Guest Posts 36 - Be a Freelance Blogger

Want to Give Yourself a Raise? Earn It.

A lot of freelancers agonize over raising their prices. I know I did.

With no boss telling you what to do or how much you should get, it’s easy to feel anxious and confused when it comes to increasing your rates. When should you do it? How do you tell your clients? More important, how much should your new rates be?

I used to spend weeks—no, months—mulling over these things and convincing myself I deserved it. Then when I arrived at the point where I had to tell my clients how much my rates were, I still sometimes ended up backtracking on my prices.

It went on like this the first few times I had to communicate my prices, until I realized one thing: Writing my new rate sheet or telling clients how much my services cost is the easy part of the whole process.

The real work involved in increasing your prices happens BEFORE you actually raise them.

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By Robert Jennings

Freelance Writers, Beware: The 4 Query Mistakes That Kill Your Client’s Interest

It’s a lot easier to get a potential client to ignore you than it is to get a response.

Frustrating, isn’t it? You send query after query, and half the time you don’t even get a reply.

If I had a nickel for every time one of my query letters was ignored, I’d have almost $7.50 by now.

It’s practically impossible to get a response out of every query you send. There are a few simple mistakes you might be making, though, that make it even more likely you’ll get ignored. Things like:

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By Alexis Grant

How You Can Use Twitter to Land More Freelance Gigs

Here’s a question you’ve probably asked at some point:

Can Twitter really help me find more work, or is it just a waste of time and energy?

The truth is, Twitter can help you fill your plate with awesome freelance jobs and put more money in the bank… but maybe not the way you’re thinking.

Sure, you can seek out freelance gigs on Twitter. You can search hashtags and watch your lists like a hawk and hope that you’ll be sitting in front of your computer, staring at your Twitter feed, when your dream employer tweets, “We want to hire a freelance blogger.”

But the chances of that happening are pretty small. The chances of you noticing that a company’s hiring someone with your skills and then actually landing that gig are small not because you won’t discover those opportunities, but because a thousand other people will discover them at the same time.

That’s why rather than using Twitter as an outbound marketing tool, where you reach out to others, you should use it for inbound marketing instead, helping potential clients find you. [You like that? Tweet it!]

So how do you help people find you on Twitter, and how do you turn those potentials into paying clients? Here are a few tips:

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By Raubi Perilli

6 Hooks That Make Your Blog Posts Irresistible

Routinely writing about the same topic, category, or concept gets boring fast.

To keep your content fresh and engaging for readers, you need to incorporate content hooks that catch your readers’ attention and reel them in. We can call these “connection hooks”, because they’re ways to connect a concept to something else readers care about.

The next time you’re brainstorming an article idea, try building connections with your concept through one, or more, of these content connection hooks.

To help you see how these hooks work, I’ve included examples of how Be a Freelance Blogger uses them to connect you, the reader, with the concept of blog writing.

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By Nicholas Whitmore

Want to Win at Freelance Blogging? Don’t Compete on Price

Reality check: There will always be someone offering cheaper rates than you.

There’s no doubt about it. You might be the cheapest writer on the forum or websites that you frequent, but there’s guaranteed to be someone out there doing what you do for a lower price.

While price is often number one on the list of hiring criteria that clients take into account, it’s also the one thing that you should leave well alone.

Take my advice: set your prices and stick to them. Only change them if absolutely necessary — even then, they should only be going up, not down.

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