personally, I’ve settled on a propriety high-value tool.) It has to be so valuable that if only 10 prospective clients read it, it still pays off because it will convert some of them. If it gets wider distribution than that, then it’s a bonus. Incidentally, I think this should be the approach to guest posting — so high quality that I would send this 1-1 with personal messages to prospective clients saying, “I hope you find this valuable.”