Your name in freelance writing is your brand. I've written in the past about investing in your business. Beyond getting educated and starting a website, there are other things you can do such as: paying for advertising on high traffic sites, buying books or e-books to help you get information, taking courses to learn new skills, joining groups and organizations that can further your writing career, doing advertising locally and taking the time to do some self-promotion.
If you're not already doing it, try to spend time each and every week working on your own stuff. I try to do this on Saturdays unless I'm already working on a deadline.
If you're not already social networking, here are a few places where you can do it for free to build your brand.
Professional profile and resume.
Blogger or WordPress
Free blogs and get a Google Adsense account (Blogger only) and start placing ads on your page to generate an income.
MySpace and FaceBook
Online Article Directories like e-zinearticles.com.
Not only might you find gigs but you can build your portfolio and search engine optimization with links to your work elsewhere. Also, don't hesitate to advertise your writing services for hire on places like CraigsList or join a bidding site like ELance or Guru.
Some of these sites are ones that I utilise at times and some of them are areas writer friends of mine use. Not everything works for everyone but it is necessary for those wanting a freelance writing career to continually build their online presence and create their brand. Doing so will establish you as an expert in your niche, bring you writing work and enable you to raise your rates.
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2 comments:
Hey Dana,
After a long time, eh?
I don't know why bt I still feel very lazy about ezinearticles.com and article marketing in general. My work loads don't permit me time in a day to actually write for myself :-)
Any way to work that out?
Elance rocks. I haven't tried guru yet. Craigslist.org is where I started out from and I will never forget that.
keep them' coming.
Hey Ashwin,
I use ezine articles not only to raise my writing profile but for affiliate marketing and for SEO for my various websites. I'm crazy busy too but it really doesn't take that long.
Take some blogs you've already written in niches you want to be established in or that advertise your services and spin and recycle them.
Rewrite them so they read a bit on the unique side and use those for an ezine article. It takes only a minute and can build links to your website and bring you more interested buyers. Try it! :)
At the very least it gives you more samples to show prospective employers and helps you with your site SEO.
Cheers,
Dana
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