Guest Posts 28 - Be a Freelance Blogger

How to Go Viral Without the Legwork

Psst! Want to know a secret?

If I said you could get read and retweeted globally, find a whole new audience for your work and increase your published clips by doing nothing would you believe me?

I thought not. But you can.

Being published on a globally read blog can take some effort. Pitch after pitch, ideas lost in the ether, courting editors, seeking approval — it’s a hard slog. But we do it to build an audience, showcase authority and make the world know we’re here, right?

Let me share with you something that happened to me this month, and what I learned about going viral without the legwork.

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By Williesha Morris

How to Earn $1,500 a Year from ONE Blog Post

Meaningful relationships create effortless rewards. So effortless you forget how miraculous they seem to others.

In your freelance blogging business — in any business — a seemingly insignificant effort may blossom into something grand, much like the growth of a garden. I’m going to show you how to step up a level in your freelancing business using complementary skills and relationship-building.

Here’s how one guest blog post landed me $1,500 per year.

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By Sophie Lizard

Is This What Freelance Writing Looks Like in 2014?

Feel like maybe you could charge more for your blogging services?

Yep, you probably could. We proved that in The Be a Freelance Blogger Rate Guide, and now the Copypress Community has carried out a survey of 247 writers to create a free report, The State of Freelance Writing 2014. It’s not just about writing rates — there’s a ton of information in there about bylines, SEO and other writerly stuff.

But one thing’s painfully clear: most of the online writers Copypress surveyed don’t charge enough.

To give you a quick overview of some interesting points from the survey results, here’s the infographic the Copypress people made to accompany the report. To download the full report with all the details for free, you’ll need to go here and register for a download link.

By Raubi Perilli

What Bloggers Need to Know About Content Marketing

Freelance writing and blogging are terms you know and probably identify pretty strongly with.

But there’s another term you should feel equally close to, even if it sounds somewhat foreign and unrelated to your writing work. Content marketing could save our writing careers, yet far too many of us don’t really know what it is. Here’s what, and why, you need to know.

What Is Content Marketing?

Content marketing is a marketing style that uses content (blog posts, infographics, e-books, videos, magazines, etc.) to engage potential customers, rather than directly sell a product or service to them.

If this sounds foreign to you, it shouldn’t. You’re more familiar with content marketing than you might think, and one of its earliest forms is something you certainly recognize: soap operas.

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By Lior Ohayon

Freelance Proposals: How One Newbie Won 5 Gigs in 3 Days

I was brand new to freelancing. No idea what I was doing.

But I won 5 gigs in less than a week, and you can do the same.

A bit of background to this story: I come from the passive-income writing world where I create my own products and all the work I do is for myself. I didn’t know how to write up a freelance proposal, let alone how to successfully deliver services to a client! But I decided to try freelancing for two reasons.

To create a backup income I could lean on for cash if anything went wrong with my passive income writing.
To test a theory I had about business and life in general: that the way you communicate matters more than your background, and that you get more if you give more.

I’d outsourced many aspects of my passive income business through the Elance platform, so I was familiar with that system and how the flow of bidding worked. I figured I’d set up as a freelance service provider there.

[Note from Sophie: Yes, I know some of you hate Elance with a passion. But Lior’s approach to sending proposals got him started and hired fast, so set aside your Elance-flaming reaction for a few minutes and consider how you can adapt this to your own proposals, no matter where you find your clients.]

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